"Indepence Day

Rating: 3/10 (21 February 2005)

The plot in "Independence Day" isn't exactly hard to describe; some kind of alien race has decided to try to take over Earth, and after destroying most major cities in the world and crushing all counter-attacks, the U.S. finally prevails and kills them off. Any movie that can be explained well in one sentence - and I imagine that last sentence was pretty much the whole script - has a problem to start with. But, there are many simple action movies that still manage to be entertaining, given that they have a certain level of self-awareness (a movie like "Die Hard" is a good example). This movie, however, has the self-awareness of a two-year old. Not only that, it also over-uses every last one of the pathetic clichés that so many people connect Hollywood disaster-films with these days - flag-waving, macho guys trying to be funny (and failing miserably in the process), a score that is basically centered around different versions of the U.S. national anthem, the underdog who gets beaten down but prevails in the end, thus achieving the American Dream, the leader who is really not a man of politics, but a man of action, and of the people - everything. Watching a movie like this is interesting, because it is actually so dumb and totally unaware of its own absurdness that you can't parody it; it's already a parody of itself.
The acting is bad, based on the fact that every character in this movie is insanely predictable. We all know within the first two seconds of seeing them exactly how they will behave until the very end. Of course Russell Casse (Randy Quaid), the alcoholic Vietnam veteran (who is the underdog I mentioned before) will get his revenge at the aliens who abducted him ten years before the attacks, of course he will prove the one's who have taunted him for so long wrong, and of course he will sacrifice his life for the sake of the United States of America - not the world - to become an incarnation of the archetype of the American Hero. Being a European, I have absolutely nothing against America myself, but it's no wonder how large parts of the world has a bad image of it when stuff like this is what they are basing their opinions on. (It's true that the director of the movie is actually German, but movies like this are controlled by studios, not directors.) All the other major characters' actions are just as predictable his Russell's, so I'm not going to go into them.
You are not supposed to take movies like this too seriously, and I don't. But large parts of it is so mind-numbingly stupid that it ends up being provoking. There are tons of logical plot holes; one of the biggest ones being how Captain Steve Hiller (Will Smith) and David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) manage to first travel into the alien mother ship, using one of the alien vehicles, obtained in Roswell, New Mexico in the '50s (the vehicle is located in Area 51 - where else?), and then downloading a virus into the main computer, causing the shields of the ships attacking Earth to go down, which allows the human forces to strike against them. This is absurd in many ways; first of all, don't the aliens have some kind of scan for spaceships entering their mother ship? Their technology is so ridiculously advanced there's no reason they shouldn't have one. But most of all, how the hell can Levinson just hook up his portable computer to their main computer and download the virus in a matter of seconds? These creatures have shields powerful enough to withstand any human weapon, but they are totally defenseless against a guy with his home computer? Normally, I don't find plot holes like that all that disturbing, but there's so many of them in this movie, you just can't help but. And in addition to that some special effects are really poor.
Movies like "Independence Day" is the reason so many people detest Hollywood these days. It's dull and predictable, and has absolutely nothing new to offer. In addition to that, what it actually does offer, it offers in such a way that it feels like the heads of the studio responsible for it is actually sitting and laughing at for buying something as absurd as this. Sadly, the joke isn't on them, seeing as how this movie grossed more than $800 million worldwide. Maybe the human race does deserve to be annihilated after all.