I recently re-visited the iconic 1996 alien invasion movie Independence Day. This was my first watch-through an adult, and I’m glad to say it was just as enjoyable as when I was a kid. My verdict for Independence Day is that most of the negative professional criticism is unfair, but I must also admit that it was really weird to watch now in 2024.
The quality about the movie I most liked is how snappy and fast-paced it is. 145 minutes is a fairly long runtime but didn’t drag at all. Every moment of screentime drove the plot forward in some way.
From browsing reviews by film critics, the most common complaint about Independence Day is that the dialogue was wooden and expository. I find this criticism odd because it implies that dialogue should be not expository. If a conversation isn’t relevant to the plot then why include it at all? This is problem with attacking dialogue for being expository. And since then, we have seen the “non-expository dialogue” that film critics like in movies such as Captain Marvel. “Good dialogue” is when characters smirk at each other and make clever comments. Repeatedly and without end.
All the characters of Independence Day all have their share of problems and personality flaws and the audience isn’t forced to like them. For example Jeff Goldblum’s character is a neurotic bicycle-riding Jewish leftie who is obsessed with saving the planet from pollution and people not recycling their trash. The movie doesn’t try to force you to agree him. Now of course every movie has to present the “good” characters correcting the “bad” characters on racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other urgently important contemporary social justice issues. A movie for entertainment purposes is better when it just presents various people with whatever they happen to believe in with no coercion.
There are some bad redneck characters who bully the drunk Gulf War pilot-turned-cropduster, but I don’t find them implausible. Small communities can be very cruel to someone who is weird and doesn’t fit in. The town drunk who rambles about being kidnapped by aliens would certainly get a lot of mockery and derision, sure.
But there is one truly bad character, the sneering defense secretary, and he’s the weak point of the movie. It doesn’t help that his main purpose is to explain away a major plot hole. He knew there was an alien spaceship at Area 51 but didn’t tell anyone because he’s bad. That’s just lazy writing and they should have come up with something better. The guy does however get a small redemption arc in the end when he joins the prayer circle, which I found cute and humanizing.
Independence Day earns most of its infamy for the deus ex machina ending with Jeff Goldblum hacking the enemy mothership with his 1996 Macintosh™ laptop computer. This was a particularly hilarious product placement choice because an Apple laptop wouldn’t be compatible with most computers even back then. But I will defend it.
For starters, every alien invasion movie has a deus ex machina, because that is the only way for the good guys to win. Imagine an aircraft carrier sailed to a remote Polynesian island. Thee wouldn’t be anything the natives could do about it except hope the men on the giant magic canoe aren’t aggressive. And that is a situation when the two respective groups are only a few thousand years apart in technological development. A space traveling alien race would in all probability be tens of thousands if not millions of years more advanced. Fighting them in any meaningful sense would just be absurd. After realizing that a deus ex machina is an inevitable part of the genre and there’s no sense in biting your fingernails over it, that frees up the writers to invent anything they want.
And really, the Macintosh deus ex machina isn’t that bad, and the reason why it’s not bad is because the movie established right at the beginning that the alien computers are compatible enough with human computers to take over our satellites. As silly as it is, this is a rule that was set up and early and followed consistently. Setting up a rule in a fictional universe is okay as long as it is followed consistently. An example of a bad deus ex machina was in the The Last Jedi when the purple-haired admiral uses the lightspeed engine to ram the much larger enemy ship. If using lightspeed as a weapon to destroy enemy ships was a viable tactic, then people would have already tried it many times before and every fleet would have developed unmanned lightspeed torpedoes so it isn’t necessary for a pilot to be killed. This same movie also invented “space fuel” which had literally never been mentioned in any previous Star Wars entry, and was obviously just invented to create an imaginary sense of urgency, then went back to never being mentioned again.
