Just the Ticket #149: Independence Day (List Lookback)

 Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Ticketmaster

Happy Independence Day, Ticketholders, and welcome to Earth!

After a week of being asked to work myself ass-less standing in for the latest summer batch of new-hires who can't handle working in a small-town grocery store deli, it's nice to be one of only two people who got the Fourth Of July off...and keep it.

Whether or not you worked yesterday (yes, it's still confusing to write in future tense for something that will be in present tense when it's published because you have to also write the present in past tense, which just makes me tense), I hope you had a happy Fourth Of July, and that you please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your hidden binary doomsday countdown at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to drive a motorhome through the desert in July, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my alien-punching content.

Nowadays, director Roland Emmerich is probably best known for the worst Godzilla movie ever (even though I personally think the first MonsterVerse Godzilla is worse on account of not being fun and the animated Godzilla sequel cartoon being an underrated gem that Emmerich also served as Executive Producer on), the Independence Day sequel (which I will review next week), and turning everything from global warming and Mayan apocalypse earthquakes to terrorist attacks and the moon into star-studded, multi-threaded, globe-spanning, effects-driven disaster spectacles. Sure, he's done similar stuff in his native German before, as well as smaller scale sci-fi action movies like Universal Soldier and Stargate, but Independence Day (though not critically appreciated) revolutionized the Hollywood disaster blockbuster and fully introduced the world to what would become Emmerich's trademark in the years to come. And for lead actor (?) Will Smith, it was the first step to solidifying the unfortunately named "Big Willie Weekend" trend of dropping a Smith-led blockbuster on Fourth Of July weekend for at least the next decade (the real solidifying step was Men In Black, which also got a cartoon interquel by Jeff Kline and Richard Raynis, the same duo behind the aforementioned Godzilla series, Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles, Extreme Ghostbusters, Jackie Chan Adventures, and Big Guy And Rusty the Boy Robot). And I'm going to go out on a limb here by saying that from a director with a film school thesis on the U.S. and Russia fighting over weaponized weather, and American blockbusters that feature a giant lizard, the Mayans predicting world-ending earthquakes, global warming causing gigacell blizzards, Channing Tatum saving fake Obama (Jamie Foxx) from terrorists, and the moon falling out of orbit, the one with an alien invasion is the most grounded.

When giant, black sand dollars from space somehow sneak up on Earth and begin hovering over every major city and landmark on the planet (but we only get to see stuff like the Chrysler Building and the White House get destroyed because America--by the way, seeing a fully intact World Trade Center in a disaster movie five years before the real one would be attacked and destroyed is both nostalgic and chilling), the fate of the world winds up in the hands of an insecure, over-qualified cable repairman named David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum, not yet reduced to the self-parodying Apartments.com spokesman he is now), a drunken crop-duster with PTSD named Russell Casse who was abducted by aliens after the Vietnam War (Randy Quaid, over ten years before he would begin hiding from pending California fraud charges in Canada and Vermont) and debuts in a rip-off of a scene from Top Gun, and a fighter pilot named Stephen Hiller (Will Smith, then merely known for his early rap career and The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air) who misses the initial alien contact by refusing to look up, listen to his son (Fresh Prince co-star Ross Bagley), or acknowledge any news broadcasts for ten solid minutes.

But then comes the series of moments that would soon be ripped off by the Katina level and its bad ending in Star Fox 64 (accomplished with practical pyrotechnics and scale miniatures), and at the cost of his friend (Harry Connick, Jr., who throws out some charismatic one-liners and gets put in some real "don't ask, don't tell" situations in his brief time onscreen) and his fighter plane in a cocky use of ingenuity during an impressive-for-the-time dogfight sequence with the aliens (using either CGI models or practical scale aircraft and green-screen that looked convincing in lower resolution almost thirty years ago), Hiller manages to down one of the alien fighters and knock out the pilot like it made fun of his allegedly unfaithful wife's allopecia.

