A Life Through Film #026: Independence Day
You've heard of Christmas in July? Time to flip the script for an all-time favorite
Release Date: 7/3/1996
Weeks at Number One: 3
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
It was the winter of 2019, just before 2020. I was still living with my parents and in a long distance relationship with my now-wife. She had made the long journey west to California, a winter trip to escape the cold of the East Coast and see me. Our time together on these trips, whether I visited her, she visited me, or we flew to a secondary location to meet each other, was always precious.
At this point in our lives, we didn’t have any idea on how we would close the distance between us for good and begin a life together in the same place. Every second together counted, especially with PTO limited and remote options far less flexible than they are now. We just had the dream of one day being able to be together in the same place after years of long distance. That particular morning, we probably should have been enjoying a day trip to a beautiful Bay Area experience, or sampling a local delicacy, or just making the time together special.
Instead, we were on the couch of my family den, channel surfing to start the day. On one of the movie channels, we stumbled upon a scene of mass destruction: alien spacecraft hovered over the major cities of America and blasted down with beams of intense blue light. The shockwave of fire spread out, destroying landmarks, cars, and entire metropolises. The destruction was more than nuclear, more than biblical. This moment was as familiar to me as any of my closest friends; I could practically recite its cuts from horrified onlookers to the next major building to be blown to smithereens.
“Classic,” I chuckled to myself.
In that moment, my beloved partner revealed a startling truth to me. She had not only never seen this movie, but was wholly unfamiliar with what it was.
I should have brushed it off, saved it for another day. We had such little time together before her flight back home after the New Year. Surely almost anything else would be a better use of our scant time in the same place.
But I was a young man who loved movies, especially when I got to show them to her. And this wasn’t just any dumb action flick. This was special to me. Without any further discussion, I pulled HBO on-demand up on the TV and scrolled through its offerings until I found it. Its poster reflected the fiery scene we had just watched, its title emblazoned across the inferno. With the limited time we had on one of our last days together before COVID lockdowns kept us apart for half a year, I put my arm around my future wife and watched the entirety of Independence Day with her.
Generally I think that the end of standard cable TV has been a good thing for consumers, but the increased flexibility that comes with a move towards streaming services comes with an odd kind of loss. If you were tapped into channels like TNT or TBS back in the day, some movies became classics through sheer repetition of their airing schedule. Certain flicks were prioritized over others by these programming directors of course; crowd pleasers were preferable, and the less content that had to be cut out to make it TV suitable, the better. Because of all this, there may be no two movies I’ve seen more because of their frequency on TV than Forrest Gump [4/5] and Independence Day.
I don’t remember the first time I watched Independence Day (or ID4 as it was oddly marketed). It’s one of those films that’s just lingered around my awareness for as long as I’ve been able to operate a remote control. Unlike in my Toy Story review, however, where extreme familiarity made critiquing the movie difficult, Independence Day is a bit more objective in its strengths and weaknesses. The level of their effect on overall enjoyment will vary from person to person, but even as someone who’s seen this movie at least 20 times either partially or in whole, I can still step back and see what works and what doesn’t.
I’m getting ahead of myself though. I forget, there may be some of you who have no idea what this is. Independence Day is a disaster movie that follows the invasion of Earth by a hostile alien species. The movie was directed by Roland Emmerich and stars Jeff Goldblum, Will Smith, Bill Pullman, and a veritable army of character actors. Even this go around, I was still doing the DiCaprio point at the screen out of newly discovered recognition in the cast (“Oh shit! The First Lady is the mom from Donnie Darko!” [4.5/5]). This is a true ensemble, even if one of its stars ended up becoming bigger than almost anyone else in Hollywood because of it. But again, I’m looking at a post-Independence Day world. Let’s take it back to West Germany.
As a graduating film student, young Roland Emmerich submitted a full sci-fi feature called The Noah’s Ark Principle as his final thesis when all he was meant to turn in was a short film. This spirit of dramatic excess would follow the director throughout his career, including after he made the jump to Hollywood in the early ‘90s after being, in his words, run out of Germany by bad reviews. The critics wouldn’t be much nicer over here, but he never felt the need to flee across the globe again at least.
