Features

Primary navigation

• The Ultimate Film Chart
• By decade
• Alphabetically
• Complete list

July 2. Radio signals buzzing across monitors in the USA prove to be emanating from a massive spaceship. As government agencies try to communicate with the ship, and a half dozen smaller vessels that have taken up positions across the world, a New York cable executive, David Levinson. discovers that the signal is actually a countdown. David and his father, Julius, drive to Washington D.C. to pass the information to David's former wife, Constance, who gave up on her marriage for a job with the President. Meanwhile, a fighter pilot Captain Hiller, takes leave of his fiancée and her son in order to "kick E.T.'s butt," while Russell Casse, a former Vietnam pilot turned alcoholic crop-duster with three kids, explains to anyone who will listen how he was once abducted by aliens.

July 3. The smaller alien ships begin to attack the earth. The President and most of his staff, along with David and his father, escape the White House just before it is blown up. They travel to Roswell, New Mexico - Area 51 - where, since the 1950s, government scientists have been studying a space ship identical to those in the invading force. The President launches an unsuccessful nuclear attack. David discovers a way to disarm the invaders' defence system with a computer virus. He and Steven, who has gunned down one of the aliens in a dogfight, navigate the older space craft to the mother ship in order to plant the virus. A convoy of survivors arrive in Roswell. including the pilot's girlfriend, her son and the wounded First Lady, who then dies.

July 4. Steven and David hack into the alien computer system, disarming its defence shields. The US launches a successful air strike on the extraterrestrials. They spread the word via Morse code to the rest of the world's armies, all of whom are then able to join in the battle. The invading forces are routed, leaving the world's survivors to carry on the business of rebuilding the earth.

Blame The X-FiIes. Or perhaps give thanks, as do so many of the television faithful. Whatever the genesis of Independence Day, it's more than likely that without Mulder and Scully this unrepentantly slam-bam extravaganza wouldn't exist - neither as the season's most eagerly awaited box-office phenomenon, nor as a gateway into the renewed uneasy collective dream of extraterrestrial invasion. A truly scary extraterrestrial alien invasion, that is, with superior hardware and intellect and none of the pieties that make for so many warm-and-fuzzy Star Treks, not to mention E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

Less the new science fiction than old-fashioned hokum. Independence Day is an SF disaster film self-consciously cut from the same movie mouldiness that made for such unforgettable 50s titles as War of the Worlds and Invaders from Mars. The message is: think back to the future, with tongue lightly in cheek. Directed by Roland Emmerich, who established his SF credentials with Moon 44 and Stargate, the film opens with a quick trip to the moon, then cuts to an earthbound lab. As a technician putts golf balls, Michael Stipe chirps on the radio, "It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine." On cue, a radio signal shivers across the lab's monitors. There's excitement, followed by alarm, then panic after spaceships begin cruising the skies. Heads of states convene; the masses scramble.

A waiting game stretched over three days. Independence Day switches between long shots (aliens looming) and close-ups (humans cringing). Emmerich may be no Steven Spielberg or George Lucas (never mind Stanley Kubrick), but he knows that even the biggest mousetrap needs mice to keep things interesting. Here, the mice are numerous and multiculturally equalised - Will Smith as Steven, a black fighter pilot; Jeff Goldblum as a Jewish cybergenius called David; and Bill Pullman, blanded out as the WASP President.

The good news is that Hollywood can still make good, solid, goose-bump movies where neat effects keep time with story, characters and loads of good cheer. Doomsday aside, Independence Day is consistently, weirdly, upbeat in mood, a gloss on the same vibrations that end Dr. Strangelove, but without the venom. Emmerich doesn't have Kubrick's wit, style or intellectual reach, but he does have a feel for epic moviemaking. If nothing else, Independence Day fulfills the primal promise of the movies: to deliver the audience out of the everyday and into the sensational, be it into Valhalla or ruin.

Emmerich and his producer/co-writer, Dean Devlin, tweak convention, but they're far too smart to dump it altogether. The film works its most ticklish fun exercising the gee-whiz principle: as in, gee-whiz, what if we glued this thingamajig to that thingamabob. It's something that works best when the odds are laughably impossible, as when half a dozen spaceships hang over the world's major cities promising destruction and all that stands between life and death are three extravagantly capable, impeccably fit American men with good hair.

Independence Day may be goofy, but it's not dumb. It barely cheats at story level and it hints at life beyond the frame. If only Emmerich could turn suggestion into substance. Unlike the directors of so many blockbusters, he knows that what makes a movie are its people; unlike Spielberg he doesn't spend time shading them in. Close Encounters takes a few knocks in this film, yet what makes that movie memorable isn't just any close encounter, but one with Richard Dreyfuss. This rarely climbs to the same woozy heights as a Star Wars or an E.T. but it has necessary down time and loads of action. It even has some terrific set pieces: most memorably a procession of RVs crossing the desert like covered wagons. What it doesn't have is an emphatic pulse, the kind that forces hearts into throats and keeps them there. The problem is partly logistical, the headaches of effects and extras, and partly inspirational; the film never shakes the B-movie tag.

In the end, this may be the key to the film's success. Firmly located between art and trash, virtuosity and insignificance, Independence Day's success is in being bigger but never better than its audience. Its mediocrity is its greatest triumph. This may be the most cheerful movie about the apocalypse ever. Faced with the end, there's barely one character in the film who sheds a tear. Most simply swallow fear and turn towards danger. Like the audience, they know that it will all be over, soon.

Helper links

• Contact us
• Help
• Terms of use
• Privacy
• Linking
• Site map
• Accessibility/standards