David Porter looks at the film Independence Day.
How to save the world. Again.
A carefully-planned trailer ensured that Roland Emmerich's summer blockbuster movie of alien invasion, Independence Day, would be an instant success: the sequence in which the White House is destroyed was shot at the beginning of production and then used heavily in pre-release publicity.
Those who wondered if Emmerich was giving away his best shot were catered for by the film itself, which piles effect on effect and certainly justifies the suggestion that the film has the most extraordinary effects in the history of cinema.
It's highly derivative, but that's its charm. Most of the great set-pieces recall other films, from the echoes of the 2001 moonscape at the very beginning to a fallen Statue of Liberty recalling Planet of the Apes. Some of the imitation is sincere flattery, other sequences have an edge to them; the welcome to the aliens in Close Encounters is cynically mirrored in the massacre of a roof-top welcome party on top of the first skyscraper to be nuked. The streets of flame, cars tossed like leaves, explosions and fatalities all work extremely well on the big screen. They'll be less impressive on video; I found myself remembering the Vogon battlecruiser over a London tube station in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which generated almost as much fear but in purely TV terms.
