Filmmaking driven by special effects and advertising

Rating: 2/10 (20 October 1999)

After watching Independence Day, and the surge of adoration from American youth that followed, I wondered if the previous generation looked on with as much horror when the same happened for Star Wars. I hope not.
Where to begin on how awful this movie is? The drama is propped up by dozens of unlikely situations. We're supposed to cheer as the dog jumps through the door, narrowly missing an early death by fireball. Would the fireball really stop at the door and preserve everyone inside? Would their oxygen not be consumed? Later, not only a stranded fighter pilot, but a horde of RVs stumble on Area 51, just in time for the president's arrival (whose wife has just been rescued by the fighter pilot's girlfriend). This is the worst kind of stop-gap scriptwriting.
The plot tries to make up for the gaping holes with extraneous material. We are told with loving detail what the aliens look like, how their biologically-active protective suits work, of their telepathic abilities. How many aliens to we actually encounter face-to-face in the film? You got it -- one.
The attempt at generating tension in the first half hour is utterly ludicrous; every person on earth has seen the previews of the White House and various other buildings being blown to smithereens by the aliens. Before the opening credits role, we know a war's on. Why pretend we don't?
Independence Day was one of the first in a disturbing trend in cinema in the 1990s, culminating, I think, with The Phantom Menace: filmmaking driven by special effects. The attitude of the film is, "We do this because we can, not because we should." This inevitably leads the plot astray and dictates what course the aliens will take. Wouldn't it be much more efficient for the technologically-advanced aliens to engineer a human-killing super virus? Sure, but then there wouldn't be great shots of L.A. getting vaporized.
Equally offensive is the needless off-target moralizing of the film. It suggests that the war is about "independence" -- come on, guys, isn't really about survival? The theme at the end is one of unity among the different nations, but it's a unity that consists of the U.S. telling the other guys when and where to shoot. And if that's what unity is all about, then we've been getting along great for the last 50 years.