Will Smith is perhaps best known to most audiences as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the long-running comedy on NBC. In Independence Day, Smith plays Captain Steven Hiller of the United States Marine Corps and the Black Knights Fighter Wing stationed at El Toro. Smith, as Hiller, really makes the movie shine, as he has some of the best lines in the movie! I think Hiller is a pretty sharp fellow. He really loves his country, his girlfriend, and his cigars!

Jeff Goldblum has played the scientist-type, from The Fly to Jurassic Park. The same goes here, except he's now the scientist-type who saves the world!! Goldblum plays David Levinson, your basic everyday cable t.v. man (who also spent eight years studying at MIT). It's Goldblum, as Levinson, who is the first to realize that the strange disturbances in Earth's television communications is being caused by an alien countdown to world devastation!

Bill Pullman is the talented actor portraying President Thomas Whitmore in Independence Day. When I saw ID4, I got the impression that Whitmore must be a Republican, because (a) the mainstream press is critical of him and (b) Pennsylvania Avenue is open to traffic :-) But that aside, Pullman does a wonderful job as Whitmore, first as President of the United States, then as an on-the-run freedom fighter and then rebel leader, delivering the most incredible, emotional speech I've heard yet in any movie. Somebody give this guy an Oscar NOW!!! Click to hear Whitmore's Independence Day speech (.WAV format)

Margaret Colin is David Levinson's estranged wife, Constance Spano. She is also President Whitmore's press secretary and information liason to several government agencies. She and David split three years earlier over their respective career choices. However, through the worldwide crisis that is the alien invasion, she and David discover their love for each other again (with a little help from David's dad). It's women like Colin, as Spano, that really bucked the traditional action movie habit of portraying women. For one thing, ID4 shows them realistically, and one such example is Colin.

No longer driving a Taxi, Judd Hirsch plays Julius Levinson, David's loving father. I was thrilled to see Hirsch in action again, and especially in this movie! (for the record, Taxi was a GREAT comedy if you ever get a chance to catch reruns sometime). Hirsch's character, Julius, is the cigar-chomping, philosophy-spouting, shotgun-toting sage who, as it turns out, gives son David an idea about how to defeat the aliens! Julius, like many other characters in this movie, is a dynamic character who undergoes personal change as a result of the alien invasion. In his case, he rediscovers his faith in God... something that is put nicely when David gives him a prayer book and yarmulke just before he leaves to invade the mothership. Hirsch is just one more reason to see this movie again!

Mary McDonnel plays Marilyn Whitmore, the wife of President Thomas Whitmore and First Lady. Marilyn Whitmore is in Los Angeles, far from her husband and daughter in Washington, when the aliens arrive. At her husband's request, she is just on he way to the airport to fly back when the aliens strike, turning LA into a hellish inferno! Her helicopter crashes, and she is discovered the next day by Steve Hiller's girlfriend, Jasmine. When Hiller comes to rescue them at the remains of El Toro, the First Lady is brought to Area 51 and reunited with her husband. Unfortunately, she is bleeding internally, and dies soon thereafter. I thought that McDonnel's role in the movie was short, but much-needed. This was a movie about war, and in war people die. It wasn't enough to have billions die in ten minutes of on-screen carnage; a real face needed placing on the casualties. And that's what Marilyn Whitmore is for. But man, I gotta tell ya... you really feel the emotion between Whitmore and his wife as she is dying. Sad in a way that movies can't accomplish anymore...

Randy Quaid is the man behind Russell Casse, the burned-out air fighter veteran with a past experience of alien terror... an experience that he's trying to drown out with alcohol. Casse makes a living by cropdusting (well, trying to anyway) to support himself and his three children. Casse is the kind of character you have to feel kind of sorry for at first, but by the end of the movie when he makes the ultimate sacrifice for humanity, you can't help but feel really proud of the guy (yeah yeah, it's just a movie, but there's not many movies that make you feel this way for a character). Quaid is excellent... again!

Robert Loggia, longtime screen actor, plays General Grey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States military. Grey is also one of President Whitmore's closest friends and advisors. I think that if Pullman was playing Sir Winston Churchill, then Loggia's character would be Sir Bernard Montgomery (look up your World War II history if you don't know who these guys are). One of the things that I've come to like about Devlin and Emmerich is that in their films they portray military people in a favorable light, and it doesn't get much better than General Grey in ID4.

Vivica Fox is Jasmine, hot-shot Marine pilot Steve Hiller's girlfriend. Fox has had several roles, and is seen often on CBS' soap opera The Young And The Restless. When Hiller is called to El Toro, he tells Jasmine to come stay with him. It is en route to meet him at the airbase that the aliens take out Los Angeles. Stuck in traffic in a tunnel, Jasmine takes her son Dylan (with dog Boomer on their tale) and the three escape certain death by jumping inside a side tunnel. After the devastation, Jasmine finds a truck and searches out other survivors of the alien attack. When they arrive at the now-destroyed El Toro airbase, Jasmine believes that Hiller is dead. Soon afterwards, Hiller arrives by helicopter and takes Jasmine, the First Lady, and the other survivors to Area 51. There, just before Steve's mission to the alien mothership, the two lovebirds finally tie the knot as husband and wife. Jasmine is certainly one of the most interesting characters in recent movies, especially action-adventure and science-fiction.

Brent Spiner is perhaps best known to millions as the android Data on "Star Trek: The Next Generation". For Independence Day, Spiner portrays Dr. Okun, head of research at the top-secret Area 51 facility at Groom's Lake, Nevada. For the past fifteen years, Dr. Okun has been studying the alien spacecraft that crash landed near Roswell, New Mexico in the forties... as well as the three aliens recovered from the crash site, who now hang in dead silence in tubes of preserving fluid ("the freak show", as Okun puts it). For fans of Spiner who know him mainly as Data, Dr. Okun is a real changeover and I thought showed a different aspect of Spiner's ability. My biggest gripe of the movie is that they didn't show enough of him!

Harvey Fierstein is an accomplished Broadway actor who has been in several films, especially the recent Mrs. Doubtfire (he played Robin Williams' brother). In Independence Day, he plays Marty Gilbert, the nervous manager of the cable company where David works. Fierstein isn't in the movie all that much (his character is one of the poor saps, all one billion of 'em, who get wiped out in the aliens' first attack). But I thought Marty was an interesting character and he does deliver one of the funniest lines in the whole movie, anyway.