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| Genre: | SciFi |
| Year: | 1996 |
| Rating: | PG13 |
| Length: | 2h 33mins |
| Cast: | Roland Emmerich, Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum |
Independence Day's grand-scale invasion of theaters marked it one of the biggest summer blockbusters of the 1990s. The story is simple enough: Aliens show up over the Fourth of July weekend and without reason blow up most of the world. It's up to the heroic survivors -- stern-faced president Bill Pullman, amiable Army pilot Will Smith, and plucky software programmer Jeff Goldblum among them -- to save the planet. Independence Day is a lot of things: patriotic battle cry; special effects extravaganza; really, really scary and loud. Though the film is not particularly dramatic or thought provoking, director Roland Emmerich (The Patriot) makes an entertaining ride out of fabulous effects, particularly the horrifyingly fiery obliteration of cities worldwide. Smith is fresh once again with a terrific alien-whuppin' swagger, and though Pullman's rousing Fourth of July speech before the climactic battle is not on the literary level of Henry V's St. Crispin's Day speech, it is equally motivational. A loud throwback to alien paranoia of the H. G. Wells classic War of the Worlds, ID4 more than found itself a place in sci-fi/action history, it attacked and took over. Pete Segall
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