Independence Day (1996)
Directed by Roland Emmerich
Strange phenomena surface around the globe. The skies ignite. Terror races through the world's major cities. As these extraordinary events unfold, it becomes increasingly clear that a force of incredible magnitude has arrived. Its mission: total annihilation over the Fourth of July weekend. The last hope to stop the destruction is an unlikely group of people united by fate and unimaginable circumstances.
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17 films that influenced Independence Day
What critics say influenced Independence Day
As satisfyingly hokey and full of Designated Colorful Characters as any of the great 1970s human-face-of-disaster epics ? the four Airport sagas, The Towering Inferno, etc. ? on which director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin (the 1994 Stargate team, who also wrote the screenplay) drew for inspiration.
As satisfyingly hokey and full of Designated Colorful Characters as any of the great 1970s human-face-of-disaster epics ? the four Airport sagas, The Towering Inferno, etc. ? on which director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin (the 1994 Stargate team, who also wrote the screenplay) drew for inspiration.
This is 1974's "Earthquake" redux only without Chuck Heston, Marjoe Gortner and Victoria Principal.
Borrowing liberally from The War of the Worlds, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and seemingly every other sci-fi outing this side of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, the picture somehow manages to recycle these reference points and come up with something that works on its own terms.
Given a choice between this and Independence Day , not only is Close Encounters more plausible, but infinitely preferable.
Whether you call it "homage" or "rip-off," "Independence Day" could not exist without a wide array of predecessors - "War of the Worlds," "Star Wars," "Alien," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "Star Trek," "The X-Files," "The Stand," "V" . . .
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Though interwoven with government conspiracy theories and UFO abduction fantasies, the plot principally dates back to the 1953 film adaptation of H.G. Wells's "The War of the Worlds."
Borrowing liberally from The War of the Worlds, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and seemingly every other sci-fi outing this side of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, the picture somehow manages to recycle these reference points and come up with something that works on its own terms.
Each of these seminal science-fiction efforts is specifically invoked by a scene or plot device, and many others ("Planet of the Apes," "E.T.," "2001," "Dr.
"E.T." answered a need for family reassurance, while "Close Encounters" responded to our hunger for wonder.
From the cheesy dialogue and paranoid conservatism to the gleeful defilement of national monuments, this is Earth vs. the Flying Saucers from 1956--albeit updated for the '90s via Star Wars, Alien, Top Gun, and T2, and then filtered through the '70s disaster genre and that awful TV movie from the nuclear-scare era, The Day After.
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Though Lucas has retouched "Star Wars" and its sequels for the re-release today, the movie seems rather quaint by the relentlessly numbing standards of "Independence Day."
Compare Independence Day to Star Wars and the difference will become apparent.
For better and for worse, this 1996 megahit is an archetypal 50s alien-invasion/disaster movie, though it contains dollops of Dr. Strangelove (without the 60s irony) and Star Wars (with equal nostalgia for old movie tropes).
It is not a bad story and it is told well by director Roland Emmerich, but with better writing, a couple of stars and better special effects, this could have been in the class of "Star Wars" or "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
The traditional language of space opera -- stretching from Buck Rogers to "Star Wars" -- isn't the only way to portray inter-species combat; great science-fiction novels like Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" have proved that.
And unlike the government-penned love songs sung by the washerwoman in 1984, it signals the fact that it's a counterfeit on a semi-regular basis.