Independence Day is a preposterous movie that, in its calculatedly corny way, just may be the most giddily enjoyable event of the summer silly season. The mood shifts cheerfully between brink-of-Armageddon and goofball pep rally. The narrative unfolds with the heedless logic of a bunch of kids improvising in somebody's backyard: "P'tend that one of the alien warships crashes. Now p'tend that you know how to fly it. . . . " The characters are shtick figures with public-domain personas: Jeff Goldblum as the tech wizard who plays chess and, it only follows, has all the answers; Judd Hirsch as his ultra-Jewish father who has lost his faith but gives great schmooze; Will Smith as a cowboy flyboy with all the right moves; Bill Pullman (Bill Pullman?!) coming on as a funky Bill Clinton surrogate; Mary McDonnell doing a saintly First Lady as sacrificial victim (that's progress--Hillary was already dead before The American President even started).
This is all eminently deplorable, and there should be many stern op-ed analyses of director Roland (Stargate) Emmerich and co-writer Dean Devlin's spectacle-mongering at the expense of four-fifths of the world's population. But (1) the movie is a hoot, and (2) the filmmakers do a shrewdly subversive job of satirizing our penchant for feeding on cliché even as they satisfy it: thousands of our fellow citizens are swallowed in a fireball, but we cheer lustily because a golden retriever is spared.
Op-ed types won't be the loudest complainers. Viewers who flock to special-effects movies and hold "state of the art" as the highest index of value, who can't wait to disown last month's FX fave while raving up the latest wonder-toy, will dismiss Independence Day as hopelessly retro. The spacecraft maneuvers are right out of Star Wars, the aliens are ho-hum, and the devastated cityscapes (and an Earth-saving plot twist) recall George Pal's War of the Worlds--which came out in 1953. But those generic milestones are of a kind with the historical monuments that loom so conspicuously in Emmerich's chronicle of the alien invasion. They're earnest s of familiarity, they're part of us. Independence Day is like a ghost story at a weenie roast. Go ahead and feel the glee. -- Richard T. Jameson
(A 20th Century Fox release; rated PG-13 for violence, i.e., near-destruction of the world as we know it.)