Independence Day: 30 Years On
Dated jingoistic nonsense, but Roland Emmerich's alien invasion blockbuster has some incidental pleasures
Warning: Contains spoilers
I was extremely excited to see Independence Day (1996) during the run-up to the original cinema release. The superb marketing, including this teaser trailer in which a massive flying saucer blows up the White House, had well and truly captivated my interest. I was curious to see how Stargate (1994) director Roland Emmerich and his co-writer Dean Devlin would handle a global alien invasion scenario. In addition, the advent of CGI meant huge vistas of epic destruction could now be far more effectively rendered onscreen. In short, Independence Day had a lot riding on it. Could it live up to the hype?
Short answer: No. Yes, the film was a box office smash (its much belated 2016 sequel failed to generate similar piles of cash), but the plot and overall tone left me disappointed. After a gripping opening act, things rapidly degenerate into pseudo-Top Gun (1986) jingoism. I don’t necessarily mind the America-centric narrative (complete with token Brit stereotypes and various other nods to other nations in a couple of brief scenes), but the flag-waving is all a bit much if you don’t hail from the land of the free and the home of the brave. Perhaps American cinema audiences found the speech made by US President Thomas J Witmore (Bill Pullman) at the end of Act Two stirringly patriotic, but at the cinema screenings I attended in the UK, it was greeted with sniggers.
In general, Brits aren’t big on flag-waving demonstrative patriotism, save for royal occasions or major sporting events. Yes, we’ve got a bit of a silly thing going on at the moment with various right-wing groups planting St George’s flags around the place, but I suspect that most Brits find this rather embarrassing. After all, the British hardly need to demonstrate such patriotic fervour, given that we don’t celebrate an independence day. If we did, who would we celebrate independence from? The Romans? Rather than flag-waving, I prefer being smug over things like our common-sense gun laws, the National Health Service (for all its flaws, we don’t get bankruptcy-inducing medical bills), and the fact that we don’t miss out half the letters in “doughnut”.
All that said, I am a big fan of America at its best and think the world is a better place because of it. For that reason, I went along with the flag-waving as much as I could. However, the narrative and character deficiencies I found harder to deal with. Emmerich and Devlin are obviously paying tribute to the golden era of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Yet somehow, they failed to grasp that what made those films work were everyman characters in extraordinary circumstances: Humble electrician Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) or farm boy Luke Skywalker in Star Wars (1977), for example. In contrast, none of the heroes here feels particularly ordinary.
