INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)

Director: Roland Emmerich

Writers: Dean Devlin, Roland Emmerich

Producer: Dean Devlin

Cast: Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Judd Hirsch, Mary McDonnell, Randy Quaid, Margaret Colin, Robert Loggia, James Rebhorn, Harvey Fierstein, Vivica A. Fox, Brent Spiner, Adam Baldwin, James Duval, Bill Smitrovich, Kiersten Warren, Harry Connick, Jr., Ross Bagley, Mae Whitman, Lisa Jakub, Giuseppe Andrews 

A gigantic alien craft has taken a position in space between Earth and the Moon. It sends out 15-mile-wide flying saucers to hover over many of the world’s major cities. They use the world’s communication satellites to relay a coordinating signal that counts down to a moment for all the saucers to simultaneously obliterate the cities beneath them. A U.S. Marine pilot (Will Smith) and an IT engineer (Jeff Goldblum) join U.S. President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) and his staff to try preventing the extermination of mankind. 

The Flashback Fanatic movie review 

SPOILER ALERT! This review will reveal many plot points and the conclusion of —ah, to hell with it! It’s impossible to spoil a turd. 

Way back in 1996 when I first saw the trailer for Independence Day, I knew I was going to hate it. The ad immediately conveyed that the film would be loaded special effects and “attitude,” which was the recipe for so many half-baked, roller coaster ride movies of that era. 

Very little has changed since, except that no one is awed by “way cool” effects anymore; we just expect them. That should mean that films stop being made just to showcase special effects. However, now that effects-heavy movies are referred to as a director’s “vision,” we are supposed to believe that CGI eye candy is meaningful. Usually it just pacifies an audience that can’t be involved anymore. 

I will give Independence Day its due. The story achieves an epic scale and has game performances to drive home the schmaltz. However, it is the fine special effects that are half the reason for the film’s existence. Of course since those very effects are merely adequate by our jaded, present day standards, we are left with the other even more obsolete reason for this film’s existence: pandering to the contemporary conceit of the 1996 audience. 

The filmmakers of Independence Day had only one objective: to make money with a sci-fi blockbuster ala Jurassic Park (1993). That is the only “vision” they had in mind. They wanted to shovel another load of CGI effects-seasoned sci-fi slop into the entertainment trough hoping that the moronic mainstream masses would lap it up during the peak summertime movie season. If those filmmakers really had some balls, they would have immediately puked up another CGI-dinosaur movie to reveal their utterly mercenary, creatively bankrupt motives. 

Lest you think I judge director Roland Emmerich and company too harshly, I ask you: Why else did their sci-fi follow-up to Independence Day become another CGI-dinosaur movie called Godzilla (1998) with velociraptors in it? Moviegoers didn’t know the first frigging thing about raptors till they were shown Jurassic Park. But making Godzilla spawn those suddenly hip dinos would seem to be an oh so contemporary twist for the remake. While Emmerich and company weren’t quite so ballsy as to hand us another GGI-dinosaur movie right away, their Godzilla remake clearly displays their derivative and opportunistic nature. 

I have no issue with filmmakers making stuff that is of its time and popular. No commercial filmmaker sets out to make a film that is a financial failure. But when a film is made to simply regurgitate a well-worn plot, load it up with new effects, and then shoehorn contemporary gimmicks into the plot as an effort to seem hip, clever, and accessible to stroke the audience while destroying any logic the ripped-off plot already had, that is NOT good filmmaking. However, it may make money from the insecure dummies that will feel validated having their asses kissed by this acknowledgement of their contemporary interests. That is why I resent this film. Not only did the mainstream audience not deserve to have its ass kissed, but I also knew that, if Independence Day was a hit, we would be buried in an avalanche of more “high concept” crap. Director Emmerich himself was encouraged by this film’s success to feed us more CGI spectacles that are probably just as gag inducing. 

 

Emmerich and his accomplices must have decided that great big alien spaceships blowing up a lot of shit could be another profitable sci-fi spectacle. Thus, 1953’s The War of the Worlds gets a ’90s special-effects rehash. 

