Very expensive, but still cheap

Rating: 3/10 (18 August 2000)

Some latest American films remind me of big `burger'-like sandwiches: too many things amassed in them, no traces of taste and a question `how can anyone eat and even swallow such a big piece of?' Well, to be honest, ID is definitely not the worst film of the decade, and even of the year and it's a good evolution for Mr.Emmerich after Moon 44 and Universal Soldier-like second rate flicks (some say his debut was the best film of his career, unfortunately, I have not seen it). But this cannot justify the immense success of the film. The thing is that the director has calculated the formula of success with American audience (patriotism + freedom + democracy + lots of special effects + couple of stars + little work for viewers brain + simple and predictable story so that the audience feels happy that it can foresee the next move of the plot=lots of money=good film; if you add to this science fiction elements it may become a super blockbuster, if you add a couple of serious problems and exclude aliens you may even get an Oscar nomination ) and if the film is blockbuster in USA it almost always earns a good money in the rest of the world, but than, this is not art, not even entertainment, its just an arithmetic.
Now about the film itself. This is not a science fiction. Some other term should be invented for the film like this, because it sounds almost ridiculous, OK, I see fiction, but where the hell is science? Real science fiction books or films use some invented or fantastic world to show some all human problems, this doesn't mean that all SFi films should be as serious as films of Tarkovsky or Kubrick, but Independence Day goes beyond all imaginable limits of cliché melodrama, cheap action film and hurrah-patriotic propaganda (when watching ID sometimes I even suspected that German Emmerich mocks at excessive patriotic feelings of some Americans  his last film `Patriot' goes even farther in this nationalistic fields of glory-but if this is a satire it is a very subtle one and most people take the `God bless America, land that I love' part of the film rather seriously). Of course, some may say `the film is what it is - pure entertainment, want serious themes? go, watch Fellini', partly it's right, and entertaining side of the film is not that bad (effects are good, the first part  `the chess game' till the `checkmate' is rather engrossing and I may say that on the level of the entertainment I liked it, than, especially after air plane attack scene, goes blah-blah-blah). When I watch a film like this I often ask myself wouldn't it still be a blockbuster if the storylines were better developed, dialogs were wiser, characters were not that schematic? Ok maybe you earn a couple millions more in USA if you make the American president to save the universe, but what we, non-Americans done to deserve such a torture? I think its mainly fault of critics and ordinary viewers. The first should have burned such film for its bad taste and low level, the audience should demonstrate that of course it likes entertainment but it doesn't mean that entertaining film should be stupid and flat. But the main problem is that Americans themselves are obsessed in finding `messages' in the films. So, what is the message of this one?
AMERICA IS THE SAVIOR OF THE WORLD, it saved the world from feudalism (`The Patriot'), and communism (there are more films on this subject than I can remember) , now it saves us from all possible enemies from Islamic terrorists to Godzila (by the way, it may shock some, but I LIKED GODZILLA, at least there was not that much flag waving and it seemed to be more pure entertainment than pro-American and pro-militaristic propaganda). If the ID stayed within the limits of `Martians attack' and disaster films, it would be pretty acceptable but here all these is mixed with enormous dosage of `America, America, God shed his grace on thee' and `Rembo-Rocky-A Few Good Man-stand up and fight' turns. The resulting salad is almost unbearable.