8 / 10
Official trailer
Independence Day is the alien invasion film that defined what summer blockbusters could be in the late 1990s. Roland Emmerich directed. Dean Devlin co-wrote with Emmerich. Will Smith plays Captain Steven Hiller, a Marine fighter pilot. Jeff Goldblum plays David Levinson, a cable technician with a Ph.D. from MIT. Bill Pullman plays President Thomas J. Whitmore. Mary McDonnell plays the First Lady. Judd Hirsch plays David’s father. Randy Quaid plays Russell Casse, an alcoholic crop duster pilot.
Vivica A. Fox plays Jasmine, Hiller’s girlfriend. Brent Spiner plays Dr. Brackish Okun. The plot involves the simultaneous arrival of fifteen-mile-wide alien spaceships above major Earth cities, the later destruction of those cities on July 2, the worldwide counterattack on July 3, and the climactic battle on July 4. The film made approximately eight hundred and seventeen million dollars worldwide on a seventy-five million dollar budget. It was the highest-grossing film of 1996.
Independence Day is big, loud and corny, and I have a weakness for every bit of it. Emmerich blows up the White House, Will Smith punches an alien, Bill Pullman gives a speech with no shame at all, and I’m grinning the entire time. It’s an 8 because the characters are thin and the plot runs on convenience, and the spectacle buys my forgiveness for both.
The film made Will Smith the dominant summer blockbuster star of the late 1990s, set up Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s long partnership producing disaster spectacles, and refined the destruction-of-iconic-landmarks template that later science fiction films would borrow. Whitmore’s pre-battle speech still gets quoted as if a real president had given it.
The Spectacle
The destruction-of-cities sequence is the film’s signature spectacle. The fifteen-mile-wide ships position themselves over major world capitals.
At noon, they fire green energy weapons that destroy the cities beneath them. The White House. The Empire State Building. The U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles. The audience watches major American architecture be destroyed in extended sequences. The visual destruction is the marketing. The trailers featured the White House explosion as their central image, and the film delivered the moment exactly as promised.
The spectacle came from extensive miniature work combined with then-advanced digital compositing. The ships were miniatures shot against bluescreen and composited into city footage, and the destruction used practical effects, model destruction and selective CGI. I think that’s why it still looks so good. The explosions have weight because something real got blown up, and I prefer that to the weightless digital rubble of most later disaster films.
For Writers
Physical destruction in fiction requires the audience to feel the weight of what is being destroyed. Independence Day spent its first hour establishing the cities and the people living in them. The destruction lands because the film has let the audience care about what is being lost. The lesson is that spectacle without setup is decoration. The audience must invest in what they’re about to watch be destroyed. The investment is the work that makes the destruction matter.
Will Smith
Will Smith was twenty-seven during filming, and Independence Day made him a global movie star.
The performance is tuned for maximum charm without shortchanging the action. The cigar after the victory, the “welcome to Earth” punch line, the boxing routine after dragging the alien through the desert: I love all of it. Smith is the best thing in the film, and he’s the reason the Hiller scenes never feel like filler between explosions.
The casting was the film’s most important creative decision. The Marines wanted to deny Smith the role because the Air Force has fighter pilots and Marines don’t (Hiller is misnamed in the script). Production proceeded anyway. The role solidified Smith’s transition from television comedy to mainstream action stardom. Bad Boys (1995) had been the test. Independence Day was the confirmation. Men in Black followed the next year. The summer-of-Will-Smith era ran from 1996 through approximately 2008.
For Writers
A performer’s specific charm can carry a film against any number of structural problems. Will Smith makes Steven Hiller credible as a Marine fighter pilot, a husband, a friend, and a national hero across a runtime that gives him many discrete tasks. The audience invests because the performer is investible. The lesson is that casting can sometimes substitute for character work in genre fiction. A strong enough performer fills in gaps the script leaves. This is a benefit and a risk.
Relying on charisma usually means the underlying character work is thinner than it should be.
The Whitmore Speech
President Whitmore’s pre-battle speech on July 4 is the film’s signature dialogue moment. Bill Pullman delivers approximately ninety seconds of rhetoric calling humanity to fight. The speech includes the line “today, we celebrate our Independence Day.” The construction is shameless. The delivery commits to the shamelessness. Pullman plays the moment without irony. The film argues that humanity facing extinction deserves rhetoric pitched at this scale.
The speech has been quoted, parodied and referenced for thirty years. Part of that is the writing and part is Pullman’s commitment.
A less committed actor would have winked, and Pullman never does. The speech is corny as hell and it gets me anyway. It’s shameless, the film knows it’s shameless, and Pullman plays it straight enough that by the last line I’m ready to climb into a fighter jet myself.
For Writers
A speech can carry a film if the performer commits to the speech without irony. The Whitmore speech in Independence Day is structurally shameless rhetoric. The performance plays it straight. The audience accepts the rhetoric because the performer treats it as serious. The lesson is that big rhetorical moments require commitment. Hedging on the rhetoric collapses the moment. The reader needs to feel the speaker meant it. Doubt the speech and the audience will doubt it too.
Craft Note
The White House destruction shot is the film’s most-copied piece of craft and among the most-imitated disaster sequences in cinema. Roland Emmerich combines forced perspective miniature work, practical pyrotechnics shot at multiple film speeds, and digital matte work that was advanced for 1996. The shot shows that a single iconic image can carry an entire marketing campaign and define a franchise’s visual identity.
Is Independence Day worth watching?
8/10. The defining alien invasion blockbuster of the 1990s, with Will Smith’s career-making performance, destruction sequences that set the template for later disaster films and a presidential speech people still quote. It loses two points because the characters are thin and the script leans on charm to cover the gaps, and I’d have traded a few of the side characters for more depth in the ones that matter. It makes me happy from the first ship to the last dogfight anyway. The sequel, Independence Day: Resurgence (2016), is best forgotten. Watch the original.
