by Jerry Roberts

July 01, 2002

First of all, calm down.

I realize that including Independence Day to a website about the worst movies ever made isn't going to win me any popularity contests and maybe it was a bit of a stretch, but there are a lot of things about this movie that have bothered me for six years and I feel that the time has come to vent.

I felt then, as I do now, that Independence Day is an over-budgeted B-movie, a blissfully dumb alien invasion flick that is as disposable as the genre that inspired it. It reminds me that there was a time when these movies were made on a small budget and were aimed at a limited audience. Oh, how the times have changed.

ID4 comes from a Hollywood that insists that it is always progressing in terms of filmmaking but in this case has gone backwards in time to remake a 50's sci-fi flick, filter it through an Irwin Allen disaster movie from the 70's and package it a homage to those dead genres while giving nods to War of the Worlds and The High and the Mighty. None of these things, let's be honest, was aching for a comeback.

The movie's opening isn't bad as far as set-ups go. Alien ships the size of the moon hover over the continents of the earth and begin a countdown. To what, no one seems to know (well, no one in the movie anyway). They want to kill us and in the grand scheme of these movies there is one lone techo-nerd (Jeff Goldblum) who needs to get to the White House to warn the President. I was thinking, he's the President, he can't make a decision.

This leads to the money shots as the alien ships obliterate most of the earth, including major landmarks like The White House and The Empire State Building (which any New Yorker will tell you, is in the wrong place). This throws the world into total chaos but not the characters who never really invest much emotional interest in the proceedings.

The characters are a mish-mash of stereotypes and disaster movie leftovers like The President (Bill Pullman), the ace marine pilot (Will Smith), his stripper fiance (Vivica Fox), The alcholic loon (Randy Quaid), the General (Robert Loggia), the swishy gay man (Harvey Feirstein, who else?) the President's personal aid (Margaret Colin), the mashuga old Jewish man (Judd Hirsch) and the wild-haired scientist (Brent Spiner) whose attempts to make nice-nice with Mr. Alien don't pan out very well. That's an Irwin Allen casting call if I ever saw one, in fact all that's missing are Ernest Borgnine, Shelly Winters, Red Buttons, Linda Blair, Stella Stevens and George Kennedy as The Commissioner.

Anyway, back to the invasion. The aliens are kept hidden until about midway through the movie and for good reason, they look pretty crummy. They are dull, slimy octopus creatures with lots of tenticles and foam-rubber. Compared to the gleefully nasty denizens of Tim Burton's Mars Attacks these guys don't look any more threatening then the plastic heads that jump out at you at the funhouse.

They aren't exactly Rhode Scholars either. I would like to have sat in on the alien's meetings where they discussed this invasion because I would have a lot of questions. Such as:

* Why do aliens who fly millions of light years to destroy us in ships the size of the moon use tiny short-range fighters to take out the Air Force pilots in areal dogfights?

* Since they are able to build spaceships can't they build any other weapons besides ray guns?

* Given Goldblum's solution, how is it that they have such an advanced technology and never heard of a computer virus?

* When asked what they want to do to us they can't think of something more original than "Die!!"

At least Marvin the Martian had the excuse that we were blocking his view of Venus