Independence Day Review

By Paul Anthony

After so many years of writing now and seeing SmashWriting grow to all platforms, the one thing I haven’t done was review a film that I have watched so many times and have yet to give it a review. With Independence Day upon us I figured to do a weekend worth of blogs and of course I had to start with this film, well let’s waste no time and start discussing this movie. The film had a star studded cast which was being led by Jeff Goldblum, Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Randy Quaid, Robert Loggia, Vivica A. Fox, James Rebhorn and Judd Hirsch. A whole lot of big time stars here. People may wonder why I didn’t put Will Smith first but his character was a co lead not the main lead and Will Smith wasn’t a big movie star just yet when this film came out in fact this movie plus Bad Boys which came out a year early started to launch him into superstardom but that is a discussion for another day. The movie was made on a 75 million dollar budget and ended up grossing 817 million dollars worldwide. Making it the highest grossing movie of 1996 and the second highest grossing film of all time at the time. the Movie was nominated for Academy award for best sound and won the academy award for best visual effects. The film was released on July 3rd but had a limited release on July 2nd in which the film takes place from July second to July fourth.

Honestly the plot is simple aliens begin to invade earth randomly, which of course catches the earth as whole off guard, though they had warnings those warnings were just too late and the aliens begin to destroy certain cities once again for unknown reasons at this point. The attack happens on July second and by July third the world does a counter attack which does nothing because the learn that the Aliens have some type of force shields that make any outside attack useless. When the president arrives at Area 51, we do learn that these Aliens at some point arrived on earth in small waves because here they had the old ones that arrived and also justified crazy character Russell Casse played by Randy Quaid. At this point we learn that the aliens can communicate through humans by basically chocking them and leaves the humans mentally linked to them but it is a two way thing because the presidents sees images and learns they are here to suck up the Earth’s resources which would also kill all of Mankind. But they come up with a plan to install a computer virus that will lower the aliens force shields and allow the attacks to happen which in time does work after a few tries and all ends well!

First let me say this about the cast, I thought the cast put on a pretty good performance, at first Randy Quaid’s character was just annoying at first and almost made the film cheesy but ended up serving a good purpose as the film went on. For a budget of only 75 millions the effects were on par, even using practical effects was a good touch. The story was honestly predictable but that was okay because it worked. Even keeping the aliens a low profile was brilliant because too much of them would ruin the shock value of them. In the end, I have to give this film a A plus or 95 percent for a rating and this film will continue to be one of my favorite films!

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