Viking Night: Independence Day
By Bruce Hall
July 7, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
It’s amazing how Christopher Columbus inspires us still, to this day.
If the aliens are allegorical in nature, so much the better. Remember the evil aliens (warning – 30-year old spoilers ahead) from V, who built giant saucers to steal our water and pack us all up like TV dinners? Did you know that the rings of Saturn are almost nothing but ice? And with that much water, growing food is the easiest thing in the world. So why visit earth at all? And imagine what it was like for a space lizard, who can’t regulate his own body temperature, to walk around wearing a heavy wool uniform over his fake rubber people suit? Yeah. It’s all kind of stupid, when you think about it.
But didn’t it all make a wonderful historical allegory for Nazi occupation? That’s what you were supposed to be thinking about. Plus, wasn’t it awesome when they peeled their faces off? My young, dumb ‘80s ass was perfectly happy to watch Marc Singer’s enormous nostrils and Michael Ironside’s resting bitch face save the world, one space lizard at a time. It was such a wonderful, different time.
And then there was Independence Day. When I first saw it, I failed to recognize it for what it was, and found myself a little put off by how obnoxious it is. There are actual explodey opening credits, which forced me to confirm that I had not, in fact, accidentally started watching Wrestlemania XII. Being kind of a nerd, I noticed, just as I had the first time, that there is more scientific imprecision in the first five minutes of this film than both volumes of my Robo Ninja Jet Squad saga put together. It’s as though everyone associated with Independence Day intentionally avoided even the most rudimentary research on anything related to the story. That’s not necessarily a crime, but it gives the movie a distinctly idiotic tone.
Nothing about the moon, the Earth, the military, politics, science, or even basic human behavior in any way resembles anything that ever happens in real life. Nobody will ever convince me that this screenplay was not written by a particularly afflicted head injury patient. I see the pages being handed straight to the director and filmed immediately after they were written. This would be the first, but certainly not the last time someone obviously kidnapped Roland Emmerich’s family and said “You have seven days to film the most obnoxiously stupid disaster movie ever, or everyone dies.”
Allow me to describe what I saw, and you’ll see my point.
A fleet of gigantic alien spacecraft, surely large enough to be seen from light years away, approaches the earth. Nobody seems aware of them until they reach the moon, when the entire planet goes into kind of a slack jawed stupor. At the head of the line is President Thomas Whitmore (Bill Pullman). Whitmore is a young, soft spoken war hero who is also a feckless twit, unequal to the task of his office. He and his staff seem overwhelmed by everything, as if they’d acquired the White House through a timeshare without bothering to read the contract. The alien fleet of city sized ships begins positioning themselves in an obvious attack posture over the world’s major cities, while Whitmore leads the world in a fit of nervous hand wringing.
I’m supposed to root for this guy? I hate him. I always knew Lone Starr would make a shitty president. I just never dreamed I’d live to see it.
Fortunately David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum), a satellite TV repairman with a suspiciously large office, is able to decipher the alien radio signals with his MacBook, and concludes that the visitors plan to attack. Levinson’s ex-wife Constance (Margaret Colin) improbably happens to be White House communications director, and yadda yadda yadda, David and his father (Judd Hirsch, serving strictly as comic relief and audience stand-in) are in the Oval Office. Of course, the aliens attack, and of course, humanity is brought to the brink of destruction. The story follows a rag-tag group of survivors as they work their way rise from the ruins, make their way across the country and mount a counterattack.
The rest of the cast includes a pair of stars headed in opposite directions, plus a dusting of ‘90s celebrity. Will Smith was impressive as hell in Six Degrees of Separation, but at the time most people still remembered him as the Fresh Prince. Independence Day was a star-making turn for him, although his Captain Steven Hiller isn’t any smarter than anyone else in the story. On that note, perennial fugitive from justice Randy Quaid appears as Russell Casse, a former combat pilot whose career was destroyed by his claims of alien abduction. He makes a living struggling to stay awake behind the stick of his crop duster as he slowly drinks himself to death. Beloved crooner Harry Connick, Jr. plays Goose to Will Smith’s Maverick - their flyboy bromance is worth mentioning only because it’s such a pale imitation.
For my money, the best parts of ID4 (the inane promotional abbreviation which I will now use because I’m tired of writing it out) are Goldblum, who couldn’t be more perfectly cast as a typical B-movie weird scientist. I’m not even convinced he’s acting, to tell you the truth. And there are some wonderful, even classic pulp-worthy moments. Extended, relatively convincing shots of urban panic coupled with miles of motor traffic snaking away from stricken cities are just pure things of beauty. And of course, the alien death rays - which must be positioned above a recognizable landmark to function - provide some of the film’s most spectacular moments. Years later, you can’t say this movie didn’t deserve that visual effects Oscar. Watching Los Angeles, New York and Washington get wiped off the map is as mesmerizing today as it was back then.
What I failed to originally understand is that Independence Day is a just a piece of McCarthy era B movie camp, made with a totally Xtreme 1990s budget. It makes a lot of noise and delivers a lot of fun, along with a more than expected dose of good humor. But it’s also aggressively stupid and utterly devoid of even basic allegory - to the point that it almost feels personally insulting. I see what this film wants to be, and I actually think it succeeds almost entirely, as long as that’s what you’re into. I had fun revisiting ID4, with its stupid title and stupid characters and gloriously stupid stupidness. But the tone of this movie just isn’t for me, so I doubt I’ll go out of my way to do it again soon.
There are all kinds of dumb movies though, for all kinds of people. If you haven’t seen Independence Day yet, don’t let me scare you away. It’s well worth your time. Also, congratulations on coming out of your decades long coma. Just wait until you hear who the President is...