I enjoyed it. I don’t try to judge it as a work of serious filmmaking, just a bubble gum action flick. On that level, it was entertaining.
This movie is a horrible, horrible, dumb movie. It is also one of my biggest guilty pleasures.
What I don’t get is why people call it “ID4”. Eh? Independence Day 4?
It’s also a pretty obvious reference to Star Wars Episode IV.
It’s the highest-budgeted B-movie ever made.
At Radio Shack or Best Buy?
It is? Putting a “4” on the end of anything would be, then. Just reads awkwardly to me.
Independence Day was released in 1996. No one cared about the Episode numbering in Star Wars until Episode I came out a few years later.
In other word, cite?
The flick was promoted that way. It opened on July 4th - Independence Day don’cha know[sup]1[/sup]. “ID4” fits nicely on a marquee or poster or in a commercial.
Of course, much of the target audience started asking where they could rent the first three Independence Day movies, and when ID5 was coming out. :smack:
[sup]1[/sup] Note to non-US readers: if you don’t get the reference - get oudda here ya furriner! But leave your admission and popcorn money. :rolleyes: x 1776
This!
It is a ‘fun’ movie. The cast does a terrific job with a terrible script. This film shows off Will Smith’s charisma better than any other. He MAKES you have fun. He’s having fun, and he brings you along.
This is one of those ‘guilty pleasure’ movies.
Um, my peers started talking about the episode number thing when Empire came out and suddenly we were on “Episode V” of something we’d all only seen one part of before. (Not all of us got to see the re-release of Star Wars that had the “Episode IV” tag.) YMMV, of course.
And no, I don’t have a cite any more than I have a cite for the obviousness of the city-killer spaceships being an allusion to Childhood’s End or the obviousness of the computer virus being an allusion to War of the Worlds. “Obvious” is always in the eye of the beholder.
Actually, it was released on July 2.
Don’t forget Will Patton–who was in Armageddon.
I disagree. I, Robot holds that honor, if only because he has more screen time.
And one of my favorite Will Smith lines of all times:
Spooner: I don’t know what “blithely” means but I’m going to get some coffee. You want some coffee?
All the more so because it’s a callback to Men in Black.
Action movies don’t have to be dumb, and they’re better when they’re not. (more to follow)
Yes; if only they’d made the movie sixty years earlier, they could have gotten Stepin Fetchit for the role.
That’s an exaggeration, but Smith’s goggle-eyed amazement schtick never really struck me as all that funny or interesting. I much prefer Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black; utterly deadpan no matter what bizarre things are happening.
Die Hard is a big, smart action movie. Accept the premise and the rest of it comes naturally; the bad guys have a plan, they’ve trained and practiced, and the surprises seem obvious once they’ve happened. Independence Day is just a series of cliches; ominous warnings are ignored, good guys narrowly escape destruction and hole up at the secret base, geeky scientist, rescue the family dog, unlikely lone hero comes through and wins his son’s respect, and one last, desperate chance to save the world. I hated it.
Really? Please explain!
In Men in Black, when Tommy Lee Jones first briefs Smith on the MiB program as they’re walking down the hallway and Smith rejects the job offer in disbelief, Jones sighs and says, “Okay. I’m gonna get some coffee, you want some coffee?” “No, thank you, I’m fine.” That’s when Jones steps into the kitchen and we first see the Worms.
It’s not an explicit connection, but Smith says the line in I, Robot exactly the same way Jones says it in MiB.
Yeah, I watch this stuff too much.
And Brent Spiner doing an annoying uber-nerd who meets a fate we sometimes wish upon the annoying uber-nerds in our life? I loved his pants and tie, BTW.
I’ve watched it on the telly seven or eight times, so I must not hate it too much.
It’s got some trite parts, but it isn’t aspiring to insight or significance, so the trite is all right.
Same thing for the acting. The bad flows by painlessly and there are some fun parts (particularly the Goldblum and Smith interaction.)
I’d say that the idea that the movie is ripping off War of the Worlds because they both use “viruses” is silly. The viruses aren’t comparable, and the computer disruption wasn’t nearly as significant in Independence Day as the microbes were in WOTW.
It’s actually one of the few movies where I like Goldblum a lot. His particular speech habits work really well with the script and create a sort of cadence that’s fun to listen to. And Judd Hirsch is great. “All you need is love. John Lennon. Smart man. Shot in the back. Very sad.”
I will say, though, that as much as I allow myself to get emotionally worked up by Pullman’s speech before the climactic fight, I can’t shut my brain off quite enough to ignore the resounding dissonance of trying to link declaring independence from Britain to fighting off a freaking alien invasion. If the aliens had established themselves as tyrannical overlords instead of destructive scourges, it would make far more sense.
Is *Independence Day *the one where the POTUS himself gets into a fighter plane to go help beat the aliens?