GUILTY PLEASURES - a space for people to share their filmic shame
Title: Independence Day (1996, 145 min)
Number of times watched: Four-and-a-bit (roughly)
Okay, just to be obtuse I don't actually believe in the phrase "guilty pleasures" in a literal sense. A pleasure is just a pleasure to me. But I know what we're getting at here so I shan't be an arse. I toiled with this one for ages; The Muppets Movie? No, that's as sharp as a whip, while being unbelievably meta and self-aware. And hilarious. Mean Girls? No - as that's simply a work of art. The Spongebob Squarepants Movie? Certainly not - it's all of the above.
So Independence Day. The pleasure is that it's shrouded in nostalgia for me; I remember going to see it with the mother in the brand new cinema in town when I was 12, and feeling very self-conscious about this at that age; I was hugely worried I may bump into some boys at my school and they'd laugh at me. I've watched it every few years since, generally while lounging in my PJs on New Year's day and being hungover and feeling fragile and wanting to die. It's my safety blanket.
I'm not much of an action movie fan. At all. But this is pretty much the most perfectly constructed action movie there is. Engineered in a lab to be as Blockbusyer-tastic as possible in that silly Summer US-tyle way. Iconic explosions and destruction (c'mon The White House exploding is something etched in everyone's head). Flippant one-liners from Will Smith "Welcome to Earth" *smack*), only just out of his Fresh Prince days. Romance and side stories. Unlikely heroes. Tragedy. Rousing speeches. And of course Jeff bleeding Goldblum, being Jeff bleeding Goldblum.
It's a B-Movie, on a blockbuster level. The awful Michael Bay made the big action movie a genre of his own after this, but ID doesn't contain the same casual homophobia and racism as his awful work, and does contain some kind of charm.
All of the above - the film is so engineered to be that perfect Blockbuster it's absurd. There's of course a huge hunk of cheese about the whole thing, alongside essentially 2D characters. Robert Elger says “There is not a single character in the movie who doesn't wear an invisible label." And he's right.
Also there's the part where undoubtedly millions of human beings have died in the alien invasion.. yet we're all rooting for someone's DOG (Boomer) to survive and it's a big deal when it leaps out of the ball of flames in the tunnel, and survives. Hey the pet survives, everything's okay! LA is in ruins but no-one cares about that. And the CGI explosion looks awful in that scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUlIOw4-3RM
But who cares as Independence Day is great.
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