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Independence Day Stars: Will Smith, Bill Pulman, Jeff Goldblum, Randy Quaid and Vivica A. Fox Director: Roland Emmerich BBFC Certificate: 12 Opened: August 1996 Running Time: 139 mins |
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For weeks now, cinema audiences everywhere have been staring, stunned into silence by one of the most impressive and effective trailers ever shown. Casting an ominous shadow over every other summer release, this has finally arrived on the back of the most successful opening weekend in US box office history, and the biggest hype machine since Jurassic Park stomped all over the opposition in 1993.
The premise is simplicity itself. Alien spaceships, each many miles wide, arrive over every major city in the world. Shadows creep across the land as the spaceships blank out the last sunshine that many will ever see. US President Bill Pullman (who is far too young and handsome for the part), along with most of the population, stupidly believe that the aliens are friends. It's as if War of the Worlds had never happened. Only cable TV engineer Goldblum anticipates the truth, intercepting the countdown being transmitted, just in time to alert the White House. Then, kaboom… Sporting some of the most impressive and intense special effects ever seen, the destruction is utterly mind-blowing. Balls of flame billow down jammed roads, tossing the cars through the air, and destroying everything in their path. The Empire State Building crumples and shatters, the White House spreads itself over a two-mile radius in a pyrotechnical extravaganza, and jaws hit cinema floors up and down the country. Only a few pieces of poorly super-imposed nonsense ruin the effect. The big problem, however, is that whilst this is impressive, it leaves a nasty aftertaste. The film seems to revel in the fact that millions of fleeing innocent people are roasted alive. I am one of the biggest explosion-junkies in the world, but even so, I could not help finding the whole thing rather sickening. The rest of the film is a mixture of bad jokes, horrendous plot implausibilities, and less-than-thrilling action sequences. Will Smith is adequate as the testosterone-flooded pilot who leads the attack on the enemy, but the film is a major disappointment. The script is utterly atrocious, the American patriotic back-slapping is almost unbearable, and basic laws of physics are ignored in an attempt to excite. It fails on every level. This kind of film is not meant to be taken seriously, but once you have sat through two and a half hours of rubbish, so lacking in thrills, so careless about the amount of people who are reduced to dust and so full of plot holes, all that you want to do is pick faults. Nice explosions, shame about the other 140 minutes. Reviewed by: Tom Whitaker
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