Emmerich found success quickly in the States, directing fellow European expat (and past & future protagonist of this column) Jean-Claude Van Damme in 1992’s Universal Soldier. Unlike the director’s future American films, this R-rated sci-fi shlock is small in scope, almost personal, and to match that scale Emmerich pulled maybe the best acting performance I’ve ever seen from JCVD (extremely low bar, but still). The film was a hit [and is tied with Hard Target for my favorite JCVD movie. 3.5/5], and Emmerich and writing partner Dean Devlin moved up the budget totem pole for their next project.
1994’s Stargate more closely resembles the Emmerich movies that most Americans would probably know him for. This time, Emmerich and Devlin created their own story, a grand science fiction action spectacle heavy on big vistas and famous landmarks (in this case, the Great Pyramids), light on much logical sense or restraint. James Spader and Kurt Russell lead the ancient aliens adventure about Egyptians and their extraterrestrial connections as a shy but charming scientist and a stoic but goodhearted military dude respectively. These are two character archetypes we’ll see again in Independence Day, not the only time the director would reuse ideas in his career. Stargate was a big enough hit to keep Emmerich’s forward momentum and spin-off into two different TV shows that ran into the 2000s, but personally I found it pretty dull overall [2/5].
It was on the press tour for Stargate that inspiration struck. A reporter asked Emmerich and Devlin if, based on the premise of their movie, they actually believed in aliens. This simple question sparked a cascade of ideas in the director’s brain. He envisioned city-sized flying saucers descending upon the Earth and destroying all of the landmarks that humanity had spent so much time and effort on in an effort to assert our relevance in the universe. Emmerich imagined hope against extermination, a global effort of unity to fight back against a shared menace.
For the next two months, Emmerich and Devlin wrote their new script, adding new characters, locations, and set pieces to that original concept of UFOs raining down hellfire. The director and writer submitted the screenplay to their agent on a Thursday, and by the next day were at the center of a bidding war for the project. 20th Century Fox, in need of a major summer tentpole for 1996, won the battle for Independence Day.
Over the next 10 months, Emmerich, Devlin, and the crew took on the herculean effort of getting this $70 million venture ready to go by the next July 4th weekend. Six different shooting units, scale models that cost tens of thousands of dollars, over 400 visual effects shots, and that’s all before you factor in the human element. In an effort to not distract from the alien invasion premise (which was seen as the main draw of the film), Independence Day cast a wide range of actors who were recognizable but not quite stars.
The closest thing to a star that the movie had to a star going in was Jeff Goldblum, for years best known for his leading role David Cronenberg’s body horror classic The Fly. He had finally broken into the mainstream thanks to his role in Jurassic Park [3.5/5], and was the biggest name that Independence Day had at the time as a result. Frankly, that’s hilarious in retrospect. Goldblum is still a beloved pop culture figure these days who’s had more than a few great roles since 1996, but come on man. You didn’t see the other guy you cast and think he might be the bigger deal?
The idea that people were still unsure if Will Smith could cross over and become a major movie star by 1996 is baffling. You know who Will Smith is, right? West Philadelphia, born and raised? The teen rapper turned sitcom star was a big hit on the small screen in the mid-90s thanks to his starring role in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, one of the few sitcoms I’ve ever actually enjoyed. But it was clear that young master Smith was a true mogul with ambitions bigger than network TV fame.
If he were just a TV star, maybe I could understand the hesitation in pulling the trigger on Smith as a movie star. But his first movie, 1995’s Bad Boys, was a major hit despite Will’s lack of film experience. Hindsight is 20/20, but I would have taken the gamble and made him the default lead of the movie. His character in Independence Day is important, but in terms of screentime, narrative importance, and billing, Smith is third string to Goldblum and Bill Pullman.
1996 was a good year for character actors named Bill who were asked to come in and lead major disaster films. Like Paxton before him, Pullman had been working in Hollywood since the ‘80s, but rarely as a leading man. Mel Brooks’s parody classic Spaceballs [3/5] had him front and center, but for years after that you’d be more likely to catch him in smaller roles in films like A League of Their Own [4/5] or Sleepless in Seattle [3.5/5]. Pullman’s a solid actor and a handsome guy, but nothing about him screams Movie Star. This made him perfect for Independence Day.
