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.
syegul@ix.netcom.com EFNet IRC: GinRei http://serdar.home.ml.org another worldly device...
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