This film doesn't deserve anything higher than a five

Rating: 2/10 (13 May 2008)

Independence Day may be the best example of what I know as "Bad Hollywood". Although I not consider myself such an expert in movies as to spot an excellent screenplay, this movie may be an easy choice for noticing a bad screenplay.
Why, do you ask? Well, let's sum up this to five scenes or situations with a memorable quote from each.
#5 TV NEWS ANCHORMAN-"Once again, the L.A.P.D. is asking Los Angelenos not to fire their guns at the visitor spacecraft. You may inadvertently trigger an interstellar war".
Apparently, people in the US are stupid enough to think that with a six bullet revolver they can inflict damage to a spaceship that covers the entire sky and could easily squash one half of a city if it landed on it. Or at least, that's what the Network executives think.
#4 CONSTANCE (Before leaving David and his father alone in the Oval Office) "Don't touch anything.
Even if it was allowed that a White House employee let civilians inside the place where the President works, there still should be some security, don't you think? Whatever person that may be allowed to enter the Oval Office may have his own personal political agenda and vandalize the place, or at least take a little souvenir, from a fountain pen to the desk itself. But that seems to stop both characters after the instruction of "Don't touch anything".
#3 UNSPECIFIED FARMER (After pesticide has landed on the wrong field) "If your father doesn't come in 20 minutes, I'm hiring someone else".
What a threat! If I was the farmer, I would be personally furious, and would have said something like "When he comes, I'll junk his stupid biplane and beat the living hell out of him with the fuselage parts". But this one gives him twenty minutes to come, considering hiring someone else. Again, if I was that farmer, I wouldn't consider it. I would hire someone else right away!
#2 JULIUS "It's Air Force One, for crying out loud, and still he gets sick!" This time, the previous two civilians manage to inconspicuously enter Air Force One without previous authorization, just because they told the President to run away. No matter the heroics, I'm pretty sure the President never lets anyone with no business on board the plane to just "shoe in".
#1 PRESIDENT WHITMORE "Today we (the world) celebrate our Independence Day" The final line of the most hated speech in Hollywood cinema by every single anti-American in the world. I personally don't have anything against the US, but still this rather globally view of an American holiday may result a little bit insulting.
I've left out some quotes as I don't remember them literally. Still some scenes are probably some of the worst in a script and in a movie.
For instance, Steven (Will Smith) and Jasmine (Vivica A. Fox) are discussing about him leaving her, while an alien spacecraft is over their skies, just as if nothing is happening aside from a dog barking in the yard. The United States have three of those huge ships above three of their most important cities. Still every other country has only one ship above it's capital, including Russia, a much bigger country with other cities besides Moscow (like St. Petersburg or Stalingrad).
If you could make a game of drinking a shot of alcohol for every stupid line you find in the movie, you would need two bottles.
There were stuff I liked. The effects of course, are state the art, but that doesn't redeems the lousy script (whose weight was the action sequences and nothing else). The fighter planes sequences were actually very good, as I love battle scenes, and also the mother ship sequences. The kneeling down sequence in the locker room stole a chuckle.
The movie overall it's not as bad as others, but it's still very bad.
The script is for idiots who have never seen a movie (not just about US politics or Earth disaster movies, but overall any good movie). The performances, coming from otherwise good actors, are forced and completely embarrassing. The famous score by David Arnold, while spectacular and good, is too much for the movie. It's too dramatic and over the top for rather meaningless scenes. It may be that the music works better without the movie.
It's over patriotic tones are almost obscene. This is rather pathetic, knowing the fact that co-writer/director, Roland Emmerich, is German and by the time this movie was being made, he still had his German accent "Zis mofie vill be great".
It's not even fun to watch, except for the action sequences.
While some may disagree with me and consider it much better, I would object to giving the movie ten stars, as there are far better alien invasion movies around and this one has major flaws (again, the whole script). Even as I was entirely crazy, drunk, high or all of the above, I couldn't rate it higher than 5, but I'm pretty sure it deserves a 2/10 (one for the effects, another for the action sequences and that's pretty much it).