Where else but America can a drunken crop-duster become a hero by pulling a Slim Pickens and riding a nuclear payload to its target?
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Where else but America can a drunken crop-duster become a hero by pulling a Slim Pickens and riding a nuclear payload to its target? What a country!
If you can swallow that and a bottle of coincidences that would make a TV melodrama OD, "Independence Day" is a big-budget, big-cast, big-effects, big-bag-o popcorn movie that's as fun as it is brainless at times.
Watch this one and you assume the man behind the explosions, fireballs, and flying cars is Jerry Bruckheimer, but nope--it's Dean Devlin, who also produced "Stargate" and "Flyboys," along with director Roland Emmerich, with whom he'd team up again on "The Patriot."
The script itself, which the two co-wrote, is a curious thing. There's plenty of action, and yet it isn't structured like a pure action movie; there's sci-fi, but it doesn't employ many of that genre's tropes either. What you mostly notice is that the characters fall as neatly into place as if they were pawns in a Herman Wouk novel-turned-miniseries like "Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance." The "Independence Day" script has the same groupings of characters whom you think are separate and distinct, yet who come together in remarkable (and remarkably coincidental and unlikely) ways. And, of course, everyone's a player.
It all starts at the top, where we see U.S. President Thomas Whitmore (Bill Pullman) talking to his wife (Mary McDonnell) who's making an appearance elsewhere while their daughter charms Secret Service men and has full access to the White House as a crisis emerges: there's a transmission from other beings, and darned if they're not just a short saucer drive away. In another thread we see a family at the other end of the economic spectrum in the dessert not too far from L.A. Russell Casse (Randy Quaid) is an alcoholic pilot who claims to have been abducted by aliens 10 years ago and is teased mercilessly by the locals, who only have to point to his drinking and habit of dusting the wrong fields to prove he's nothing but a besotted storyteller of the Darby O'Gill variety. His kids (James Duval, Lisa Jakub, Giuseppe Andrews) are more together than he is and pretty much take care of old Dad. A third thread involves a man playing chess in the park with his father, and we quickly learn that David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) is in the communications field and his father's business ("Taxi's" Judd Hirsch) seems to be everybody's business. Then there's a fighter pilot (Will Smith) who's dating a stripper named Jasmine (Vivica A. Fox) and relating well with her small son.
Before long, David, a broadcast technician for a TV news station, is the only one who seems to know the secret of the gigantic alien saucers positioned over each of the world's major cities. It's an impending invasion, he warns . . . as if it took anyone to tell us that. David also gets immediate access to the President because his ex-wife just happens to be his top aide, and hey, he once socked the Prez in the jaw before he landed in the Oval Office. Oh, and Dad tags along, so when the spectacular devastation begins (and the effects are pretty cool) the two of them conveniently end up in Air Force One as they evacuate Washington, D.C. It doesn't take long before Jasmine, who's fleeing with hundreds of thousands of people, ends up with the First Lady, and her pilot boyfriend ("Let's go kick E.T.'s ass") ends up teaming with David, while the crop-dusting bust of a pilot ends up being the biggest coincidence of them all, flying wing-man for the President. But the strategy seems to be to keep the main characters in front of the camera and keep the action moving.
If you ignore those colossal coincidences and the unlikelihood of any of these people being in key positions to stop the aliens while America's top minds seem to be dimming faster than a florescent that's on the way out, "Independence Day" is a rollicking good time. And it's full of self-conscious allusions to just about every space and sci-fi film out there, from "E.T." to "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." When Smith's pilot character punches out an alien, he quips, "Now that's what I call a close encounter." Why, even "Airplane!" gets a nod, as the drunken crop-duster gets behind a fighter plane and presses a "fire missile" button by mistake, then says, as the Lloyd Bridges character did in the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker comedy, "I picked a helluva day to quit drinking." But the film that inspired the most allusions is the original "Star Wars," from the opening shot of the gigantic space ship gliding toward Earth to the final battle.
A number of critics have panned "Independence Day," but I don't think you can have it both ways. If you praise "Star Wars," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," and other big-budget action films with just as much coincidence and melodrama, then you can't fault this one for doing almost as well. It's not the same caliber exactly, because there are just a few too many cheesy moments--Pulman's "win one for the Gipper" speech comes to mind--but "Independence Day" is film that can appeal to the entire family. It's rated PG-13 for sci-fi destruction and violence, but otherwise it's pretty clean. Even when we see Jasmine at her stripper's pole it's an abbreviated moment without a stitch of clothing dropping. A few of the key characters die, but their deaths are handled with sensitivity. And we jump right into the threat of invasion, rather than taking 40 minutes for the story to slowly unfold. Kids will appreciate that, along with the superb special effects, all of which look awfully good in Blu-ray.
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