Subject: REVIEW: INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)

From: [email-masked] (Andrew Hicks)
Date: 13 Jul 1996 13:54:47 GMT

INDEPENDENCE DAY
                       A film review by Andrew Hicks
                Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions

(1996) **** (out of four)

	Nothing has been more hyped this summer than the 
release of Independence Day. The trailer has been playing 
non-stop for months, long enough for me to be able to recite Will 
Smith's soundbite of "I'm just a little anxious to get up there and 
kick E.T.'s ass, that's all," in my sleep. And the movie theater I 
went to was so crowded there were actually cops directing traffic 
out of the parking lot. It was playing on three screens with a line 
around the corner and the first showing sold out. With the only 
other opening-day competition being the John Travolta melodrama 
PHENOMENON (which looks pretty Tra-volting to me), I knew 
they were all there for INDEPENDENCE DAY, probably the movie 
event of the decade so far.

	But is it worthy to be hailed as an event? In two 
words -- yes. It may not have the artistic merit of a SCHINDLER'S 
LIST, but this is the common man's classic, mainstream 
entertainment that draws average audiences together and 
envelops them completely. INDEPENDENCE DAY is a huge-scale 
epic worthy of the hype, one which shamelessly exploits those last 
lingering shreds of patriotism we all still have. It's STAR WARS plus 
ALIEN plus TOP GUN with hints of 70's ensemble disaster movies 
like THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and AIRPORT (but I'm not 
holding the last two against them).

	There are no huge stars in INDEPENDENCE DAY -- no 
Arnold protecting Vanessa Williams or Sean Connery breaking into 
Alcatraz, not even any names above the title. Instead we get 
second-string stars like Will Smith as an overly brave fighter pilot, 
Jeff Goldblum as the earth-friendly genius (pretty much the same 
character he played in POWDER), Bill Pullman as the President, 
Randy Quaid as the eccentric crop duster who claims a previous 
alien encounter and Judd Hirsch of "Taxi" as Goldblum's 
stereotypical Jewish father.

	Then there are the brief screen-time casualties like Harvey 
Fierstein, who vamps his way through the first reel, Harry Connick 
Jr. as a fellow fighter pilot and Brent "Data" Spiner, a government 
scientist who gets attacked by an alien who must have heard his 
"Old Yellow Eyes" loungeact album on K-Tel records. (Hell, _I'd_ 
travel the galaxy to kill Spiner after listening to that.) Countless 
others die, of course, when the giant hovering spacecrafts show 
up over New York, Washington, L.A. and the other key Earth 
cities.

	The first third of INDEPENDENCE DAY, the most 
chilling and compelling part of the movie, is devoted to the arrival 
of the spacecrafts over Earth. Scenes of mass panic and destruction 
on a huge scale abound, with strategic shots of skyscrapers 
crumbling, giant fireballs engrossing the masses and even the 
White House exploding ("Hillary! Chelsea!"). Goldblum, a cable 
technician, is the first to figure out that the aliens haven't come 
in peace, and intervenes accordingly. But that's just the 
beginning.

	The second day of our three day epic brings the first 
human retaliation attempts, centering around Bad Boy Will Smith's 
bloated-ego action hero techniques, which is when you remember 
you're still only watching a movie. As authentic as the INDEPENDENCE 
DAY visuals are, the biggest implausibilities are in the mostly 
one-note characters and how lightly they seem to take the news 
of impending global destruction, as if they'd already read the script 
and know things will be okay in the end.

	It's not a perfect movie by any stretch of the imagination 
but is such an incredible experience that you can easily overlook 
the rampant implausibility and dialogue which would in other 
circumstances seem laughable. In forty years, as the special effects 
become dated, the flaws will seem more obvious and INDEPENDENCE 
DAY may well join the Bad Movie Hall of Fame, but right now it's 
the best entertainment of the year. What it lacks in big-name draws 
or intelligence of plot it more than makes up for in visual effects and 
the collective anxiety it invokes over the fate of the characters, not to 
mention the planet.

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