Reel Look: Independence Day

Rating: 6/10 (4 July 2015)

"Welcome to Earth!" Sci-fi disaster flicks don't get any bigger than this 1996 blockbuster, oozing destruction and explosions left and right on practically every frame. The forty-seventh highest grossing film of all time, it was at the forefront of the large- scale disaster film and science resurgences of the mid-to-late 1990s. But do the effects outweigh character? Let's take a look.
Director Roland Emmerich takes us on a roller coaster ride in saving the world from non-peaceful extraterrestrials of whom, rather than the friendly aliens from 'Close Encounters' and 'E.T.', are bent on planning to decimate the very existence of mankind with their monstrously menacing mothership, where in one sequence the White House is blasted to smithereens. The film also features an all-star cast: Bill Pullman (as United States president Thomas J. Whitmore playing a Bill Clinton-esque persona, alongside the Hillary-esque First Lady portrayed by Mary McDonnell), Jeff Goldblum as David Levinson, an MIT-educated computer expert, chess enthusiast and environmentalist, the cool, charming and cocky Will Smith as Captain Steven Hiller,an assured U.S. Marine Corps F/A-18 pilot and Randy Quaid as Russell Casse, a widowed alcoholic redneck and Vietnam veteran who claims to have been abducted by the aliens a decade before the present Martian invasion and of whom eventually sacrifices himself to save mankind.
As far as it's concerned, it's just a spectacle-filled summer popcorn flick that presents a visually slick and fast-paced adventure, boasting expensive special effects and large-scale action sequences that appears more of an actual character than anyone actually in front of the camera, borrowing liberally from H. G. Welles' 'War of the Worlds', 'Aliens' and every sci-fi invasion film in between. Poor on character development but dripping with all-too realistic visual effects, 'Independence Day' nonetheless thus resulted as an international smash-hit, and remains a big and loud sci-fi extravaganza, exploding with gigantic visual grandeur of stunning visual proportions that were, and still are, out of this world.