Film
Independence Day
- Director
- Roland Emmerich
- Certificate
- 12A
- Running Time
- 153 mins
Back in 1996, after years of big-budget, mainstream SF movies with no real feel for the genre, Stargate director Roland Emmerich and his scriptwriting partner Dean Devlin delivered this entertaining $70 million Alien Invasion B-picture that harks back to War of the Worlds, while drawing upon ‘70s disaster movies, Top Gun-style heroics and Alien-derived horror.
Okay, the characters are cliched, the plot’s riddled with holes, and the tone shifts uncomfortably between apocalyptic horror and badass banter, but Emmerich’s fan boy aesthetic delivers the goods, taking its time to develop our emotional involvement with the threatened Earthlings before pulling us up short with fiery images of city-wide destruction, then slowly recovering pace and scale as it builds up towards an eye popping, rib-shaking finale. Bill Pullman’s president is sincere without being irksome, and, with the help of Jeff Goldblum’s backroom boffin and Will Smith’s brash pilot, shows he has the right stuff to win the day, although the gung-ho American patriotism is more than a little irritating.
This 25th anniversary reissue is of the extended cut, which delivers nine additional minutes of alien whupass.
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