Subject: REVIEW: INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)

From: [email-masked] (Serdar Yegulalp)
Date: 21 Mar 1997 19:57:16 GMT

INDEPENDENCE DAY
                       A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
                        Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp

CAPSULE: Big, stupid B-movie that would have been more fun if we could have
seen the strings from which the UFO models were hanging.

I waited a long time before codifying my feelings about INDEPENDENCE DAY, a
big, stupid movie that commanded a massive audience mostly by sheer
audacity. The trailers and promotional material for ID4 sold the flick on
one point: "In this movie, the world blows up. Come and see!"

Putting aside the basically reprehensible nature of this kind of hard sell,
what's left? An extremely expensive B picture that, because of its cost and
size and pretentiousness (yes, pretentiousness), isn't nearly as much fun
as it could have been. It's a surefire perpetual rental hit and frat-party
MST3K-style video keeper, but it's still incredibly dumb. (One of the
surest signs that Hollywood is losing its grip: MARS ATTACKS! which
post-dated ID4 and could have parodied that movie brilliantly, couldn't
even do *that* well. Figures.)

The plot is old, old, old. Big alien ships arrive and hover over our major
cities ("in exactly the same way that bricks don't" -- Douglas Adams). They
eventually start blowing everything up. (A very sarcastic underground-press
poster showed the shot of the White House getting blasted and the caption
PROOF OF ALIEN INTELLIGENCE.) Mankind finds a way to fight back. Everything
that hasn't been blown up in the first half of the movie is blown up in the
second half. The end. (At least until they decide to write "ID5".)

There are some moments throughout the movie, individual touches, that
garner a laugh or a shock. Will Smith's performance as a hot-dog pilot who
apparently seems to know how to fly alien spacecraft from having looked at
them is funny (and his monologue with an unconscious alien in the desert is
destined to become bumper-sticker material); he's probably the best thing
in the movie. But the movie as a whole is just impossibly stupid, a total
failure of real imagination. The effects are impressive, but they're
monolithic and unimaginative. (White House blows up. Empire State Building
blows up. And the picture of Lady Liberty, trashed, is more or less ripped
from PLANET OF THE APES. Et any number of ceteras.)

I mentioned pretentiousness. At various points during the flick, we're
allegedly supposed to have our sympathies enlisted for some sort of
patriotic revival, a feeling that good ole Ammurrican ingenuity will rise
up and remake the world once again. Give me a break. The low point of the
movie, in this vein, is a speech by Bill Pullman (playing a Clintonesque
[i.e., spineless?] president) which rather clumsily ties in the movie's
title with a rallying cry. I waited for someone to clobber him with a brick
and get on with it.

(Actually, maybe the real nadir was reached when the video game tie-in was
released a couple of weeks ago -- which is more enjoyable than anything the
*movie* has to offer.)

From what I understand, a three-hour extended version of the movie will be
appearing sometime later this year on LaserDisc. I've been on trips to the
DMV that were shorter and less dimwitted.

One-half out of four motherships.
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[email-masked]                                       EFNet IRC: GinRei
http://serdar.home.ml.org                          another worldly device...
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