Above all, this movie needed to be seen as clever, so it was not called something as honest as War of the Worlds for ’90s Nitwits. It was called Independence Day. Boy, that sounds lofty, doesn’t it? There is a certain air of dignity and heroism about this whole half-assed, expensive endeavor now, isn’t there? Best of all, it would have a nationwide release the day before the July 4th Independence Day holiday, so the movie could be marketed with the oh so hip acronym of ID4. The word “four” does not actually appear in the film’s title, BUT if we are all really smart, (and if we can figure this out we must be and will just love this movie for engaging us on such an “intellectual” level) we will realize that the numeral four refers to the U.S. Independence Day date of the fourth of July. It also follows that ’90s trend of sticking numerals into titles and names of things that make them sound techy and make us feel so advanced for accepting numerals adorning titles and names for no good reason. Man, these filmmakers don’t miss a trick! They must be geniuses! Actually, they just know their moronic market and will pander to it shamelessly, as we shall see… 

Independence Day is just another alien invasion movie. British author H.G. Wells popularized that classic science fiction concept of mass destruction way back in 1897 with his novel The War of the Worlds, which has been the basis for adaptations in all forms of media ever since. Apparently, our familiarity with that story means we should be impressed when Independence Day puts its ’90s spin on it. Independence Day was hell-bent on being ingratiating to its audience. It knows that we “get it” being so “clever” and are made to feel relevant having an old sci-fi standard festooned with our contemporary interests. Those “hip” variations are anything but clever when they are not only forced, but they often blast holes in the logic of the plot. 

Remember when I told you that I hated this film immediately on the basis of its trailer? It trots out that ’90s movie trope of disaffected youth, represented by a cute stripper named Tiffani (Kiersten Warren), reacting to a television news report of a nearby, giant spaceship with an oh so disaffected exclamation of “This is so cool.” Right. We all know that the nation’s youth are so worldly and sophisticated that they are above any sense of concern or panic. Well, actually that is only how the filmmakers think that the film’s young target audience wish to be perceived. So, Tiffani joins more of the cool crowd somehow holding a rave atop a Los Angeles skyscraper waving “Welcome” and “Take Me Away” placards right below one of the hovering UFOs. In one of many “hip” variations on the 1953 movie version of The War of the Worlds, instead of three local yokels waving a white flag becoming the first victims of the alien attacks, it is this group of thrill-seeking hipsters getting blasted who represent a large chunk of this movie’s demographic. Wow! Now it’s personal? Whatever. 

Why is another stripper named Jasmine (Vivica A. Fox) the girlfriend of Will Smith’s hero character? Because 1996 was apparently when strippers went mainstream. You could not watch prime time television that season without sooner or later seeing a promo for a stripper being featured in an episode of a network series. There is no reason for a stripper to be in Independence Day; it is just another hip ’90s gimmick. Hey, I love strippers! Bring ‘em on! But since this is a PG-13-rated movie, when we see this stripper at work she won’t drop the top, so what’s the point? Oh yeah, it’s still supposed to be cool in an oh so ’90s way. One more box has been checked off on the trend list. 

Independence Day makes a stab at sci-fi relevance by incorporating UFOlogy speculation about the legendary UFO that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico and the government Area 51 facility in Nevada that is supposed to be storing it. In this movie Area 51 contains an old scout ship from the alien race now attacking Earth. For 40 years the movie’s government eggheads have been studying this alien technology that is so advanced they understand hardly anything about it. Of course the awe that is supposed to generate is destroyed when our heroes must instantly master this technology. Nevertheless, since the ’90s sci-fi television series The X-Files used Roswell references, Independence Day dumps that into their sci-fi slop. At least this justified David Duchovny pissing on an Independence Day poster in the first theatrical film of The X-Files (1998). Truly an Oscar-worthy moment. 

Apparently, just about no one was more hip than Will Smith on the verge of superstardom in 1996. So, we need him to be the hip U.S. Marine hero Captain Steven Hiller. After bringing down one alien fighter craft, he knocks out the alien pilot with one punch and drags it across the desert to Area 51. It is never explained why this glass-jawed alien during a later surgical examination suddenly has the deadly ability to immediately decimate a room full of scientists. I guess the eggheads did not have any wiseass Will Smith-styled one-liners to defend themselves with. 

Eventually, in order to save the world, Smith has to fly the old, downed alien ship stored in Area 51. But just how the hell does he have instant prowess flying a forty-year-old alien craft so expertly that he can outmaneuver aliens flying their own new and presumably more advanced fighter vessels? Way back in the 1936 Flash Gordon serial, Buster Crabbe’s Flash had to at least watch Frank Shannon’s Dr. Zarkov pilot his rocketship all the way to the planet Mongo before Flash could fly such vessels himself. So much for the supposed advance of credibility and sophistication in the modern science fiction film. 

Remember that bullshit title to all of this contrived crap? Bill Pullman’s character of U.S. President Whitmore tries to justify this film’s pretentious title by delivering a troop-rousing speech before the big counter attack against the aliens. Very conveniently for movie marketing purposes, this is occurring on July 4th. Therefore, President Whitmore makes a ridiculously strained and patriotic analogy about this being Earth’s Independence Day. What the hell does once seceding from a monarchy have to do with resisting invasion and extermination? This is not about independence but survival. I guess “kill or be killed” doesn’t make the popcorn-munching morons want to stand up and cheer. 

