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Personally, I thought it was amazing. Leave your reality-and-hokiness meter at the door of the theatre, because it'll go haywire. If you can enjoy a movie without it, then you'll have a ball. Yes, this movie is filled with more lucky coincidences than all of the works of Dickens combined, images and lines ripped straight from dozens of other sources and "serious" scenes that are so campy you'd think they were from a Saturday Night Live skit. But it works.
This movie has two big things going for it; it's terribly earnest and it really delivers on its promises. Independence Day relates a big, bloated, ridiculous story, without apology, in an era when few films have the guts to do this. It combines a heartfelt, patriotic zeal with more mass destruction than I ever thought was possible. It's an over-enthused, fireworks-toting tomboy of a film, whose gung-ho sense of fun pushes at and eventually topples that part of us which knows better than to enjoy this sort of nonsense.
Not since Star Wars have I seen something that filled me with such amazed delight, super-charged with guilty glee. In other words, it's a movie for seven-year-old's and those who can remember the joys of being that age. As a kid, I can vividly recall playing games with GI Joe where no swashbuckling plot twist was too outrageous. I miss those times of unbridled imagination. If you wanted to blow up the White House, then, BOOM!, it was done. No apologies and no limits. Just add an unbridled imagination to an enormous budget, blown on gigantic toys. What's important is that the filmmakers know how to squeeze every possible thrill out of the effects - unlike Waterworld, where they just sat there, bobbing lifelessly in a tepid tub. Nowadays we are so saturated by our need to be sensible and rational that real, over-the-top thrills feel out of our grasp. Not so in Independence Day - less a movie, more a time-machine, designed to enthrall the unjaded kid residing in us all.
Independence Day has another out-of-era quality too. This is the first large-scale, star-studded, splashy disaster epic I've seen since Irwin Allen quit making them (SEE... American landmarks like the Empire State Building get blown to smithereens! SEE... the Fresh Prince of Bel Air punch out an alien and then drag him over the desert sands). There's even a good, ol' fashioned, rouse-the-troops speech the likes of which might have made even Winston Churchill wistful. Everyone who's anyone is in this movie (even Mr. Data). Part of me wishes that the advertising poster had all of the stars' photos in little boxes at the bottom. Hollywood is so obsessed with being alternative that the mere making of a movie like Independence Day is a miracle.
As an added bonus, the film boasts some of the best sound this side of Twister. That alone is the excuse you've been looking for to buy a laserdisc player (not to mention the amazing Margaret Colin, an actress more eye-poppingly gorgeous than any other I care to think of).
Independence Day is of a species of films belonging to the "they don't make 'em like that anymore" school of moviemaking. However, they do make'em like that - ID4 is the proof. File this one alongside The Thief of Bagdad (with Sabu) and Raiders of the Lost Ark in the "perfect fun" category. As a double feature, I suggest getting hold of The Phantom. If you don't have a good time, you don't have a pulse.
Patrick McCray.
VNDP20D@prodigy.com
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