There’s another reason stars were not prioritized: they weren’t cheap. Despite its epic sci-fi ambitions, Independence Day only had a budget of $75 million. That hardly made it an indie film, but it did mean that Emmerich, Devlin, and the rest of the crew had to stretch a bit to make every dollar count to achieve their vision. A small team of Europeans (friends of the director, naturally) was brought over to handle the bulk of the computer effects at a reduced price, and the use of scale models when possible helped stretch every cent of that $75 million. They may have lucked out with the casting in hindsight, but at the time it was at least partially a financial decision.
The three leads were set: Goldblum as scientist, Smith as fighter pilot, Pullman as president. I could go on listing other notable names in the cast but I’d be here all day and these reviews are already getting too long. But actors like Harvey Fierstein and Vivica Fox being in the cast serve the greater purpose of the ensemble. They’re talented, distinct, and most of them get at least one memorable moment within the narrative, without ever getting in the way of the aliens, explosions, and message of hopeful collaboration.
The studio knew they had a big hit on their hands, but wanted to maximize their long release weekend. They wanted to build the excitement and anticipation for Independence Day, both the movie and the holiday it was releasing around. In an unorthodox move for the time, marketing cut together a teaser trailer using some of the more complete effects shots and aired it as a commercial during the Super Bowl in January of 1996. It sounds ludicrous, but before this, movie studios typically didn’t advertise during the big game, despite the sheer number of eyeballs they could attract.
Through sheer effectiveness, this teaser changed that. The opening week for Independence Day was record breaking in a way that couldn’t just be explained by the long weekend. People went to the theater in droves to watch this movie, which critic Roger Ebert attributed mainly to its advertising campaign that started with the Super Bowl ad. In the years since, teasers for the summer’s upcoming blockbusters have become as common during those commercial breaks as pleas to purchase Budweiser and Doritos.
But it’s not just that the movie had good marketing. Plenty of movies that I’ve covered for this Substack had good enough marketing to debut at the top of the box office but didn’t end up lingering in the pop culture memory for very long afterwards. This was different. For a time, Independence Day was one of the most financially successful movies ever made. People were lining up around the block to see a movie without much star power and a premise that was so common it could have been a retro camp throwback if it wasn’t taken so goddamn seriously. What kept people going to the theater past that first weekend?
This might be a controversial opinion, but I think first and foremost, the reason Independence Day did such good business is that it’s fucking awesome.
This is not a movie that wastes your time. The very first thing you see in Independence Day is the alien mothership flying past the moon, shaking the still extant footsteps from the Apollo 11 landing out of existence. Even before Goldblum’s character decodes a mysterious signal and reveals a mysterious countdown, the building of tension from those first moments to the incredible scene of urban destruction about a half hour later is truly incredible pacing.
Rather than introduce the characters on a normal day and then show how their lives change once aliens are added to the mix, Independence Day weaves characterization and basic exposition into their reactions to the mass close encounter. These aren’t complicated characters, but they don’t need to be; if they were, it would get in the way of the spectacle. The distinctions between the characters serve less to create an interesting tapestry of the human experience and instead to hammer home the simple message of collaboration. In the face of existential danger, it takes all types to bring us back from the brink, whether you’re a hippie scientist, brash fighter pilot, or drunken Randy Quaid.
I’m going to be bold and say there isn’t a single bad performance in Independence Day. Even though most of these characters are one note, every actor locks in fully on that note, creating harmony across the larger ensemble. Smith is the clear standout in the crowd though; he exudes movie star charisma in his good looks and performance. The dude showed up to show the world that he was ready to become the biggest star on the planet, and he more than succeeded. There are many iconic moments from across the Will Smith filmography, but it's telling that one of the most lingering is still a pissed off Smith reacting to seeing an alien for the first time in human history by punching it in the face and sarcastically mugging “Welcome to Earth.”
Goldblum has become known more for being quirky and whacky over the past 15 years, so it’s nice to see him in a role that showcases his ability for character development and, yes, sex appeal1. I wouldn’t say his character gets as many big iconic moments as the other principle cast, but him being the one to save the day at the end is in its own way a moment to remember. With Goldblum hacking his way into the alien mothership and giving it a virus, the final nail was firmly nailed into the previous generation of action movies. We didn’t need big muscle men like Schwarzenegger or Stallone to save the day anymore. Instead, the alien menace could be eradicated with a particularly competent programmer and a copy of Windows ‘95, no machine gun needed.
