Review Grade: D
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1996 Cineaste Publishers Inc.
When the coming-attractions trailers for Independence Day
began playing in theaters early in 1996, audiences always
cheered at the spectacular demolition of the White House
by an alien spaceship as big as Rhode Island. "It blowed
up good," as the farmer-critics used to say (it was their
loftiest and most frequent movie verdict) on SCTV's
parody of Siskel and Ebert.
The scene was probably cheered nowhere so loudly as in
Washington itself, America's last colonial outpost,
governed at the whim of a hostile Congress and currently
suffering the tender mercies of rule by Mayor Marion
Barry. Like most movies that visit Washington, Barry's
city was nowhere to be seen. And it went up in smoke,
presumably, with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, just as the
Prez and a few souls who might save the world from
invaders escaped in Air Force One.
That explosion was just about the only thing that anyone
could remember about the trailer for Independence Day,
which played early and often throughout the year. The
climactic image led pundits and psychologists to worry in
public and in print about the dangerous mindset its
reception revealed: Americans gleefully applauding the
obliteration of a national symbol of authority. Surely
this was yet more evidence of the antigovernment paranoia
and disrespect for constructive norms that had led to the
Oklahoma City bombing of a federal office building, not
to mention contributing to the proliferation of unwed
mothers, whose wimpish parenting nudged their fatherless
sons into a life of crime.
Not to worry. The movie, when it finally arrived, turned
out to be a popular nostrum designed to salve precisely
these two canker sores on the body politic. In this plot,
jingo-istic patriotism, in the form of a call to arms
against the most sinister illegal aliens Patrick Buchanan
could imagine, ultimately unites the globe under can-do
American command and provides the movie with its general
tone of kick-ass virility. It's easy to imagine the late
John Wayne taking a cameo role, or maybe as the general
played by Robert Loggia.
Family values get a boost in the movie, too. The imminent
destruction of the planet is one long object lesson
designed to drum them into the top-gun pilot played by
Will Smith (the success of both character and actor
serving as a living testament to the end of racism and
the superfluity of Affirmative Action). This young black
man better marry his girlfriend (oddly occupied as a
stripper), the movie suggests, thereby making an honest
woman of the mother of his son, or else - civilization as
we know it will come to an end. So what if he already
lives with her in suburban bliss, and is an active
father? Without the sanction of that piece of paper, a
proper church (or in this case chapel) wedding, and the
witness of no less a Big Daddy than the President of the
United States, actions and relationships mean nothing.
No wonder Independence Day became the movie phenomenon of
not only the summer but the year, moving up through the
ten all-time top-grossing mo-vies as the election neared.
Bob Dole himself actually went to see it, towing along
reporters to verify he'd bought a ticket and some
popcorn, and he pronounced it good (despite the fact that
ID4, like the movie Dole denounced, Striptease, features
a stripper mother).
And no wonder Dole liked it. Dole probably hasn't seen a
movie since 1955, and Independence Day is virtually
indistinguishable from any number of Fifties schlock
science-fiction flicks hailing from that decade, except
for the fact that its budget was approximately 3,000
times bigger.
It's not all a matter of sucking up to the market that
explains why presidents and wannabe presidents should
adore ID4 (as it became known in ads). After all, one of
the central characters is the president and he is a
heroic sort, even though the actor playing him, Bill
Pullman, first made an impression in Ruthless People
(1986) as the biggest idiot on the face of the earth, and
has since then generally played jerks and Ralph Bellamy
style foils for leading men. As befits a movie trying not
to alienate any segment of the market, the fictional
commander in chief seems to be based on both Robert Dole
and Bill Clinton. He's a war hero (a jet jockey from
Operation Desert Storm) but also a young man in his
forties with a hint of skirt-chasing about him. Glimpsed
at the White House is a photo of himself with the Dalai
Lama, surely not to be found on any Republican desk.
Like both candidates for the presidency in 1996, he has a
wife actively involved in...well, what it is the First
Lady, played by Mary McDonnell, does is as vague as the
president's party affiliation, a matter usually left
unspecified by Hollywood when it comes to fictional White
House occupants (last year's The American President,
clearly labeled a Democrat, was a notable exception).
This First Lady also fulfills a great national fantasy,
if polls are correct - she expires in midpicture. Beating
her to the grave is the movie's token gay, a
cable-company employee played by Harvey Fierstein as a
kind of Stepin Fetchit to techie hero Jeff Goldblum,
repeating his Jurassic Park role with a patina of
environmentalism (he finally proves his manhood, however,
and lights up a stogie for the victory party).
Also slated for execution is Harry Connick Jr., playing a
flyboy chum of Will Smith's. Connick clowns around with
Smith as a mock lover in their squadron, suggesting that
in this movie even jokes about gender deviation can be
lethal. On the other hand, superficial racial tolerance
gets a sentimental endorsement in the script's attempt to
reconcile African-American and Jew through the
camaraderie of Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum, and
Goldblum's almost vaudevillian dad, played by Judd
Hirsch.
Despite such convoluted subtexts, Independence Day makes
a great show of constructing a simple, linear plot and
old-fashioned character typology that recall not only
Fifties B-movies but also the made-for-television
features that replaced them. It certainly does not
significantly improve on their special effects. The giant
alien ships are disappointingly muddy and vague in
detail; indeed, the only contribution the movie makes in
this regard is an apocalyptically satisfying shot of cars
tumbling end over end down city streets filled with
panicked citizens, propelled by a gigantic fireball that
will soon engulf all those nameless extras and
sacrificial supporting players stuck in traffic (that's
how Fierstein gets his, consumed by almost biblical
wrath).
