23 years old and looking splendid...

Rating: 10/10 (17 June 2019)

Unlike his 2016 ID:Resurgence, which can pretty much be dismissed without a second thought, Roland Emmerich's original is a triumphalist triumph of epic film-making, with gung-ho David Arnold music to match. Although 150 minutes long, it is in many ways an economically-made yet attractively-filmed movie, passing smoothly and logically (but also at times with pleasant eccentricity) from scene to scene; and all the time looking plausible (at the military and government levels), while playing successfully with emotions of fear, shock, sadness, patriotism, stoicism, wit and indeed enigma.
Not much is wasted here, very few scenes indeed fall down, and a great many have become iconic, not just for this movie, but in the whole history of cinema. One knows those images or vignettes are coming, yet they continue to give pleasure, and have not lost their edge. There are no dud characters here, and many are a joy to see in action, all the more so as unlikely combinations of characters come together.
To look at "Independence Day" as it should be looked at is to see an antidote - or better a mirror image - of "Close Encounters". While the latter is clearly the more cerebral movie, ID also does its bit of emulation by following logical if strange paths of the stories of individuals, many of whom resemble Richard Dreyfuss's Roy Neary in being able to penetrate the top-secret military and scientific stuff, opening the movie up, though of course exposing those featuring to fear and misery, as opposed to the mix of awe and wonder that Spielberg had to offer back in 1977. But the universe is a big place, and if aliens exist at all, perhaps they will indeed be the locust-like lifeforms Bill Pullman's President Whitmore tells us about.
While Pullman is not a great actor, he does quite well enough in this role, while the Smith-Goldblum pairing is again iconic, robust and witty, as is the father-and-son provided by Goldblum and Judd Hirsch. James Rebhorn and Robert Loggia are perfect in their top-politician and top-military roles respectively, while Randy Quaid gets his character just right, as of course does Brent Spiner as the slightly whacko Doctor Okun. Adam Baldwin showed early promise in uniform as Major Mitchell, and Harvey Fierstein also offers his part with a nice mix of humour and poignancy. The female leads are perhaps weaker, though with Vivica Fox convincing most.
Many at the time dismissed ID as an effects movie of little import, but ironically the chance to compare with ID:Resurgence all those years later makes it abundantly clear what a surfeit of CGI can do to render a film meaningless. In contrast, the original "Independence Day" plays a military battle story straight and really seems to offer a tangible hint of what the dread event of alien invasion might look like; and it's authentically scary and awesome, and far from just throwaway death and destruction (unlike the tragically weak 2016 effort). To my mind, this kind of invasion is (thankfully) something that's never going to happen, but recall how mainstream physicists do actually see life as a relatively likely outcome out there in the universe (even as biologists, ecologists and geologists feel that planets with any life are going to be excruciatingly few and far between). Which means that a species gearing its whole way of life to moving from one to another exploiting resources look all the more plausible...