Last weekend opened a film in the form of a sequel 20 years in the making. Independence Day: Resurgence is the long-awaited follow-up to the 1996 blockbuster, and one can argue classic, Independence Day. Rare among many genre films of the 1990s, Roland Emmerich’s epic about aliens invading Earth, blowing up our national monuments and being taken down by a computer virus, has aged pretty well.
Like H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, it’s a story both of its time and for all times. It was the defining hit of that key summer of 1996, when CGI truly came into its own as the prime tool for movie special effects. That summer saw the release of Twister, Eraser, Daylight, Dragonheart and Mission: Impossible (which amazingly is still churning out sequels). But Independence Day towered over all of them with its grand scope, humor, pop culture power and yes, epic special effects.
It’s hard to imagine any major film aficionados not being familiar with the film’s plot. It begins with a shot of a vast shadow moving over the Moon, soon massive structures are detected by the Earth’s satellite and radar systems. Soon massive, disc-shaped craft emerge over every country in the world, the aliens have arrived.
Meanwhile various characters are dealing with their own life dramas just as the world is turned upside down. There’s cable repair man David Livinson (Jeff Goldblum), divorced and regular chess player with his cranky dad (Judd Hirsch), Air Force captain Steven Hiller (Will Smith), who would like to someday fly the Space Shuttle and marry his girlfriend Jasmine (Vivica A. Fox) and of course, the president of United States, Thomas J. Whitmore (Bill Pullman), who has to figure out how to deal with the sudden alien crisis.
When Livinson discovers a pattern to signals being transmitted by the aliens, he rushes to Washington, D.C. to warn his ex, Connie (Margaret Colin), who works for the White House, that the aliens are preparing to unleash major hell on the planet. They are here to take over.
Independence Day was a throwback to classic science fiction and B-films, spruced up with a major budget and talent, but it was also a complete product of the 1990s. The first decade after the Cold War ended witnessed a rise in the obsession with UFOs and aliens. “Nonfiction” paranormal shows like Sightings and Paranormal Borderline were the rage.
A year before the movie premiered Fox aired a sensational (later proven to be a hoax) piece of footage claiming to show the actual autopsy of one of the Roswell aliens. The show, titled Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction, is a wickedly good time and can be seen right now on Netflix.
Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction Independence Day
With the economy booming and the Commies gone, Americans began to wonder if the only real threat left were extraterrestrials. UFO hunters made it a popular pastime to hike to Nevada and snoop around the notorious Area 51 airbase, purported to hold crashed UFOs and possibly their pilots. Thousands of people were claiming at the time to have been abducted by aliens, a genre in itself developed around this with serious-minded abduction movies like Fire In The Sky and Communion.
Independence Day absorbs all this pop culture and more, blending it into a well-crafted, energetic film, it takes ideas from everywhere and adapts them into the narrative. There is an alien autopsy in the movie after Will Smith captures an alien pilot after an exhilarating dog fight in the sky.
The president and other survivors make their way to Area 51 where the wonderfully mad scientist Dr. Okun (played by Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Brent Spiner) has been studying the Roswell craft since the 1970s (turns out the Roswell UFO looks exactly like the ones now attacking Earth, of course).
To top it all off, a drunken crop duster, Russell (Randy Quiad), was abducted by a UFO years ago, his claims laughed off, but not anymore.
Above all else it’s the films images that first grip the viewer. Emmerich has always been a great visual stylist before anything else. His lesser films like 1998’s Godzilla still have a big, visual scope while his two best dramatic efforts, The Patriot and Anonymous, are beautifully elegant and lush.
With Independence Day he gives us a total apocalypse. Miniatures are combined with CGI for the now classic sequences where the alien craft open shafts which emit giant, blue lasers that decimate major national monuments like the Empire State Building and the White House. Entire cities turn into infernos as our heroes desperately try to leave.
My favorite shot is still the one where Air Force One just barely makes off the runway, the flames devouring the capitol licking at its tail.
These scenes are a cinematic version of what the renowned scientist Stephen Hawking meant a few years ago when he warned that if indeed there are aliens, contact with them would be similar to when the Conquistadors arrived in Mexico.
There’s a slightly unnerving element in Independence Day even because it taps into our fears of total destruction. Maybe aliens won’t blow up New York, but with the news dominated by ISIS and our stand offs with Russia, you never know when someone will press the wrong button.
Emmerich would later go even further with even bigger CGI extravaganzas like 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, movies which also imagined the end of the world through ecological and prophetic catastrophes where familiar sites and cities are buried, demolished, swept away or frozen over.
The famous dog fights between alien ships and military fighter planes over what’s left of our cities still hold up, maybe because they’re not too overdone. Today the common trend is to make a battle scene as massive and insane as possible (Batman vs. Superman, The Avengers: Age of Ultron), but in Independence Day computer effects are combined with real elements to make just the right amount of believable visuals.
When the alien ships open their lasers it never feels corny, but like technology that might exist, or when an alien attacks Okun at Area 51 it looks as organic as the creatures in Ridley Scott’s Alien. Independence Day would go on to win the 1996 Best Visual Effects Oscar.
But Independence Day has remained popular outside of its own decade because it also combines a lot of classic adventure movie elements that simply make it an endlessly good time. The score by David Arnold has melodies and soaring sections that sound inspired by John Williams’s scores for Spielberg’s action fare.
The characters are easy to like because they’re so close to us. The president is at the end of the day a dad and husband, Will Smith is his humorous, cocky self but we do care when he worries for his girlfriend lost out there in the rubble, this was his first real blockbuster role after 1995’s Bad Boys. Jeff Goldblum, at the time fresh from his Jurassic Park stardom, is great as David, a cool-headed guy who has the classic bad luck of not being taken seriously until disaster strikes.
And of course there’s Bill Pullman in what must surely be his most popular role ever as President Whitmore. He joined that crew of 1990s presidents like Air Force One’s Harrison Ford who could be action heroes as well as commander-in-chief. His speech before the final showdown with the aliens is one of the 90’s classic “pump up” speeches.
But one final point that should be made about Independence Day is that it also endures because at its core it has a really good message: If humankind were to be threatened by a powerful extraterrestrial force, we would be forced to unite for the simple purpose of survival.
The title was always a sly play on words. Yes, the aliens arrive just in time for the American Forth of July, but ironically now all of mankind needs to fight back against an oppressive force. Today with so much division and uncertainty, it’s interesting how a fun sci-fi action film courtesy of the director of Stargate has very deep things to say.
How worried would we be about helping refugees from the Middle East if we were suddenly ALL threatened with extinction?
So go see Independence Day: Resurgence, which no doubt is tailor-made for 2016. But make sure to revisit the classic that captured the 90s so well but like the best sci-fi can be enjoyed anytime. It’s also great fun as a pure movie, and that’s good reason enough.
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