Despite playing the American President, Pullman is probably the least interesting performance minute to minute when compared to Goldblum or Smith. Part of that is intentional; the character lacks confidence despite his high position, and constantly doubts his decisions as the ramifications of them negatively affect both the nation and his family. Pullman does this effectively, but it makes his character seem oddly stoic at times in the face of total destruction. The character’s iconic speech right before the final battle, of course, more than makes up for any performance shortcomings. I still get goosebumps from it, even though I’ve lost count how many times I’ve watched the scene.
Even when figures in the movie resemble archetypes more than actual characters, the strength of the ensemble as a whole means that no one is ever really asked to carry an entire scene on their back. As the movie goes on and the surviving characters are forced into more group scenes, new dynamics are formed through these meetings, which create new moments of either dramatic escalation or comedic payoff, justifying the character setup done earlier in the film. Smith is a minor exception to the “no one has a solo scene” rule, but even his few scenes as the sole subject have him playing off a knocked out alien, so he can showcase his verbal charisma without having to worry about stepping on anybody’s toes.
I haven’t watched Independence Day in full in a few years before this, but one thing I was pleasantly surprised by was how little the film relies on computer graphics for its many effects. Large scale dogfighting scenes notwithstanding, most of the iconic imagery in this movie was accomplished with scale models, matte paintings, creative filmmaking, and legitimately great compositing in post production. When you watch the film’s centerpiece moment, the montage of some of our biggest cities being glassed, it’s hard to not be impressed by the filmmaking on display. Nowadays, everything on screen would be modeled and rendered on a computer far from any actual explosive.
That’s not to say that Independence Day didn’t make liberal use of computers in its post production though. Instead of filling the screen with copious 3D models (which by this point in 1996, were still not exactly great looking), CG was mostly used for seamless compositing. I’ve used this term before in the column, but if you aren’t aware: compositing is the combining of various visual elements in post in a way that makes them seem like they belong in the shot together.
(Yes that’s three separate clips with the same shot of the White House being blown up as the thumbnail. Don’t care, it’s sick every time.)
For the larger scenes of action and destruction in Independence Day, this form of editing was essential. A more complicated shot from the film may involve extras running in front of a green screen, footage from the destruction of a scale model, a CG shot of a UFO, practical footage of cars being dropped from a wire, and more.
Putting these elements and effects together in a cohesive way goes a long way towards making the actual action in this action movie as entertaining as it is. There isn’t much in the way of fight choreography, shootouts, or fist fights in this one; the large scale of the action matches the large scale of the destruction. The two scenes of fighter jets going up against alien fighters are a bit boring visually, but they’re both capped with climatic emotional moments that, on repeat viewing, make you sit through them with a sort of giddy anticipation.
None of this may mean anything to you. You might hate action movies, find any amount of fiery destruction distasteful or even boring. I get that. Part of me worries that I’m trying to retroactively find meaning or craft in a movie that I enjoyed as a kid because it was just so fun and exciting. But at the same time, I’ve never thought that this movie was perfect. I think if Independence Day has any major flaw, it’s in its pacing.
Like I said earlier, the build up to the city destruction at the end of the first act is pretty remarkable filmmaking. ID4 introduces a cast of characters that reaches across the United States, each with varying relationships with others and reactions to the alien threat. As the tension builds, however, you begin to realize that not all of these characters can survive. And just like how the actual alien attack forces the characters to focus on figuring out a way to fight back, it also forces the script to focus all of its characters and narrative beats into one place, Area 51.
The secret military base is where the bulk of the movie actually takes place past the first act. This middle portion of the movie is still pretty fun, and it does contain a few of the best moments in the whole film (the attempted alien autopsy, for example). Unfortunately, it also slows things down to a crawl for less interesting story beats, like the attempt to nuke the aliens out of the sky or Smith’s attempt to rescue his girlfriend by hijacking a helicopter. I know these sound like extremely interesting plot developments, but in a movie this long and full of much cooler ideas, they instead feel like padding.
