Independence Day – 1996 (WINNER)
I went into this movie having seen it before, several times. I have always enjoyed watching it, but I had forgotten many of the movie’s flaws. Some of the acting was poor, the highly implausible script wasn’t very smart or even clever, and a lot of the dialogue was just dumb. But its ok. We went to see this movie for its fantastic action and special effects, and when it came to those things, this movie was great!
Hostile, technologically superior aliens arrive on earth. They position gigantic, city-sized ships over every major city on the planet. The arrival of the ships into earth’s atmosphere was really cool! They created massive, dense clouds that were ominous and apocalyptic. They cast dark shadows over iconic buildings like the Washington Monument, the White House, and The Empire State Building. A repeating signal is detected between them and the mother ship, in which is found an electronic countdown. The countdown reaches zero, and the real fun begins.
They shoot glowing blue-green beams down onto the cities that erupt into expanding walls of fire and destruction. This was really the film’s centerpiece. To see the White House explode in a gigantic ball of flame and flying shards of debris was just phenomenal! They showed several of these beams of devastation and the havoc they caused, and there were even a few great shots of the leveled cities. I’m guessing they used miniature models and composited them with digital matte paintings. The walls of fire were pretty impressive as they leveled the cities, throwing cars and people around like they were nothing. I actually would have liked to see a few more locations around the world being destroyed in this manner, but this movie was heavily America-centric.
After that, the good ol’ U.S. of A fights back, because goodness knows no other country in the world knows how to kick butt like America. There are a few cool aerial battles between our fighter jets and their alien combat ships. I particularly liked the effect of our missiles hitting their shields. These fast-paced action sequences were very exciting to watch, and looked fantastic on the screen. Even the sequence where the two good guys in the stolen Alien ship escaped from the mother ship was great!
And then there were the aliens, themselves. We only actually saw two live aliens in motion, if you don’t count the weird-looking CGI invasion forces all lined up inside the alien mother ship. They were big and menacing with bio-mechanical armor and flailing tentacles on their backs. Honestly, their faces looked like the faces of the underwater creatures in James Cameron’s The Abyss.
And finally, in the film’s climax, the Americans show the world how to beat the aliens. Blowing up their big devastating lasers apparently makes their entire ship erupt in a spectacular series of explosions, killing all the bad guys and completely destroying their ships. As implausible as that sounds for a technologically superior alien race, the visual effect was pretty cool, and well-worth the price of admission.