Remember those government scientists in Area 51 that were studying that old alien vessel for 40 years and still can’t figure out how it works? Don’t worry because Jeff Goldblum (another popular box is checked using the star of Jurassic Park), as our IT hero David Levinson, shows up with his magic laptop. You see, back in the ’90s, the audience was infatuated with that new consumer craze for home computers. So, they would accept any plot point being glossed over by those gadgets. Computers were the handy trinkets that lazy screenwriters used to score with their audience. Here we are stroked with yet another “hip” variation on The War of the Worlds; instead of naturally occurring germs being responsible for the aliens’ destruction, a computer virus delivered via laptop saves the day. 

That is absolutely impossible! How does the virus get written that will communicate with an alien civilization’s computers? Remember that Earth scientists could not understand anything about that alien technology. So how the hell does Goldblum’s Levinson, who has no prior knowledge about the aliens, immediately cobble together a virus to interact with an alien technology that, once again, scientists were studying for 40 years and still understand almost nothing about? That means that they would not understand that alien computer language, much less be able to write code for it. 

Goldblum’s laptop had info about alien signals from his company’s cable television satellites that were being used by the aliens. Therefore, are we to believe that laptop somehow automatically wrote a virus with code that is understood by alien computers? Then why the hell did anyone ever bother to learn how to write computer code? The reason that most of our real world computer viruses did not infect both Apple Macintosh computers and other personal computers was because they have different hardware and operating systems. So, doesn’t it stand to reason that an extraterrestrial computer and its code would be even more incompatible with human computing code writing a virus? Should we assume, without any explanation in the film, that in a matter of minutes or hours, our hungover IT hero somehow invented alien-compatible code to write a computer virus? 

Believe it or not, computers are not magic. But they need to be for the purposes of this gung-ho, feel-good, ’90s perversion of The War of the Worlds. Can’t just let man be saved by the grace of God. Hell no! Gotta be sure that our salvation depends on our techno trends and consumer choices. Never fear! All is solved with a magic laptop. Did Apple and Microsoft bankroll this stupidity? 

This asinine aggravation just does not end, folks! This impossible computer virus is supposed to command the alien vessels to drop their defense shields allowing mankind’s missiles to strike them. Hotshot marine Will Smith, along with IT guru Jeff Goldblum and his magic laptop, must fly the old alien vessel from Area 51 into the aliens’ mothership. Somehow a giant leap of logic is made to assume that, once they dock, they will be connected to the mother ship’s computer system to download the virus. First off, this vessel that Smith and Goldblum are using is 40 years old. Why do the aliens not notice this antique arriving in their mother ship? If this alien race were so technologically sophisticated, surely their aircraft would have advanced one helluva lot over 40 years. Second, it was surmised that the aliens are telepathic. Then why is it when the Will Smith-piloted vessel docks in the alien mother ship, none of those telepathic aliens watching can sense that no member of their race is aboard that 40-year-old relic? 

Let us not neglect the sentimentality that is supposed to legitimize this coldly calculated money grab called Independence Day (not ID4, dammit). In a redemption setup that could be seen coming a light year away, the Goldblum character’s crusty father (Judd Hirsch) and ex-wife (Margaret Colin) see no merit in the tech guru’s line of work. Of course nothing could be more uplifting to a ’90s mainstream audience than seeing someone’s career path not only being justified, but also used to save the world. Great, now the wage slaves will feel validated marching back to the office to keep making the money to buy more stuff, especially computers. 

Having to force myself to watch Independence Day again for this review, I am not quite as hate-filled about it these days. I do see that a lot of technical and performance talent was poured into it, yet I am still opposed to its objective which is more about marketing than storytelling. I do not expect perfection, but I will condemn pretentious pandering full of illogical plot points. This expensive and ponderous display of fantasy could have been partially salvaged with just a few more sentences of that dreaded exposition to prop up its wobbly logic. That wouldn’t have cost one more lousy buck, but it may have required an honest effort. Just because Independence Day is ripping off The War of the Worlds does not mean it can’t be bothered to make sense of its contemporary tweaking. Paper costs no more for a good script than for a bad script. Since this turd cost $75 million and took four months to excrete, these feces makers could have made the effort to wipe. 

Whew! This alien autopsy was long overdue, but rest assured that it did not cost the American taxpayer a single penny, folks. I normally do not expend this much energy picking movies apart. There are plenty of fun flicks that have some narrative lapses, yet I may be able to reason out something not made clear and still celebrate a film’s merits. I love schlock, but Independence Day wants us to believe it is more than schlock, when it is actually less. Expensive spectacle without originality or logic that aspires to be nothing more than trendy, state-of-the-art spectacle should be beneath contempt. Unfortunately, too many moviegoers got off on it, so I have been compelled to use this review to lance the boil of my contempt that has been festering for decades. Please excuse the mess.