Independence Day turns 25. BONUS cinematic throwback.

Summer 1996. My senior summer. The last summer of pure freedom. Movie fandom blowing up. And one of the all time best blockbuster summers (probably THE best in terms of batting average).

ID4 was the crown jewel. Everybody was crazy hyped for this movie, myself included.

The lore of this movie always includes the Super Bowl teaser. This was maybe the first time a Super Bowl ad for a movie was a big deal. I'm pretty sure this movie was already on my radar by that point. Director Roland Emmerich was coming off of Stargate, which at the time I was a pretty big fan of. So giving him a big alien invasion movie was instant hype. And at this point the big CGI revolution was new and hadn't been used on this kind of movie yet.

No doubt the marketing for this flick was all time great. Just try to watch the trailers for this without getting hyped.

ID4 just by what it was was set up to be the quintessential summer movie. It takes place on the holiday. It HAD no choice but to be a summer movie.

Will Smith. Look, he was already a movie star. Bad Boys clinched that. But this movie made him the biggest movie star. I'm not sure there has been anything like this since. Nobody even becomes a movie star anymore independent of some franchise. 

So the movie itself. It wastes no time, as the very beginning of the movie is the aliens arriving outside the atmosphere. The whole first 45 minutes or so are just an expert example of story setup and pacing, leading up to the aliens blowing shit up. The shots of the spaceships bursting through the clouds remain awesome spectacle. There's even a literal ticking clock.

Movies like this by design always do shorthand characterizations. I'm sorry, but when you have to juggle a huge plot and so many characters you aren't going to have time to sit with them and hear their thoughts on life. Movies like this always get unfairly criticized for that approach. ID4 does about as good a job as any. The casting is so good. You know everything you need to know about all the major characters by the time the aliens attack. Will Smith, Jeff Golblum, Bill Pullman, Randy Quaid, Vivica Fox, Robert Loggia, Judd Hirsch, even little Mae Whitman. Even Harvey Fierstein is a hoot. Yeah Adam Baldwin is in it, but no cast is perfect. 

That first destruction sequence is what people remember most from the movie. It really holds up, even if you can really tell how much of it is old fashioned model work (but even that has a charm to it). At this point we have seen landmarks destroyed so many times that it may have lost some of its visceral kick (even Emmerich has destroyed the White House again), but this one still really nailed the scope and while this is cool to watch it also can feel scary.

The July 3rd second act is pure post-calamity disaster movie, and also where Smith especially takes control of the movie. The Grand Canyon dogfight (homaged in The Falcon and The Wibter Soldier) is the peak of the movie for me.

And in act 2 we get all the fun, kooky stuff involving Brent Spiner's wacky scientist, and all the fun tie-ins to all the Area 51/Roswell conspiracy stuff. Few movies like this have ever been.able to find that balance between both being a certain genre film and poking fun at the genre, while never lapsing into self-parody.

Then July 4th is the big rally the troops, fighting back climax. Everyone remembers the big Bill Pullman rah-rah speech, which again manages to find that right spot between cheesy and rousing.

I always appreciated how the movie doesn't make the problem of figuring out how to defeat the aliens into a quick fix. The whole middle of the movie is trial and error, setting up the aliens as a seemingly impossible adversary. Now, yes, everyone who hates this movie always trashes it for the way they eventually do defeat the aliens, through the whole conceit of implanting a computer virus into the mother ship. Look, they were using computers to study that crashed ship in that lab for decades. Surely they had some means of connecting the technologies, even if they couldn't control it. And Goldblum is established as essentially a tech genius. I never had a problem buying it, but then again I don't seek out reasons to hate things.

Overall the movie, like all great blockbusters, finishes strong. I love pretty much everything in the finale, from all the stuff with Smith and Goldblum in space, to the dogfights on the ground, to the delightfully cheesy Randy Quaid sacrifice.

I saw this the first time in a packed theater on July 4th. It was one of the best moviegoing experiences ever to have a big crowd-pleasing blockbuster completely work its magic on a full theater. I ended up seeing it in theaters 5 times. I rushed out to buy the priced to own VHS (those were always a big deal). 1996 was a hell of a movie year, but it's still one of the best of that year, and one of the unquestioned peaks of 90's blockbusters.

Smith was the only one in the cast to really propel their career from this. He spent the next decade cranking out smash after smash. Fox had a hell of a run for a few years after this. Goldblum was and always will be inimitably Goldblum. Nobody else really got a big bump. Emmerich himself decided to make Godzilla, and he was THE reason that movie got so highly anticipated, but he wouldn't really click again til The Day After Tomorrow. 

Now, yes, I have to mention the sequel. Talk of a sequel went way back to the late 90s, even though this movie ties things up pretty perfectly. It's established that this is the whole alien civilization that was just defeated. The sequel retcons that. But I always looked at it as a great thing that Emmerich and co. did not just rush into a sequel. Years, even decades passed, but no sequel. I was content with there never being one, unless Emmerich really had the right idea. So when a sequel was finally announced I was really excited, even though Smith didn't return. 

Then Independence Day: Resurgence happened. It wasn't the worst sequel of all time or anything, but it kind of shits on the original. They kill off major returning characters in insulting ways. They tell us Smith died between films. They recast Mae Whitman's character. It's kind of damaging to the original film, more than almost any sequel ever.

But I have kind of just decided that the sequel is not canon. The original movie is the only movie that counts. And it remains one of the all time summer blockbusters both as a movie and as nostalgia.