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Close Encounters of the Corny Kind

(2.6 MB AVI) | (2.6 MB MOV)

Independence Day, starring Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, and Will Smith; directed by Roland Emmerich

The dark mass heading toward Earth is one-fourth the size of the Moon. U.F.O. watchers get on to it because it's generating a radio signal: the first incontrovertible sign ever of intelligent life in outer space. Intelligent life on Earth being in short supply, no one else especially notices until the mass is blocking satellite-TV transmissions. When fifteen-mile-wide flying saucers park above the world's metropolises, families pile into their Winnebagos and jam the highways. The president of the United States, meanwhile, having seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, dispatches an airborne "welcome wagon" to flash signals of peace at the saucer hovering above Washington, D.C. On TV, the McLaughlin Group is polled whether, on a scale of one to ten, the president's actions are brave or foolhardy.

Reader Reviews
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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).

75 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.)


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