INDEPENDENCE DAY
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Mary McDonnell, Judd Hirsch, Margaret Colin, Randy Quaid, Robert Loggia, Vivica A. Fox. Screenplay: Roland Emmerich, Dean Devlin. Director: Roland Emmerich. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
In case you are just emerging from Biosphere 2, or have been otherwise hermetically sealed away from all media for the last twelve months, INDEPENDENCE DAY is about an alien invasion of the earth. 20th Century Fox began running teasers for its major summer entry sometime around the mid-1980s; they flew planes over the cities targeted in the film, warning of impending doom; they sent out massive theater lobby cards which required a light rail system to get from one end to the other. Whatever the production budget was for INDEPENDENCE DAY, the marketing budget probably came close to matching it, and it appears to have worked. People are a-buzz over INDEPENDENCE DAY, and theater owners successfully lobbied to have the opening moved up to July 2nd. All that money spent...and by all evidence, not a dime of it went to a good script doctor.
By now, I am fully aware that the call for better scripts in summer blockbusters is a cry in the wilderness; the success of TWISTER has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that little else matters if impressive visual effects are on the bill of fare. What makes INDEPENDENCE DAY so frustrating is that its complete failure as a story does not appear to be the result of laziness. Director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin, who co-wrote the screenplay, were trying to create an epic tale-of-three-cities, beginning with the appearance over Los Angeles, New York and Washington D.C. of giant spacecraft on July 2nd, their subsequent attack and humanity's attempt to resist on July 4th, and several characters are followed through those three days. There is David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum), a satellite engineer whose ex-wife Connie (Margaret Colin) is the Chief-of-Staff for President Thomas Whitmore (Bill Pullman), and Capt. Steven Hiller (Will Smith), a Marines pilot separated from his girlfriend Jasmine (Vivica A. Fox), a single mother who is one of the few survivors in Los Angeles, along with the First Lady (Mary McDonnell).
The half-dozen or so sub-plots which wind through INDEPENDENCE DAY suggest that Emmerich and Devlin really wanted to make human drama matter. Instead, they created a story full of one-dimensional characters, absurd coincidences and laughably uninteresting interpersonal conflicts. A couple of performances manage to rise above the nonsense -- Will Smith, who has far more charisma than this film deserves and is almost always entertaining when he is on-screen, which is not nearly often enough; and Brent Spiner, who has fun as the eccentric scientist in charge of examining the remains of the infamous Roswell, New Mexico spacecraft from the 1950s -- but mostly there are forced emotions and nascent cliches like the bickering-estranged-spouses-who-still-love-each-other.
But let's get down to the real business: at times, INDEPENDENCE DAY looks great, a real apocalypse wow. The dog-fight sequences are complex and exciting, particularly a one-on-one battle between Smith's Capt. Hiller and an alien fighter which whizzes through canyons at break-neck speed. At other times, believe it or not, it looks cheap. Some of the digital effects are too soft around the edges, and INDEPENDENCE DAY skimps on a face-to-face showdown with the aliens. That is a big mistake, because the only time in INDEPENDENCE DAY when there is any genuine tension is when scientists get hold of -- and have to deal with -- an alien survivor. There is something cold about an Ultimate Battle which comes down to a showdown between ships.
Then again, a swarming alien ground invasion might have given Emmerich and Devlin just one more better film to crib from. INDEPENDENCE DAY feels like a hodge-podge of quotes from science fiction classics like STAR WARS (the "mother ship cruising overhead" opening shot, as well as the trench run finale), RETURN OF THE JEDI (the multi-craft dog-fight) and ALIEN (the design of the aliens). Even the film's self-promoted nickname, "ID4," evokes TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY's "T2" campaign from a few years ago. To top things off, the president gives what is intended to be a rousing address to his hopelessly outnumbered troops; it was supposed to be his "St. Crispin's Day" speech, but it's so lame it makes you wondered how this guy was ever elected _class_ president. INDEPENDENCE DAY appears to be the meticulously constructed result of one of those screenwriting programs which are supposed to give you all the elements for a complete story...and of course, all those elements come from other films. You can't buy inspiration, and INDEPENDENCE DAY is woefully short on anything that rouses the imagination. It's a kick-ass trailer that's wagging a dog.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 days the earth stood still: 4.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews