Roland Emmerich (1996)
Points of interest (I slept through much of the first hour so may have missed lots more) …
(1) This alien invasion movie was made in the relatively short interval between the end of the Cold War and the onset of modern global terrorism. The film went into production midway through Bill Clinton’s first term as President, when the economic situation and outlook in the US and the West more generally were relatively very positive. This and the great commercial success of Independence Day suggest that actual, immediate threat and adversity aren’t necessary in order for pictures like this to be conceived and to prosper. The American economy was faring well too when Invasion of the Bodysnatchers was made in 1956 but the climate of fear – of nuclear war and/or Communist brainwashing – at that time was salient in contemporary culture. Independence Day seems rather to tap into a public unease that things seem to be going too well.
(2) Thanks to the lack of any obvious terrestrial enemy, the film’s President Thomas J Whitmore proposes that in future the Fourth of July should become a day of celebration not just for the USA but for the whole world. This gesture of American benevolence comes across as more egregiously nationalist than any anti-Commie or anti-anyone else statements in militaristic movies that I can call to mind.
(3) High-fiving is a more recent epidemic than I’d thought. When the alien threat is overcome, people – even in America – merely hug each other and clench their fists. Everyone on the planet celebrates, including a group of spear-carrying African tribespeople, who wave their free arm rather limply. When the long-awaited Independence Day 2 finally arrives (it’s now scheduled for July 2016), it will be possible in the corresponding sequences for the representatives of all peoples of the world to high-five.
(4) The character of Russell Caisse – who, according to Wikipedia, is a ‘widowed, alcoholic crop duster and veteran Vietnam War pilot who claims to have been an alien abductee prior to the film’s events’ – provides a connection to they-came-from-outer-space thrillers of an earlier era. As he heads to his gung-ho kamikaze end, Randy Quaid also recalls a character in a very different kind of movie: Slim Pickens’s Major Kong in Dr Strangelove
(5) Will Smith, as a military pilot, is a lot more annoying than Jeff Goldblum, an IT nerd, with whom Smith joins forces to save the day and the planet. Yet Judd Hirsch as Goldblum’s father, who reconnects with his Jewish faith and eventually puts on a yarmulke to prove it, is nearly as annoying as Smith – so you wonder if, in spite of appearances, it’s the Smith and Hirsch characters who are really related.
(6) Bill Pullman, as President Whitmore, is too quiet and tasteful for the whole enterprise – even when he gets into fighter pilot gear and leads a strike against an alien destroyer. It’s funny how good American actors (George Clooney in The Ides of March a more recent example) tend to underplay the crude grandstanding to which American politicians are prone – even when, as here, they’re delivering statements of jingoistic idiocy. Mary McDonnell is more convincing as the doomed First Lady, with her fixed professional smile and highly resilient hairdo.
26 December 2013
