Our Daily Trailer: INDEPENDENCE DAY
4th of July fever is a mystery to non-Americans. Sure, the rest of us love our countries because we were born in them too, but we don't even approach the incendiary patriotism America radiates to the world. I grew up in Texas, for Christ's sake, and I still don’t get it. The 4th of July may be a glorious, positive holiday for you, but to the rest of us, you guys look INSANE, with your fireworks and your hot dogs and your Uncle Sam hats. On New Zealand's equivalent holiday (the anniversary of the still-controversial treaty wherein the indigenous Maori people more or less signed away their land to England), our population forgoes celebrations in favour of heading home to have a good, hard think about what it’s done.
But if America wasn’t as ludicrously patriotic as it is, it might not have gifted the world a movie as patriotically ludicrous as Independence Day.
The above trailer is a memorable tease for a movie that would become the highest grosser of 1996 (among a top 20 that featured only three remakes and one sequel!). It doesn’t reveal any more about its story than “aliens come to blow shit up.” There’s nary a glimpse of either of its delightfully oddly matched co-leads Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum - only perfectly-cast Joint Chiefs Chairman Robert Loggia. Excitement for the movie is built by two things: the trailer’s countdown structure, and one of the best money shots in cinema history in the form of the White House explosion.
Independence Day’s German director Roland Emmerich has a filmography equally obsessed with destroying American iconography as it is with glorifying it, and here, the destruction of landmarks like the White House and the Empire State Building - using huge miniatures and pyrotechnics still yet to be equalled - becomes a deeply patriotic act on the part of the filmmakers. In retaliation to its landmarks being destroyed, of course, the United States leads an ultimately victorious global coalition against the marauding aliens. Given the terrifying might of the American military, that’s not an unbelievable premise. But ID4 isn’t satisfied with that: it has to put President Bill Pullman in his own fighter jet to fight the aliens in person, Commander-in-Chief versus nameless peon.
It’s that willingness to present the ridiculous with a completely straight face from whence Independence Day derives its charm. This is a movie that has Air Force One pulling out just ahead of an alien explosion; Will Smith punching an alien unconscious; and Jeff Goldblum uploading malware to an alien mothership from his PowerBook. It’s a movie where the United States gives the gift of its own holiday to a graciously accepting world, making everyone else that little bit more like America. And it’s a movie where all of this happens with the utmost sincerity and gravitas.
Independence Day laid the groundwork for countless recent blockbusters, most notably the Transformers movies, which are like grotesque cartoon versions of an already over-the-top film. (Seriously - everything malignant about Transformers started out relatively benign in ID4.) Sequels have been bandied about for literal decades, but given the direction of Emmerich’s career and of blockbusters in general, it’s hard to believe they could live up to the original. It’s an odd notion to contemplate, but they don’t make ‘em like Independence Day anymore.
Have a happy 4th of July this Friday, you wacky Americans.