Even worse, they make the climatic final act feel rushed by comparison. Independence Day takes about 25 minutes to hit credits once we recover from the dark night of the soul at the end of Act 2, which in most action movies would be more than enough time. But this is a movie with a lot of moving threads to sew up, and you can feel it kicking things into overdrive to get there. With the second act as meandering as it can be, it does feel like less attention was paid to the grand finale by comparison. I wouldn’t ever really fault a movie like this for “plot holes,” but certain dramatic story beats are forgotten about by the characters, or just never really seem to affect them that much.
This is especially noticeable when one of our main characters loses someone dearly close to them (no spoilers, obviously). There’s a brief emotional scene showing the tragic loss and the immediate aftermath, but based on how that character acts once the camera cuts away from it, you’d be forgiven for thinking the death never happened. A third act that had more time to focus on concluding character arcs might have fixed this. Instead, if you can believe it, the character development in this mid ‘90s action movie can feel like an afterthought.
The long and the short of it is that the movie is just a bit too long. Cut out like 15 minutes and you have one of the best action movies of the whole decade. Honestly, I’m still willing to say that might be what you have here. In all my years of watching Independence Day, I don’t think I’ve ever considered the fact that it may be bad, actually. There’s a real possibility that nostalgia has blinded me to its true poor quality, but I’m just so engaged by the effects, action, and big character moments that I don’t really care. I thought this movie was kick ass when I was 9 and I think it’s kick ass now that I’m 29.
I’m not sure if it matters if critics liked Independence Day or not. I mean, they were generally positive about it based on the Rotten Tomatoes score of 68%, but a big effects-focused feature like this isn’t made to appeal to the Academy Voters. The film had a marketing budget of $25 million ahead of release, selling the concept of flying saucers coming down to destroy our landmarks and unite humanity against them. That’s a premise that people can get behind at least enough to check it out on a holiday weekend.
I doubt many people were going to be turned away by, for example, Rita Kempley’s negative review of the film in The Washington Post where she complained about the pacing and lack of computer effects. She’s entitled to that take, and I agree with her a bit about the pacing. I’m not sure it mattered by the time her review was published though. This movie was a train that couldn’t be slowed down by the time it was actually released.
Lines circled the blocks the whole weekend as theaters ran show after show after show. Everyone had to see the movie where the alien laser destroys the White House. They just had to. Everyone expected Twister to be the biggest movie of 1996, with Independence Day and Mission: Impossible fighting for second. Instead, the movie’s financial results left its competition in the dirt. The film cleared $50 million by the end of the weekend. Before a week had passed, Independence Day had already made $100 million domestically, making it the fastest movie to reach that milestone in history at the time.
By the time the movie left theaters in December, it had made $300 million at the US box office and $500 million abroad. Nowadays, billion dollar blockbusters aren’t exactly uncommon, but this haul was insane for 1996. For a time, Independence Day was the second highest grossing film of all time. When accounting for inflation, it’s still in the Top 25 to this day.
So what drew audiences in? If it was just good marketing and cool effects, the film would have done well, but not $800 million well. It might sound silly, but I think a lot of that broad appeal comes from the vision of unity that Independence Day presents.
This starts with a fairly universal depiction of the threat we face in the film. The aliens resemble your classic Gray aliens and they pilot literal flying saucers; the movie didn’t need to narratively connect itself to Roswell and Area 51 for us to already be in tune with its usage of classic alien invasion iconography. This premise dates back to at least HG Wells and War of the Worlds, probably earlier. People immediately understand the premise and the stakes when your movie features this kind of prototypical alien invasion.
From this easy to understand concept, the movie expands and prioritizes efforts of cooperation and shared ability. Superman does not save the world in Independence Day. No one person or nation has all of the knowledge or know how to stop the alien menace. Instead, it’s a problem that emphasizes all of humanity coming together, even those of us that “should” be enemies, and refusing to go quietly into the night. The threat works on its face but also as metaphor. This might not have been Emmerich’s intentions at the time, but I’d argue a threat that everyone on Earth needs to come together to work on with many different talents sounds more like climate change than anything else2.
