For Pete's sake, it's a barn burner

Rating: 9/10 (29 June 2009)

Some posters are over-intellectualizing Independence Day. It was an emotional barn burner, for Pete's sake. To worry about anything deeper than that is sort of like saying, "Are we having fun yet? -- i.e., you're just not getting it.
Actually, looked at another way, it IS deep. It is a great movie for showing directly what it feels like to put aside petty differences for the time being. It reminds me of taking LSD: it takes for most people an extraordinarily strong entheogen like LSD to enter different "spaces" of expanded awareness; similarly, it takes an extraordinarily strong world event to bring people together. I experienced this in the Santa Cruz earthquake of 1989. For a short while, many petty interpersonal differences disappeared.