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Gene Siskel's Capsule Review
A souped-up, sci-fi potboiler that's really a throwback to
old-fashioned disaster films, with their cornball casts of
stereotypes. Alien life forms attack Planet Earth by encircling
it with massive warships, and it's up to a computer whiz (Jeff
Goldblum) to help the weak U.S. president (a lame Bill Pullman)
keep hope and America alive. The special effects are sometimes
stunning, but there is precious little payoff to this nearly
two-and-a-half hour movie.
  
by Gene Siskel, Tribune Media
Services syndicated columnist
Rod Dreher's Review
For once, the trailers didn't lie. "Independence
Day," whose much-enthused-over preview reels featuring
humongous spaceships pulverizing the White House with
destructo-rays, rocks the bejeezus out of the holiday weekend.
It's like the Comic Book of Revelation, in which snarling wrath
descends from the heavens in the form of death Frisbees:
Apocalypse wow!
With its vintage 1950s tale of alien invasion, tongue-in-cheek
humor, cutting-edge special effects (there's $70 million well
spent) and director Roland ("Stargate") Emmerich's
electrifying visual compositions, "Independence Day"
succeeds where so many of the season's hyperviolent clobberfests
fail: It combines nonstop techno-thrills with high-spirited humor
(no gruesome murders here), and likable, if cookie-cutterish,
characters.
The movie's a big, bodacious goof, to be sure, and it borrows
shamelessly from every sci-fi movie in history. But what a trippy
spectacle! It's Cecil B. DeMille, Irwin Allen and Steven
Spielberg rolled into one cinematic juggernaut.
"Independence Day" is pure pop moviegoing pleasure, the
kind of junky perfection they make summers for.
The film's visual sensibility is its most impressive quality.
Sheer gigantism overpowers you in scene after scene of tiny men
facing down vast spaceships overhead or moving across the empty
desert flats, conveying a staggering sense of evil's
impregnability. And Emmerich concocts some wonderfully cheesy,
but effective, images of American icons being disrespected and
destroyed by the intergalactic louts. It's hard not to shiver
when the dark shadow of the alien cruisers descends ominously on
the Manhattan skyline, and sweeps across Abraham Lincoln's
monumental face like a frown. After the aliens ravage New York
City, the Statue of Liberty, poor old gal, is left lying face
down in the mud.
"ID4" (as the studio calls it) isn't perfect. The
plot is full of holes and at times awfully hokey: A hammy Bill
Pullman, as the American president, gives an
"inspirational" eve-of-battle speech that's an
unintentional hoot. The gleeful accumulation of sci-fi movie
clichés is mighty audacious, too. There's not a single new
idea here, just a passel of old ones recycled with winking style.
Big deal. "ID4"'s bombastically entertaining virtues
obliterate its flaws as effectively as the aliens vaporize the
White House and the Capitol (and what a satisfying sight that
is). Really now, how can you not love a film that gives us Randy
Quaid as a liquored-up hick of a crop-duster pilot flying a jet
fighter straight up the flaming wazoo of an alien mother ship?
This is a way cool movie.
Rod Dreher writes for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
Text copyrighted 1996 by the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.
Distributed by KRT.
Carrie Rickey's Review
A carefully calibrated crowd-rouser, "Independence
Day" is the movie in which the Fly and the Artist Formerly
Known as Fresh Prince save the planet.
Will Smith plays Marine fighter pilot Steven Hiller and Jeff
Goldblum -- who last saved the world from velociraptors -- is his
hacker-genius sidekick in this disarming greatest-hits
compilation of every action and sci-fi movie ever made.
It's the biggest, loudest fireworks spectacle a kid could
imagine, replete with a nuclear blast that explodes the White
House and a tsunami of fire that incinerates the Statue of
Liberty and topples her from her pedestal.
Despite the destruction of our national landmarks, it's great
fun, too, even though about 2 billion people die. The movie
distracts you from this shocking turn of events by making sure
you're preoccupied by the fate of one yellow Labrador Retriever.
