Special effects take the lead role in Independence Day, the fastest-earning movie of all time. JONATHAN FREEDLAND explains the monster hit
DIALOGUE doesn’t get much of a look-in in Independence Day, the sci-fi blockbuster now blowing US box-office records out of the sky like so many enemy alien spaceships. What with the hi-tech crushing of New York, Los Angeles, Washington, London and Moscow, the movie has little room for words. But one short sentence squeaks through: an incredulous child, gazing at the city-size saucer in the heavens above gasps: “It’s just unreal.”
Snarly critics might well say the same of the film, whose dialogue flips between B- movie tacky and disaster-movie cheesy. But they’d be wrong. Independence Day is very real, and not just because it’s the monster hit of 1996 and possibly of all time: in the first six-and-a-half days of its US run it became the fastest-earning film ever, bagging R450-million (Jurassic Park took nine). Independence Day has grabbed attention for reasons beyond its phenomenal commercial success — fuelled by Americans who have queued round the block to get to screenings at one, four and seven o’clock in the morning. The film has been hailed as a cultural snapshot, capturing much of what’s going on in Hollywood and in America itself.
It makes perfect sense that Independence Day is seen as a handy summary of the state of the US movie business. It is a virtual amalgam of every film currently churned out by Hollywood. The story of a world laid siege by hostile spacecraft has a US leader modelled on Michael Douglas’s American President: young, handsome and vaguely Clintonian (the White House scenes were filmed on the same set). The sky-high terror causes havoc, throwing trucks and tankers around like children’s toys — just like the upcoming Twister. Only computer wizardry can confound the forces of evil, as audiences have already learned in Mission: Impossible. There’s even an exotic dancer, who performs solely to support her child — the shaky premise of Demi Moore’s summer flop Striptease.
Independence Day stands above them all because it has dared to take the current direction in Hollywood movies to a logical extreme: films as rides, more appropriate to a theme park than a cinema.
Sean Connery’s The Rock and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Eraser, along with Twister and Mission: Impossible, have packed the multiplexes this summer with films that make your chair vibrate, and where the only emoting comes from the enhanced Dolby sound system. These thrill- a-minute spectaculars take as their inspiration the attractions at the Universal Studios Tour, rather than old- fashioned drama.
That’s why, even though Americans said they couldn’t follow the plot of Mission: Impossible, most didn’t care. It’s the same with Independence Day. Even if you accept its far-out premise, the plot is so riddled with holes (Man has to search entire United States to find girl, does it within minutes).
Steven Spielberg spots a trend: “If the Seventies and Eighties were the era of the “What If?” movie, then the Nineties are that of the “What the Heck!” movie,” he told Time magazine. “We say, ‘Hey, this is so beyond our logical grasp, so out of this world, that we’re just going along for the ride’.”
In this, Independence Day is the model of the form. It doesn’t worry that its characters are utterly one-dimensional — – Jeff Goldblum as clever Jewish scientist-geek, Will Smith as cocky Top Gun pilot, Vivica Fox as tart with a heart, Margaret Colin as cold career woman — just as it didn’t bother to recruit any really big-name actors. It knows its true star is the special effects department and that in the business of spaceships, laserfights and sheer spectacle, size is all that matters.
Industry analysts are already venerating Fox’s marketing strategy as the textbook for other studios to follow. They built up the hype for six months with teasing trailers and a 30-second TV ad during the mass-audience Superbowl in January. That was what created Independence Day’s status as an event movie — a must-see that would make those left behind feel like they’d been living on Mars. The film is set over the July 4 weekend, so that’s when it opened — with the added gimmick of all-night screenings. And Fox also practised neat synergy: the fictitious reports shown in the movie all come courtesy of Sky News which — like Fox — is owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Still, Independence Day’s real interest lies in what it reveals about America. “The US is desperately in search of an enemy,” says Paul Verhoeven, who directed Robocop and Total Recall. In the post-cold war world, communists will no longer do. Middle Eastern terror is already passe and it offends Arab-Americans. The Rock tried the enemy within — with a disaffected right-wing US general — but that can get messy and can alienate a chunk of the audience.
Extraterrestrials are the perfect solution. “They’re bad. They’re evil. And they’re not even human,” says Verhoeven.
Independence Day also exposes several American traits with laser beam clarity. America sees itself as the last superpower, so it’s left to the US to fend off the aliens. In one scene, a British commander is seen standing around until he hears the Americans are launching a counter attack. “About bloody time,” he says.
America wants to be a place where all races get along. So Independence Day has a Wasp president, surrounded by Jews, blacks and Hispanics who join together to save the day. Americans love family values, so Will Smith’s pilot makes sure he ties the knot before flying off to “whoop ET’s ass”.
Which leaves the small matter of what the aliens themselves represent. The Fifties crop of space-invader flicks were all veiled allegories playing on American fears that the Russians were coming. Some critics suspect the patriotism of Independence Day might be a coded cry of panic over aliens of an other kind: illegal immigrants heading for America’s southern border.
Either way, Independence Day is a film of its time. Americans are obsesssed by the paranormal — scan the bestsellers’ lists or the ratings for the X-Files. Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! is coming this Christmas, along with Contact; Starship Troopers and Michael Crichton’s Sphere. When it comes to America’s appetite for tales from space, there’s indeed something out there.