So Independence Day is a fun and well-written movie. But politically, hmmm, I have to ask why. Iraq and Russia are mentioned but have no relation or impact on the plot except to establish that there are alien ships over other countries. So why these countries so specifically and prominently? Yes the Cold and Gulf wars were recently over and at the time this was likely a reasonable explanation that no one gave a second thought to. But these references do hit different now, don’t they? It does at the very least lend credence to the assertion that the conservative establishment was upset that Bush Sr. chickened out of invading and occupying Iraq properly. Getting rid of Saddam was unfinished business that would have to be resolved later one way or another, so it was important to keep American moviegoers primed for Iraq coming up on the geopolitical radar again.
The portrayal of the president as a hotshot young combat pilot who served in the Gulf War is also interesting. The last American president to go to war was Bush Sr., who served in World War II. Everybody after him except Obama was of military age in the Vietnam War and invented various excuses to not go, including Bush’s own son. who hid in the Texas National Guard (who at the time rarely deployed anywhere outside the USA). It is completely understandable that the WWII generation would not want their sons to be killed in Vietnam, but this did not prevent them from seeking out aggressive wars for the poor man’s sons to die in.
Portraying the American president as a fighter pilot in his prime now, when both candidates are geriatric old men rambling nonsense at each other, just feels like a parody.
Of course Independence Day is blatant war propaganda. Alien invasion movies serve an important propaganda purpose because if American military hardware could stand up to aliens then of course it would easily defeat anyone else here on earth. But it is entertaining and well-written propaganda with great special effects. Now movies aren’t entertaining or well-written and the special effects are cheap CGI garbage so the producers and A-list actors can funnel more of the budget to themselves, but they are still propaganda. And much more obnoxious propaganda than before.
Ian Kummer
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I recall watching it and hating every nanosecond. I think it was one of the last Hollywood films I ever watched.
I found the President jumping into a fighter plane cringe beyond limits. I remember a friend talking about it: “It’s typical American” followed by an expression of extreme disgust. I agreed.
The first Independence Day is actually I movie I liked quite a bit because it shows the usual cliches but in a unusual fresh way; in addition, by any behavior you can say that the Aliens in the movie represents the Americans in the real world and the Americans in the movie the hapless but valorous human beings.
Let’s see some: “The President of the USA is a former military pilot and heroically throw the first nuke at the alien ship!” – you can’t get much more ‘murican than that, but on the other hand the President is played by a young actor, he is dandy, and his presenting scene is his secretary admonish him that the ratings do not go well because people voted him because they wanted a fighter, not someone that does compromise; to which he retorts that doing compromise and getting results is not bad. Even after the starts of the invasions the Presidents asks the prisoner Alien if they can coexists and clearly the Alien does not even know what “coexists” mean. In other words, he is what you really want from a President hard as nail if needed, but perfectly able to compromise and ask for peace.
Another one: “America saves the day!” – clearly this is a classic cliche; but yet it is clear that USA can save the day only because decades before an alien ship fall in its territories. It is basically a stroke of luck or the USA would be messed up as everyone else.
I remember thinking about more, but it is long time I did not see the movie. I hope it passes the point, though
I hated “Independence Day” when I first came out, but after several viewings I started to appreciate it. I agree with Hiroshi Hashimoto above. The move makers inserted a lot of subtle stuff that undercut the “rah rah” that you miss on the first viewing.
The Prez in the plane is really the only miss step. And it probably would have been better if it were less USA focused. But there are some nice touches. The First Lady getting rescued by a stripper. The President still trying to negotiate with the aliens AFTER they have destroyed tons of cities and killed at least hundreds of millions of people. The Earth’s computer tech having been reversed engineered from a crashed alien spaceship. The President being told by the military industrial complex that essentially he doesn’t have a high enough classification to be told about the crashed alien spaceship. The crazy and drunk conspiracy theorist turning out to be completely right. Its also one of the few scifi/ space operas where the aliens behave like a genuine different lifeforms with different motivations, not humans dressed up in rubber costumes.
I’ve not seen any of the sequels.