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🎙️ EPISODE 502: 07.04.22
I will cop to the fact that at least some of my enjoyment of this was nostalgia-based (the least based vibe of all that vibes can be based upon). A fifteen-year-old was I — young, dumb and full of molasses — likely at the Morristown Mall in North Jersey, seeing the highest-grossing summer blockbuster of '96 at least twice in theaters and then on VHS rental many more times, probably early 1997. This movie was just COOL. I can watch it now and realize, unflinchingly, that it is very dumb of course. But even within that recognition, it's easy to figure out that being dumb doesn't necessarily equate to bad filmmaking. Because this is an impeccably put-together work. It takes it's time flushing out the main cast before getting to the big and notorious action sequences, and the auxiliary roles are a who's who of great character actors peppering the edges of the story along the way. It just works. It's a well-oiled machine.
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Its mix of CGI with large scale real life, real people set pieces is phenomenal. And as far as those mid-90s graphics are concerned, I have no idea if I'm in the minority on this, but I think it still looks fantastic. But after all these years, even as the very frames of the White House exploding are etched in my memory, what really stood out to me were these performances. Every actor is just GOING FOR IT. And by "IT" I mean, hamming it up the nth degree. Bill Pullman brings the B-Movie chops and charm. You can practically smell the booze coming off Randy Quaid through the screen. Judd Hirsch is doing what feels like a parody of the neurotic Jew, but it works. Jeff Goldblum is Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith is every bit the biggest star in the world. And sure, the lack of any notable or distinct female roles is... not great. But when you read that this almost didn't get made because the studios didn't want a black guy in the lead and Roland Emmerich insisted on Smith, well, baby steps I guess. We can't be cancelling things from 1996, folks. Or at least I wouldn't recommend it. It's exhausting. Even with shots like this...
Don't get me wrong, my high praise here isn't meant to diminish the clear-cut fact that this movie is very, very stupid. The logic behind some of the plot twists and conflict resolutions feels like it was cooked up by a sixth-grader at some points. Like their plan for ultimately defeating the aliens is just: Will Smith rides a 40-year-old crashed alien spaceship up INTO outerspace and boards their mothership where Jeff Goldblum magically "gets online" to upload a "computer virus" that will disable the forcefields of the smaller alien crafts around the earth. So very glad that the aliens' technology was also based around Windows...
But the beauty of this lies in how it somehow rises above all of that nonsensical crap and its endless barrage of one-liners. It fits the long run-time of over 2'20" nicely and never tires. The action is jam-packed and HUGE, but it's really well-paced, culminating in one last twenty-minute hurrah that is just damn near-perfect filmmaking.
Independence Day (also promoted as ID4) is a 1996 American science fiction action film directed by Roland Emmerich and written by Emmerich and Dean Devlin. It stars an ensemble cast that includes Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Mary McDonnell, Judd Hirsch, Margaret Colin, Randy Quaid, Robert Loggia, James Rebhorn, Harvey Fierstein, and Harry Connick. The film focuses on disparate groups of people who converge in the Nevada desert in the aftermath of a worldwide attack by a powerful extraterrestrial race. With the other people of the world, they launch a counterattack on July 4—Independence Day in the United States. It was released on July 3, 1996.
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