STUDIO--Twentieth Century Fox
PRODUCTION COMPANY--Centropolis Films
The Actors and Actresses in it:
Jeff Goldblum--David Levinson--an eccentric bicycle riding scientist
Bill Pullman--President Thomas Whitmore--yeah as in United States
Will (the fresh prince) Smith--Steve Hill--a F-18 fighter pilot
Randy Quaid--whatever the part, sure to be a scene stealer
Mary McDonnell--Constance Levinson--ex-wife of David and Prez' Com. Dir.
Brent Spiner--believed to be a scientist from the Area 51
Harry Connick Jr--F-18 fighter pilot
Vivica Fox--Actress from golden age of film, starred with Flynn, Reagan, died '96
Judd Hirsch--?????
Matthew Perry--aaaahhhhh, one of our NBC FRIENDS
Margaret Colin--Most likely the First Lady
James Duval--?????
Harvey Fierstein--Yeah that uumm guy
Adam Baldwin--Not the Shadow, Not a Usual Suspect, who is he?
Robert Loggia--think he is in airforce--in scene with Will Smith in Area 51
DIRECTED BY Roland Emmerich--Stargate had some problems, but it should be noted that his final cut was told to be cut by another 30 minutes or so. There has been talk by Devlin and Emmerich that there will be Director's cut of Stargate on video or laserdisc ala James Cameron's Abyss special edition 2E.
WRITTEN BY Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, from an idea that was unloaded onto Emmerich by a reporter during filming of Stargate.
PRODUCED BY Dean Devlin
EDITED BY David Brenner
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY Karl Walter Linderlaub
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS Roland Emmerich, Ute Emmerich, Bill Fay
MUSIC COMPOSED AND CONDUCTED BY David Arnold
MODEL WORK BY Doug Smith--Star Wars, Top Gun. Considered one of the masters of motion control model work. This is the largest model shoot ever.
PYRO-EFFECTS BY Clay Pinney--Backdraft, this guy knows how to do his fire stuff, Backdraft had glorius fire effects.
The film starts with giant alien ships arriving into Earth orbit and immediately begin to pulsate a cyclic tone down to the nations of Earth. The world is frantic to try and understand the aliens intentions- till Dr Levinson decodes the message and finds out that it is a countdown. He decyphers this code using orbital satelites. Goldblum says, "I intuit, in fact, that it's a countdown signal that's reducing itself everytime it recycles. Eventually it's going to disappear, at which point they're going to attack. I then rush heroically--and romantically--to get my former wife, Constance, who I'm still very much in love with, in Washington, where she works as the President's communications director. The aliens are stationed over Washington, Los Angeles, and New York--those bastards!--and they're going to decimate all of them. Constance alerts the president and we all go up in Air Force One just before the capital is destroyed." Goldblum neglects to say that before he and our cast leave the smoldering capitol behind, that the President of the United States attempts to talk and make peace with the aliens, but it becomes evident that they have presented Earth with an ultimatum;
become their willing slaves, or die and be exterminated as a species from the planet. As Air Force One makes good it's escape, the aliens demonstrate their massive orbital firepower by totalling major cities of the United States, the U.S. and World powers launch military attacks to try to respond to this demonstration of power, but against impossible odds. Meanwhile, safely aboard the jet, Levinson learns that it is headed for Area 51, the super secret military facility in the Nevada desert that, in real life, has been a hotbed of reported UFO sightings and a long rumored testing ground for alien technology. The movie posits that the key to defeating the extraterrestrial menace is an alien craft recovered nearly intact from a crash site
in Roswell, N M, in July of 1947. Levinson then devises a technological weapon against the alien terror that's somewhat like the biological ammunition used in H.G.Wells' The War of the Worlds, and it is deployed with assistance from both the military and civilian sectors.
The story, which begins on July 2nd, initially presents the idea as a force of nature--with 15 mile-wide atmospheric phenomena igniting the skies above the planet and descending on its largest urban centers. "Rather than have little spores live inside of people and slowly take over," says screenwriter Dean Devlin, "our movie really starts with, They're here. They've arrived, and they're blowing the shit out of our planet. Now what do you do? So we track different characters from all around the world to see how they deal with this disaster." Devlin views Independence Day as a vaccine of sorts to the superheroic action adventure movies popularized by Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. "This is an ensemble of characters that you can relate to, that are like people you know. They're not superheroes; it's you, "according to Devlin. If anyone is performing superheroics, it's the FX crew, which includes motioncontrol model master Doug Smith and explosive expert Clay Pinney. The film also will contain a fair amount of digital work, but only where necessary. "We love CGI, but we still feel--and we're going to get a lot of flak for this--that it doesn't look as good as a really well-built model. I don't know if it's because of the lighting or texture mapping, but for some reason they still haven't done it," Devlin said, "Independence Day represents the largest model shoot ever attempted on a feature. You'll see a sequence in the movie where 150 F-18 jets are fighting 250 of these [he gestures toward the full-scale alien craft on the other side of the sound stage], and in the foreground, the first 30 will all be models and everything behind it will be CGI. In backgrounds, we find that CGI stuff looks great. But in foregrounds, I think the models still hold up better than anything else. Our FX people have created some of the most phenomenal images I've ever seen. We're aiming to set the new standard for aerial battles." The film wrapped in 70 days of live shotting, though that does not include the 200 plus days of shooting models. "Will Smith's character has a dogfight with one of the alien craft. The aliens crash and then Hiller sort of punches one of them out on the ground, but then...one comes down and kind of reveals himself to be alive when he seems to be dead and sort of takes over this guy and certain people get to shoot at him after he does some mean things and articulates their plan, which is to parasitically invade the population and take over Earth. And they've got their whole culture on these enormous ships. They've come here, they're ready to go and they don't want anybody else here," according to Goldblum.
ID4 most likely means Independence Day 4th of July. However, research at MIT indicates that ID4 is a genetic inhibitor which ceases certain procedures in evolution and life. Could this be the answer that saves the human race. Or is it like this author thinks, and simply a stupid attempt to conjure memories of the ol T2 campaign. Hopefully, the MIT research is true, and the answer to the future existence of mankind is the three symbols ID4. Could 20th Century Fox and the clan of Emmerich be that clever, don't bet on it. No matter what, with ads like the one that ran during the Super Bowl, that say things like, "Enjoy the rest of the Super Bowl, it may be you're last," they are sure to grab an audience. Hopefully, the studio will leave Emmerich and Devlin alone, and present the film they made.
Return To Science Fiction Menu.