Subject: REVIEW: INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)

From: [email-masked] (Mark R. Leeper)
Date: 8 Jul 1996 14:49:59 GMT

INDEPENDENCE DAY
                      A film review by Mark R. Leeper
                       Copyright 1996 Mark R. Leeper

               Capsule: This is a huge production that starts
          with the plot of the film THE WAR OF THE WORLDS and
          hangs on it bits and even scenes from a lot of
          other films.  We have a no-holds-barred alien
          invasion film that is willing to kill off whole
          cities for the camera.  This big spectacular
          special effects film may be the most visually
          impressive so far in the 1990s.  Much of the
          audience will get pulled into the action and will
          not care that the writing borrows so much from many
          other films.  Rating: high +2 (-4 to +4).  A
          discussion of some of the ideas of the film follows
          the main review in a spoiler section.

     In retrospect there was something positively refreshing about
George Pal's 1953 film THE WAR OF THE WORLDS.  Over the years we have
seen many alien invasion films in which the aliens come as seed-pods to
replace us, or they have an advance guard take over our minds, or they
seed our planet with alien vampires.  Sometimes they really are
friendly; sometimes they only pretend to be friendly; sometimes they
are nasty and hide out in swamps; sometimes they steal our scientists.
There are only a very small handful of films in which the aliens try
straight-ahead overwhelming us with sheer military power.  In most of
them the aliens equivocate by negotiating at some point as they do in
THE MYSTERIANS or EARTH VERSUS THE FLYING SAUCERS.  Unique among these
films, until now, has been THE WAR OF THE WORLDS in which the
implacable aliens arrive with incredible power and start to pound
humanity flat--no negotiation, no communication, no quarter given.
That is perhaps a very believable scenario for an alien invasion, but
since THE WAR OF THE WORLDS nobody has really wanted to tackle it in a
movie.  One reason it has not been done more often is that it would be
really expensive in terms of special effects to do it right, showing
scenes of mass destruction rather than telling the view about them.
And it would require a script that would have the courage to depict
whole population centers destroyed, showing thousands of people being
killed.  George Pal made a reasonable stab at that with his film, but
nobody has really tried it since.  Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin
apparently observed that film industry's visual technology has caught
up with that concept.  They also realized that the way was paved for
film like this by the success of the television program, "The X-Files."
Whatever convinced them that the time was right they now have a super-
hit of a film.

     A huge artificial object appears near the moon and start moving
toward Earth.  Without warning the skies over major cities go dark as
they are covered by mysterious cloud-banks.  From the cloud-banks
emerge city-sized flying disks, fifteen miles in diameter.  For six
hours they float in ominous silence.  Perhaps the best moments of the
script are the tension before the initial attack.  The script takes its
time, slowly revealing more and more about the alien ships.  The
script, which was co-authored by Dean Devlin who produced and Roland
Emmerich who directed, consciously mimics disaster film writing
introducing a large number of characters, most played by solid but
second string actors.  Bill Pullman plays a rather youthful President
of the United States is worried about his strong-willed but nice First
Lady Marilyn (Mary McDonnell).  He is aided by Constance (Margaret
Colin) whose ex-husband David (Jeff Goldblum) is a whiz with computers
but he is still working out his relationship with his cute but kvetchy
Jewish father Julius (Judd Hirsch).  Davis will soon find his fate
entwined with hotshot Air Force pilot Captain Hiller (Will Smith).
Most of the characters are developed only on the most superficial level
with the most touching relationship being that between David and his
father.

     Emmerich and Devlin freely admit that there is much in
INDEPENDENCE DAY that was inspired by other films.  They cite 1940s war
films and 1970s disaster films, but whole scenes seem to be lifted from
films like ALIEN and THE RIGHT STUFF.  In spite of the safe route of
borrowing from established films, the script does take some chances.
It is not many, but some characters the audience cares about get
killed.  While the script is heavy on coincidence and melodrama it
never fails to be fun.

     If this is not an intelligent film, it is not a really dumb one
either.  It is a big spectacular, almost two and a half hours, with its
share of script problems.  Much the same can be said of films like THE
TEN COMMANDMENTS or THE TOWERING INFERNO.  It is not intelligent, but
it is fun.  There is enough good to compensate for the negative points.
I rate it a high +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.

     Spoiler...Spoiler...Spoiler...Spoiler...Spoiler...Spoiler...Spoiler

     There are a few of the ideas of the film that needed to be better
explained.  The aliens were here to steal out precious natural
resources, supposedly.  Our resources are valuable to us, but Earth is
no richer in resources than any other planet in the solar system.  It
is not at all clear to me why they wasted so much energy and resource
subduing a hostile native population.  It might have been better adding
a few words saying that they needed an atmosphere of oxygen to mine the
resources or that they as a policy first subdue any populations that
might be a threat before mining a solar system.  On the other hand,
perhaps it is better to leave them a little mysterious.

     Part of the problem is that the aliens are a bit too much like us.
They share our eyes, nose, mouth configuration, our five-fingered
hands.  This in spite of the fact that a daisy is a closer relative to
us than they are.  Not only are they too similar, their technology is
way, way too similar.  Humans can figure out how to fly craft
instrumented for their anatomy and designed by their psychology.  We
are able to write and run programs on their computers.  Isaac Newton
was much closer to us than they are in terms of mental processes and I
doubt that if he stumbled somehow on a modern PC it would be able to do
much with it without instructions.

					Mark R. Leeper
					[email-masked]
					Copyright 1996 Mark R. Leeper