According to Dean Devlin, this was all by design. Action movies had shifted towards stories of man fighting his fellow man, especially if they were from a different nation or race. This inherently makes these other films divisive, leading to the potential loss of an audience that may be offended by which group was chosen to play the bad guy this week. Instead, as Devlin put it for The LA Times:
…Aliens are the best film villains since the Nazis. You don't have to worry about offending anyone. And with those kinds of villains it allows audiences to get a good old-fashioned, fun patriotism going.
The patriotism he’s talking about doesn’t even seem to be a sort of national pride. Sure, Independence Day is VERY focused on America. But it makes sure to show the joy of victory as a global sensation, a planet of humans fighting back together against the tangible threat of annihilation. Is there a term for being patriotic but for the whole Earth? We’re gonna need to figure that out before World Contact Day.
The ramifications of this movie’s success will be felt for years to come in this column. Top 20th Century Fox producer Scott Rudin predicted around the film’s release that the summer of ‘97 would be filled with Independence Day knockoffs, and looking ahead, he was right. Twister already made a strong case for the disaster movie earlier in ‘96, but with the insane success of Emmerich’s film, the genre was officially back and better than ever.
And that’s before we even get into the fact that Will Smith became a movie star overnight on the back of Independence Day. Whether it’s in other sci-fi movies, harder action fare, rom coms, or tragic dramas, the Fresh Prince will be one of the more recurring actors in A Life Through Film because of how much his star was elevated here. As Smith himself said after that first insane weekend of Independence Day:
I was Will before Independence Day, and I was Mr. Smith after.
Roland Emmerich will also keep appearing here, but believe it or not, it would take 20 years before he or anyone else would come back to the franchise that made him the king of Hollywood destruction. The director claimed he was just waiting for the technology to catch up to his visions for a sequel, but looking at his repeated poor output in the 2010s, I think he was in need of a win.
Independence Day: Resurgence in 2016 should have been that win, especially with Goldblum and Pullman reprising their original roles (Smith didn’t care to come back, so they killed his character offscreen) amid a new ensemble and an even bigger budget. Instead, the movie failed to top the box office or make much of an impression overseas. The film ended with teases towards a third film, but the poor box office returns means that Resurgence is likely the last movie we’ll be seeing for now in the series.
It doesn’t help that Resurgence sucks big time. It looks terrible, relying too much on CG instead of any practical effects like the first film, and it is just so truly boring. The new actors don’t leave any kind of impression and the returning cast feels out of place because of it. I paid money to see Resurgence in theaters and I came this close to walking out, something I’ve never done in my entire life. Do not watch it. [1/5]
I think the original Independence Day is very much worth your time though. Its effects have held up quite well, there’s a wide cast of fun characters, and its central thesis of global cooperation feels good to see in action, even if in reality it feels like a faraway dream. If you’ve somehow missed watching the movie on one of its countless airings on cable, I highly recommend pulling it up on streaming and settling in for the ride.
And if like me you’ve seen it countless times before, you may find it works best as a comfort watch these days. Despite the fiery explosions and extremely high (yet mostly implied) body count, Independence Day feels like a calming transmission from yesteryear to me now, a vision of what we could accomplish if we all worked together and fought back against oblivion.
A guy can dream.
Rating: 4.5/5
What Else Was In Theaters?: If you wanted some more mature fare in July of 1996, Danny Boyle’s black druggie comedy Trainspotting had its American premiered at 21st place the third weekend of Independence Day being on top. Despite some shocking content, the Scottish film would eventually peak at 13th place later in August, probably thanks to good word of mouth. It isn’t my favorite movie by the director, but it’s considered a classic for a reason. 3.5/5
Next Week: America was ready for something a bit more mature after three weeks of aliens and explosions. So how about a legal thriller that tackles racism in the American south? It’s A Time To Kill in next week’s review.
See you then!
-Will
My wife joined me on this most recent watch of the movie, and at one point while Goldblum was onscreen, she turned to me and simply said, “He’s a 10.”
Emmerich would later make big budget movies of destruction where the threat was explicitly climate change, so it’s possible that he was actively trying to push the metaphor in ID4 as well, especially with all the talk of recycling that Goldbum does in the movie.