David Porter looks at the film Independence Day.
How to save the world. Again.
A carefully-planned trailer ensured that Roland Emmerich's summer blockbuster movie of alien invasion, Independence Day, would be an instant success: the sequence in which the White House is destroyed was shot at the beginning of production and then used heavily in pre-release publicity.
Those who wondered if Emmerich was giving away his best shot were catered for by the film itself, which piles effect on effect and certainly justifies the suggestion that the film has the most extraordinary effects in the history of cinema.
It's highly derivative, but that's its charm. Most of the great set-pieces recall other films, from the echoes of the 2001 moonscape at the very beginning to a fallen Statue of Liberty recalling Planet of the Apes. Some of the imitation is sincere flattery, other sequences have an edge to them; the welcome to the aliens in Close Encounters is cynically mirrored in the massacre of a roof-top welcome party on top of the first skyscraper to be nuked. The streets of flame, cars tossed like leaves, explosions and fatalities all work extremely well on the big screen. They'll be less impressive on video; I found myself remembering the Vogon battlecruiser over a London tube station in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which generated almost as much fear but in purely TV terms.
Not many tricks are missed. Like a pulp disaster novelist, Emmerich chooses a handful of characters and makes us really care about their fate: somehow the millions of other deaths pale into insignificance once the pretty woman is rescued and the plain one dies heroic-ally. Similarly, the ludicrous assumption that the whole world would accept America as self-appointed global saviour (with hammy speech by presidential-wimp-made-good Bill Pullman) and the lurch into buddy movie rhetoric as Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum team up to save the world are details one might worry about in a slower-moving film.
Hokum
Nevertheless, as a piece of hokum it justifies all the publicity. You'll have to be in an uncritical mood and disinclined to ponder the harsh realities of life to really get your money's worth, but if you enjoyed Close Encounters, Jurassic Park and Jaws, the odds are you'll not complain about Independence Day.
Christians might bring deeper questions to this film than it is willing to discuss, despite the very biblical visual metaphors of the early sequences: the appearance of the alien craft as pillars of smoke and fire in the desert, a few brave palm trees surviving the urban holocaust, and a very strong sub-text of Jewish faith. Such touches serve, like other details in the film, as reassuring spiritual gestures. There's a pervasive emphasis on the redemptive power of crisis; the alcoholic ex-pilot once kidnapped by aliens appears, washed and shaved, in time to make the ultimate sacrifice; the wimpish president makes good; the lapsed Jewish father ends up organising an emergency prayer meeting; bad government (secrecy about UFOs) is shown to be morally inferior to good government (the aforementioned hammy speech); and the world population (well, what's left of it), having faced together the threat of a purely evil alien horde, can now look forward to a future of peace and harmony. Add a touch of religion, a dash of homespun philosophy, and some convincing special effects, and you have a wholesome, uplifting film, that, with its '12' certificate, is bound to edify most of the family. Right?
Wrong, in my opinion, though it seems a bit churlish to spoil the fun. But there's actually a danger in films like this which we need to bear in mind, though I don't think it means they should be shunned.
Chaplin's wartime The Great Dictator also had a hammy speech straight to camera and addressed issues of tyranny and invasion in its own context. And though the film was a hilarious comedy, it changed many people's minds about Hitler and the war; through comedy (more so than through Chaplin's peroration at the end), it made people angry and shaped mass attitudes.
So what contribution is Independence Day making to the ongoing debate about extra-terrestrial life? It seems to be preaching the indefatigable ability of the human psyche to defeat tyranny by sheer strength of spirit; there's a kind of stoicism in the film that measures courage by the quality of the wisecracks you make as you encounter the foe; love, as always, is imperishable and will survive; and a humanistic gospel of the power of the unchained human spirit, adorned with a smattering of religion for good measure, suffuses the whole.
I think Chaplin's values were better. You could fight a dictator with what you absorbed from Chaplin's film. Trying to deal with an alien invasion using insights derived from Independence Day would probably mean you got melted very quickly.
Certainly I and my whole family enjoyed the film hugely, but I do hope none of us will be tempted to use it to help us think about anything important at all.
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