Of course, because this is a Roland Emmerich movie (which means it's Love, Actually with less romance, less intelligent writing, and more sci-fi jargon and explosions), we also follow the converging plot threads of Hiller's stripper girlfriend (Vivica "Is" A. Fox) and her dog who is named after a Millennial insult,

Casse and his family (the daughter of whom is so fixated on not dying a virgin that she starts out the movie almost sleeping with a guy who looks like her brother, and she's played by Lisa Jakub, a.k.a. the older daughter from Mrs. Doubtfire), the badass President Whitmore (making me nostalgic for the days when a real President had to have a military service record, played by The Sinner's Bill Pullman) and his daughter (a young and almost unrecognizable Mae Whitman, of Good Girls and the CGI Nickelodeon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series), and a horde of extras in mobile homes trying to do a Joy Ride-meets-Naruto run to Area 51 before that became a dangerous meme challenge, all in an effort to escape and prevent the escalation of humanity's extinction at the hands and psychic tentacles of the more technologically advanced alien invaders. Hiller himself also winds up at Area 51 with the unconscious alien in tow because the New Mexico desert is the only desert in this movie, as do Levinson and his Jewish stereotype of a father (Judd Hirsch), and the Presidential cabinet (a who's-who of character actors, including Robert Loggia as the gruff military guy, Margaret Colin as the weakly defined love triangle interest and subsequent Goldblum trophy, and James Rebhorn as the slimy asshole with secrets). In addition to Harry Connick, Jr. (and later, Randy Quaid), dead characters include Mary McDonnell as the First Lady who gets rescued triumphantly by Vivica Fox before dying of internal injuries halfway offscreen, and Harvey Fierstein as Levinson's gay Jewish stereotype best friend who dies staring at an exploding Chrysler Building like an idiot. And at Area 51, we are introduced to Chuck's Adam "no relation" Baldwin as cool but uptight military guy and Star Trek: The Next Generation's Brent Spiner (Data) as...a charismatic and socially awkward science nerd‽ Yeah; growing up with TNG and then seeing this, I never would have pegged these two as the same actor, which is a testament to his range, I guess?

Anyway, the cast is stacked high with every "that guy/gal" of the era, the sand dollar aliens were the aliens our government supposedly captured in the Roswell Incident (because every "good" Emmerich movie has to have a "what if bullshit conspiracy theory X was real" in it somewhere), Goldblum and Spiner figure out how to get a forty-year-old alien craft flight-worthy and code a radio-frequency computer virus faster than a Dragon Ball fan can call bullshit on a Blutz Wave Generator, America is somehow able to coordinate a minute-precise global nuclear strike using Morse code and a MacBook from the mid-90s, President Badass gives THE Speech, Smith and Goldblum have good banter chemistry before nuking the mothership, and Randy Quaid flies his fighter jet (because when you're sober for five seconds and the fate of the world is at stake, crop dusters and F-15s are totally the same thing) straight up the Katina-buster's peehole, sacrificing himself for revenge against the aliens because he knows that teenagers will only think you're cool when you're dead.

Oh, yeah; the human interest stuff that made this movie two and a half hours long in between explosions and laser blasts...! Smith and Fox get married while the movie tries to have Goldblum and Colin upstage their big moment in the background with some anime teenager sex (a.k.a. hand-holding). And that's it: Earth wins...at the massive cost of human lives, Emmerich levels of structural and infrastructural damage, and every major city being a nuclear fallout zone now (the latter of which is never addressed in hindsight), and the couples couple.

The alien creature designs and effects (by Resident Evil and Silent Hill creature designer Patrick Tatopoulos) were impressive and clearly identifiable as Tatopoulos' work, marred only by a couple of scenes where the movement looked too comical and the green-screen keying looked low-effort in this modern digital age. There's a clear difference between this and the first two Alien movies; wherein the latter made me go "Holy shit! That was practical!," the effects here mostly had me going, "Holy shit! That was practical‽"

Another thing that struck me on re-watch was just how stilted Will Smith looks in this. Don't get me wrong; when he has to exaggerate and front and look excited, it reminds me why I liked this two-plus-hour movie as a preteen. But when he has to do mundane or dramatic stuff, it's like trying to make eye contact with a heroin-addled Frank Sinatra, like, there's nothing there. So it's a good thing he has personalities like Harry Connick, Jr. and Jeff Goldblum to bounce off of. Just imagine if Ethan Hawke had said yes to the script and gotten the Hiller role...or if Will Smith had gotten stuck with Matthew Perry as his blatantly homoerotic comedy relief sidekick...or if both of those things happened‽

Independence Day is still a fun, bad movie. Its formulaic nature, stupidity-reliant setup, dated green-screen effects, and stop-and-go pacing may have aged like last year's free fireworks in a New Mexico greenhouse, but it's an instantly quotable slice of mid-90s nostalgic Americana that begs to be seen.

C+

Next week, I dare to put myself through the sequel for the first time (or a wall, if that feels better), so Stay Tuned and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your hidden binary doomsday countdown at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to drive a motorhome through the desert in July, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my alien-punching content.

Ticketmaster,

Yesterday, we celebrate...our Independence Day!