Independence Day is nonetheless a cheery and playful
pastiche of visual and dramatic elements filched from
dozens of science-fiction movies. The cinematic quotes
are as thick as puns and parodies in a Leslie Nielsen
movie, but hardly as scattershot. They tend to follow a
pattern that gradually takes on ideological coloring,
pointing toward a more heroic, xenophobic, and
militaristic interpretation of space fantasy.
Independence Day invokes the whole of Star Trek the most
long-lived version of the imperialist wing of space
adventure, when Next Generation star Brent Spiner shows
up as a U.S. saucer scientist who has been underground
too long. The most obvious inspiration for ID4's
signature shot can be found in the Cold-War allegory
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), in which virtually
all of Washington's federal presence was blown to
smithereens. I think I even heard a reference to
thermite, the explosive used in The Thing from Another
World (1951) in the first bungled attempt to free a
spaceship from the Arctic ice cap. The movie that came
most often to mind, however, while I watched Independence
Day at a crowded, jubilant, and unprecedented 4:00 a.m.
sneak preview preceding opening day (the best route to
enjoyment, no doubt) was The War of the Worlds (1953).
The aliens have a greenish protective force field that
recalls the alien shields in that movie, and when the
squishy alien anatomy is revealed, particularly the
hands, they invoke the vulnerable Martians created by
George Pal. Independence Day does a nifty update on War
of the Worlds' doomed minister, too, when religious
fools, in Nineties guise as New Age loonies, mount a
skyscraper hoping for alien communion, despite every
rational indication that they are soon to be dead meat.
When Independence Day quotes less xenophobic space
fantasies, the references are usually mocking
repudiations of the sentiments of detente. E.T. The
Extraterrestrial (1982) is invoked when, prior to his
mission, Will Smith says he wants "to get up there and
whup E.T.'s ass." He rebuffs the premise of Close
Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) when he punches out
an alien and says, "Now that's what I call a close
encounter." Spielberg's movies are also represented by
spaceship design and signature special-effects shots,
such as the billowing, surging cloud that heralds the
approach of the alien ships. Star Wars (1977) is mined
for its dogfights in space and an alien mother ship with
approach lanes that recall the Death Star. There is a
visual echo of the space station architecture of 1968's
2001: A Space Odyssey here, too, and a more direct
reference when Goldblum turns on his lap-top computer,
which greets him with HAL's "Good morning, Dave." A scene
from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) is actually
seen at one point and its D.C. visitation is echoed and
inverted by Independence Day's pseudo-diplomatic call on
the White House. Another subversion of an anti-Cold War
movie occurs when Randy Quaid, as a scruffy crop duster
recruited to fly against the alien armada, rides a
doomsday weapon into the heart of the enemy and is deemed
a hero, reflecting as in a funhouse mirror the final,
absurd ride of Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove (1964).
One telling difference between the past and the present
in Washington-set science fiction is that forty years ago
special-effects genius Ray Harryhausen sent his elegant
ships in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers crashing into every
national monument but the White House. Now director
Roland Emmerich zeroes in immediately on the president's
residence, using its fiery destruction to promote
Independence Day to lusty hurrahs from the putative
owners of that real estate. This is not, I suspect,
Republican sour grapes so much as a measure of the
definitive celebrity makeover of American politics that
has occurred during the elapsed four decades. The
Congress, that pack of indistinguishable supporting
players, can all go up in smoke without delivering the
thrills that immolating America's most bankable leading
man would bring. The occupant of the White House has also
seen a more precipitous decline in sanctity since the
Fifties; Congress has been an object of unrelenting
ridicule for about two centuries.
Independence Day does not stop with sampling the sci-fi
archives. It also rummages through the history of
disaster movies - Airport (1970) and The Towering Inferno
(1974) are referenced. ID4 even taps the current
conspiracy motifs of The X-Files (a throwaway line even
names the show), solving the mystery of the disputed 1947
alien landing at Roswell, New Mexico with real panache.
Thus is history that has passed into myth reactivated as
a dramatic explanation of suppressed history, which is
revealed in a future that is just around the corner.
Celebrating the fictional past is the main activity and
effect of Independence Day when it conjures up Fifties
esthetics. It thereby reestablishes as blockbuster
material the obsolete style of moviemaking that was
standard operating procedure in a Hollywood era marked by
the suppression of dissent, active industry censorship,
and the relegation of politics to often hysterical
subtexts. Independence Day also calls the audience back
to a past that is fictional in the sense that it depicts
an imaginary American society that never existed, but
that conservatives exhort the public to recreate: that
America of vital military action embraced by blissful
nuclear families.
Most science-fiction movies of the Fifties wasted little
time on this neighborhood homily, but then this is the
kind of world presupposed by such movies as The War of
the Worlds. Science fiction in succeeding decades lifted
off in altogether different directions - into
philosophical chilliness, violent nihilism, sheer boys
adventure in its most trivial antisocial stance, and dire
paranoid feminism. Even when desperately attempting to
fabricate families out of modern loners, as in Alien
(1979) and its sequels, in The Terminator (1984) and
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Earth and its offworld
outposts were places of shattered harmony and menacing
predators long before the murderous parasites and
androids arrived.
Independence Day is celebrated in a sunnier place where
ali's right with the world - until the outsiders intrude.
The fiction of an idyllic America, waiting to be spoiled,
is necessary to construct the fiction of barbarians at
the gates. Just as, outside the theater, the right calls
for restrictions on legal immigration, just as the
refrain of the Cold-War classic The Thing was 'Shut the
door,' so too does Independence Day literally and
figuratively topple the Statue of Liberty, submerging her
undiscriminating invitation and shrewdly saddling the
aliens with this suicidal metaphor. This is one big dumb
science-fiction movie that may be smarter than it looks.