Still, "ID4," as it's known, is too intense, not to
mention way too long, for kids under 10.
OK. It's July 2. Picture a "gigundo" spaceship the
size of L.A., charred and pocked like an English muffin, hovering
over Manhattan. Now picture its sister ships casting their long
shadows over Washington, Moscow, Paris, Cairo, Tokyo and dozens
more metropolises.
What looks to be a Klingon convention is actually a systematic
attack on Earth by planet-hopping ETs who consume natural
resources the way babies consume Pampers. The humbling fact, as
one military officer solemnly intones, is that earthlings
"are cockroaches for this alien culture." On July 2,
the alien ships gather. On July 3, they attack.
Sleekly put together by the "Stargate" team of
Roland Emmerich (director and co-writer) and Dean Devlin
(producer and co-writer), "ID4" quotes so many classic
movies that there's hardly a single unique image or thought.
While it won't win any prizes for originality, the film boasts
stunning special-effects and welcome humor that defuses the high
tension of its scenario. Only in America do we make movies in
which we blow up all our national monuments, then plant the flag
on top of the debris.
Carrie Rickey writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Text copyrighted 1996 by Knight-Ridder Newspapers. Distributed by
KRT.
Chris Hewitt's Review
The popcorn-friendly "Independence Day" is the most
ballyhooed movie of the summer and it's a pleasure to report that
all the ballying and hooing is on target.
Based on a trailer introduced during the Super Bowl,
"Independence Day" has built up huge expectations, and
most of them are met in this intergalactically entertaining
movie. One spectacular section near the beginning of
"ID4" -- when aliens are blasting major American cities
sky-high -- is so big, so improbable and so scary-funny-cool that
the reaction it produces is something close to euphoria (it's
clear we are not in the real world, where blown-up buildings are
becoming too common).
"ID4"'s first trailers didn't show the cast, which
was a smart move. The actors are a quirky bunch, and you're
delighted every time one of them is introduced: Jeff Goldblum is
an advocate of saving the planet via recycling who ultimately has
to, well, save the planet. Will Smith is a Marine whose reaction
to the invasion is more cheesed-off than scared. Bill Pullman is
a heroic American president. Offbeat actors like Harvey
Fierstein, Margaret Colin, Mary McDonnell and Randy Quaid are
also involved and, although most of their roles are fairly
stereotypical, the actors make them something more (in
Fierstein's case, too much more).
Smith is, as usual, very funny, and so is Goldblum. Trying to
be a big stud, he urges Smith to "take 'em down, take 'em
out, do your stuff" and his inability to wrap his mouth
around the hard-guy dialogue is a scream. "ID4" reels
off knowing references to "The X-Files," "Star
Trek," the alleged Roswell alien, "The Day the Earth
Stood Still" and every other station on the
paranoid/spacenut cross. At one point, before it's clear that the
aliens are bad news, a New Ager gazes at the skies and shouts,
"Oh God, I hope they bring back Elvis."
Me, I just hope director Roland Emmerich leaves the
sentimental goop out of his next movie. "Independence
Day" missteps whenever it tries to push the emotional
connections between characters. Judd Hirsch is funny as
Goldblum's pushy dad, but his kvetching gets old and the movie
could easily do without a subplot in which we learn that Goldblum
and Colin are bickering exes (Colin actually has to say, "I
never stopped loving you" ).
I never stopped hating that garbage, but I do like the movie's
gung-ho rah-rahism. With tributes to patriotism, the power of
prayer, individual sacrifice for the common good and the
importance of family, the movie is a regular " Close
Encounters of a Norman Rockwell Kind," and what's wrong with
that?
Should you go?
Yes, and seeing it with a huge, gleeful crowd is part of the
fun.
Chris Hewitt writes for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press.
Text copyrighted 1996 by Knight-Ridder Newspapers. Distributed by
KRT.
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