Independence Day (1996) Movie Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I'm back to review the 1996 Sci-Fi classic, Independence Day, starring an entire cast of 90's heavy hitters, including Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum. Let's get into it.

Independence Day is one of the many movies that I saw on TV throughout the 2000's, after I got a TV in my room in 2001. However, I don't think I saw the last hour or so of the movie, because most of my memories of the movie come from the first hour, where the aliens invade and President Whitmore (played by Bill Pullman) is on Air Force One with the majority of the rest of the movie's cast.

Directed by Roland Emmerich and written by Dean Devlin and Emmerich, Independence Day is an extremely interesting movie. It's not a character study. Characters like Whitmore, and David Levinson (played by Jeff Goldblum) have character arcs, but this movie is purely an action flick. I'm not usually a fan of pure action flicks, but if I'm being honest, it works for me here, because the characters are likeable, and I love the cast.

Brent Spiner has a minor role, but, like he did with all of his Star Trek roles, he is having so much fun playing his character, Dr. Okun. I think that's partially because he could really emote in this movie, AND he didn't have to put on gold makeup for it, like he did the other movie that he was in in 1996, Star Trek: First Contact. I also didn't realize that Adam Baldwin, who played Jayne in Firefly and its 2005 movie spin-off/followup, Serenity, was in this movie. Probably because I didn't see the second hour of this movie, starting with when the White House party, David, and his dad, Julius (played by Judd Hirsch), arrive at Area 51.

I honestly don't have much to say about the action because it's action. Like what can you say about action sequences that everyone's been talking about for the last 28 years? For me the dogfight scenes very much reminded me of both Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. The music in the movie is good. Even though it's not John Williams (the score was done by David Arnold), it SOUNDS like a John Williams score. There's just some musical cues in this score that sound like John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith composed them.

I wanna go back to the cast for a moment, because with the exception of maybe one or two of them, I've seen them in other things over the years. Including Mary McDonnell as President Roslin in season 1 of the 2003/2004 remake of Battlestar Galactica. And while I'm generally not a fan of Jeff Goldblum, mainly because he plays unlikeable characters in everything I've seen him in, including Jurassic Park, I really liked his character, David, in this movie. It's also funny that I've seen Judd Hirsch more in the last decade than I have any other time in my life. He plays Jeff Goldblum's dad in this movie. And he seems to be good at playing fathers because he played Leonard's dad on The Big Bang Theory, and Murray's dad in the second half of The Goldbergs and was sort of a main part of the show's recurring cast in its final season. Oh and Harvey Fierstein voiced Yao in Mulan, which I did not know until I was looking at his Wikipedia page for this review. Go figure.

I did have Independence Day on VHS when I first started collecting VHS again five years ago. However, I'd had it on DVD since around the time my parents and I moved out of our old house in Greely, so I got rid of the VHS since it's not a movie that I watch all that often. I wasn't even sure if I was going to keep the DVD for that same reason, as I hadn't watched the DVD until last night. 

Full disclosure, I hadn't even planned on doing this review at all. I'd decided to watch the movie because the VHS Club Video Podcast is doing their review on the movie tonight on their live show, and I wanted to be able to participate in the chat during the episode. But, when the movie ended last night, I decided I wanted to write about it, since it wasn't going to fit in my My 90's and Early 2000's Experience series since, even though it came out in 1996, I didn't see it until at least 2007, 2006 at the earliest, and I didn't watch the whole movie. It also wasn't a movie that had much of an impact on me since I didn't watch it when I was a kid.

Independence Day is a good movie. I don't love it, but I did like watching it last night. It was pretty fast paced, and I think that's my biggest problem with this movie. There wasn't any time to really get to know any of the characters before the aliens invaded Earth. But the movie was focused on the invasion and the actions taken by the characters in the movie to fight off the invasion.

Alright my friends, that's gonna be it for me for today. I don't know if I'm going to have any other blog posts coming out this week or not. If not I'll see you on Tuesday for the next My 90's and Early 2000's Experience post. Until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.