Decent blockbuster (Independence Day (DVD))

Member Name: shaneo632

Product:	Independence Day (DVD)
Date:	19/09/09 (5 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well performed, impressive action

Disadvantages: Corny

note: also appears in part on Flixster and The Student Room

Independence Day is the film that shot director Roland Emmerich to fame, and established him as a director of high concept, big budget blockbuster films, following with efforts such as The Day After Tomorrow and 10,000 B.C. Whilst he rarely crafts intelligent films, this is probably his most charming one, thanks largely to the charismatic lead performances, notably from Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman. The film, combined with Will Smith's role in Bad Boys the same year, helped catapult him to superstardom.

The film opens as a massive alien spaceship gravitates towards Earth, deploying a number of saucer-shaped spacepods, which wait above all the major cities in the world. David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum), an MIT graduate, however notices some hidden coded messages, which he believes are counting down to a time when the ships will perform some sort of attack on Earth. He eventually warns President Thomas J. Whitmore (Bill Pullman), who orders all major American cities evacuated, but it's simply too late, because the aliens attack all of a sudden, reducing most of the cities to rubble and leaving only a few survivors behind.

When the military are sent in to attack the aliens, they are levelled very quickly, but one of the few survivors, Captain Steven Hiller (Will Smith), manages to survive and hopes to mount a secondary strike against the aliens.

It's a fun film that presents lots of spectacular scenes of destruction and is a visual marvel for its time. It's also quite corny, though, with some really overt and quite laughable patriotic sentiment, although it is quite knowing with its corniness, and never has pretensions beyond its uses - it knows it's brainless, and mostly revels in it.

A cheesy, fun, entertaining sci-fi actioner. Pullman as the President of the United States in itself is enough reason to watch this.

Summary: Corny but visually stunning