Back in 1996, Will Smith owned the box office with the July 4th weekend hit INDEPENDENCE DAY.
Smith is a hotshot pilot, Jeff Goldblum is an out of work scientist that figures out the aliens plan and Bill Pullman makes one hell of a President willing to go the distance against the ET bad guys.
Randy Quaid foreshadows his real life downfall into scruffy insanity with his crop duster role, Harvey Fierstein is hilarious in his reactions to the invasion and Will Smith provides the best alien punch out in film history.
It's pure summer fun with BIG special effects, massive destruction and more laser blasts and explosions than you can count.
Twenty years ago, it didnt offer anything new from the standpoint of an original story, but it blasted you with so many state-of-the-art effects, plenty of laughs along with suspense and enough red blooded patriotism in the guise of Pullman and Smith that story holes just faded away in the noise.
The solution that Levinson (Smith) comes up with to defeat the invading forces is clever if goofy.
David Arnold provides one of his best music scores here, the main theme's become a sci-fi classic.
On a summer day as escapist entertainment, It doesn't get much better than this all out sci-fi blast. It holds up surprisingly well two decades later and is FAR superior to its superfluous sequel unleashed in 2016. Save yourself the lame-brained experience of the sequel and revisit the full blast fun of the original.
These aliens are big, bad and angry and the original INDEPENDENCE DAY is tons of fun, earning a solid B.
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