Flashback – 1996 – Independence Day

Posted by Dan Stasiewski on Jul 3, 2008 in Flashback | 3 comments

Original Release: 7/3/1996 “Today is our Independence Day!” I want so hard to not like Independence Day. In fact, I remember not liking Independence Day when I first started to write about movies. As James Berardinelli put it in his 1996 review, the film had a “hackneyed plot, feeble attempts at characterization, and a predictable finale.” Yet every time I watch the Roland Emmerich disaster epic, I find like it more and more. Most of the above criticism misses the point. Independence Day makes spectacle its top priority like other pioneering effects movies of the 1990s. And unlike the lackluster disaster films that followed it, Independence Day also takes pacing the characters’ stories seriously. It has to. We still have to watch a whole lot of movie after alien spaceships level Los Angeles, New York City and D.C. And we...