[rolls eyes upwards and mutters] "God bless America"

Rating: Null/10 (26 January 2004)

(This review contains one or two spoilers, but I'm sure you've all seen the movie anyway.)
With a massive budget, massive special effects and massive spaceships, Independence Day is a massive turkey. This movie is pretty much two hours of jingoistic flag waving, patriotic fervour and really really really annoying scenes of stupid people saluting one another.
The stereotyped characters do little to save this either. Judd Hirsch is little more than embarassing as a typical elderly Jewish world-weary type of guy, and Bill Pullman must be the most expressionless President since George Bush Jnr. The very talented Will Smith tries his best but when the script has him punching an alien in the desert and then muttering some banal dialogue you just know that this is an extremely BAD movie.
From a logical point of view, it defies belief. Here we have Jeff Goldblum (who plays Hirsch's son) managing to figure out the alien's plan for world domination all by himself because he plays chess quite a lot. Also, the Empire State Building is demolished by the aliens and the resulting out-of-control fire is stopped by one female character simply closing a door. Area 51 is shown, and conveniently has a recovered alien space ship which crashed years earlier, and of course Goldblum and Smith figure out how to pilot it without reading any alien manuals. The list goes on.
But the real problem with this movie, as I've mentioned, is the ridiculous level of patriotism shown. It's almost as if the Americans are trying to remind all of us that they are the great super-power, and they'll always be there to save us should 15-mile wide spaceships happen to appear in the skies. As with "Armaggedon" there are endless shots of the American flag, predictably nauseating scenes of wholesome Americans huddled around radios and of course that old American stand-by, the endless rounds of people saluting each other.
Judging by some of the other comments on here, even Americans are slightly weary of this movie, which really says it all.