Information about Independence Day (film)

Independence Day
Independence Day movie poster
Directed by	Roland Emmerich
Produced by	Dean Devlin
Written by	Dean Devlin Roland Emmerich
Starring	Jeff Goldblum Will Smith Bill Pullman Margaret Colin Vivica A. Fox Judd Hirsch Mary McDonnell Robert Loggia Randy Quaid
Music by	David Arnold
Cinematography	Karl Walter Lindenlaub
Editing by	David Brenner
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	July 3, 1996
Running time	145 min. (Theatrical) 153 min. (Director's cut)
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$75 million,[1] though this has been disputed to $71 million[2]
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Independence Day (also known as its promotional abbreviation ID4) is an Academy Award winning science fiction film directed by Roland Emmerich. The film's plot is about an attempted alien invasion of Earth.

The film's success was partially credited to an extensive marketing campaign which began in the United States with a dramatic commercial during the Super Bowl XXX.^[3] It is the first movie to advertise during Super Bowls.^[4] Fox spent $1.1 million to promote the film.^[5]

The movie was scheduled for release on July 3, 1996, but due to the high level of anticipation for the film, many theaters began showing it on the evening of July 2, 1996, the same day the action in the film begins. The movie's total worldwide gross was $816,969,268 - the 18th highest worldwide gross for a movie all-time. It has been rated the 49th best sci-fi movie of all time.^[6]

Plot

When Earth comes under attack from an advanced extraterrestrial species, the survivors must band together to repel the invaders.

On July 2, an alien mothership enters orbit around Earth, deploying several dozen smaller spacecraft to hover over many of the world's major cities. Satellite transmissions from the craft are discovered by scientist David Levinson (Goldblum) to be a timer which he believes is a countdown to a coordinated attack by the aliens. Having made his way to the White House with his father, he warns President Thomas J. Whitmore (Pullman) of the impending attack. After three US Air Force helicopters are shot down by an alien spacecraft while attempting to establish communications, the president orders the evacuation of the affected cities. Before the countdown reaches zero. he flees the White House aboard Air Force One with his staff and Levinson. At zero point, the hovering alien spacecraft open fire upon their targets with advanced directed-energy weapons, destroying entire cities and killing millions.

The United States counterattack is coordinated from El Toro and sees the alien spacecraft assaulted by Air Force fighter aircraft. The attacks are useless, as both the larger craft and individual fighters launched from within are protected by seemingly-impenetrable force fields. While leading his unit of fighter pilots in an attack against the aliens, Captain Steven Hiller (Smith) is involved in a dogfight with an alien fighter which sees both crash in the desert. Having parachuted to safety, Hiller subdues and captures the injured alien. As the El Toro airbase has since been destroyed, Hiller takes the alien in the direction of the nearby Area 51 base, where the president and his remaining staff have also landed. There, they discover a top secret facility housing a captured alien fighter and three alien bodies recovered from Roswell in 1947.

When lead scientist Dr. Brackish Okun (Spiner) examines the new alien specimen, it attempts escape and takes control of his mind. When questioned by President Whitmore, through a telepathic connection it reveals that its species travels from planet to planet, destroying all life and harvesting the planet's natural resources, before moving on to the next conquest. The alien attempts a psychic attack against Whitmore and is killed by military personnel. Whitmore orders a nuclear attack on one of the larger alien spacecraft which is hovering over a by-now-evacuated Houston, but as the craft is still protected by its force shield, the attack fails.

Levinson devises a plan to gain access to the interior of the alien mothership in space in order to introduce a computer virus and plant a nuclear device on board. This, it is hoped, will cause the shields of the Earth-based alien craft to fail long enough for the human resistance to destroy them. Hiller volunteers to fly the captured alien fighter and Levinson accompanies him to upload the virus. The Americans send word to the other countries still holding out against the invaders to begin a concerted attack against the aliens, timed to when their shields are scheduled to fail.

The implantation of the virus successful, President Whitmore leads the US fighter jets against an alien spacecraft which is taking up position above Area 51. The attack is initially unsuccessful and the fighters soon exhaust their supply of missiles. An opening appears on the underside of the alien craft and its primary weapon of mass destruction is prepared in order to fire upon the base. Russell Casse (Quaid) finds that he possesses the one remaining missile. The firing mechanism damaged, he pilots his jet into the opening in a kamikaze attack. The ensuing explosion causes a chain reaction which destroys the alien spacecraft. Human resistance forces around the world use the same weak point to destroy the remainder of the alien ships, while the nuclear device planted by Hiller and Levinson destroys the alien mothership. Hiller and Levinson escape unharmed, crash-landing their captured alien fighter in the desert close to Area 51.

Cast and characters

• Bill Pullman as President Thomas J. Whitmore; former Persian Gulf War fighter pilot and current President of the United States.
• Will Smith as Captain Steven Hiller; US Marine Corps F/A-18C pilot at the forefront of the human resistance counter-offensive, Hiller's ambition before the alien attack is to join NASA's astronaut training programme.
• Jeff Goldblum as David Levinson; a former MIT-educated scientist working as a senior manager for a cable television company who discovers the aliens' invasion plot and formulates a plan to defeat them.
• Judd Hirsch as Julius Levinson; Jewish immigrant and widowed father of David Levinson.
• Mary McDonnell as First Lady Marilyn Whitmore; the wife of President Whitmore who is wounded while fleeing the destruction of Los Angeles, later dying of her injuries.
• Margaret Colin as Constance Spano; the White House Communications Director and David Levinson's ex-wife, she divorced David because of his lack of ambition. Reunited during the attack, they reconcile their differences and remarry.
• Vivica A. Fox as Jasmine Dubrow; an exotic dancer and girlfriend of Steven Hiller, the two marry shortly before he leaves on his mission to disable the alien mothership.
• Randy Quaid as Russel Casse; an alcoholic crop duster and veteran pilot of the Vietnam War who claims to have been a former alien abductee, Casse is ridiculed by his neighbours and held in contempt by his son until the alien attack, when he sacrifices his life to destroy the alien spacecraft hovering over Area 51.
• Brent Spiner as Dr. Brackish Okun; the chief scientist at Area 51 in charge of investigating the aliens, later killed by an alien captured by Steven Hiller.
• Harry Connick, Jr. as Captain Jimmy Wilder; a US Marine Core pilot and best friend of Steven Hiller, killed during a failed attack on an alien spacecraft.
• Robert Loggia as General William Grey; the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
• James Rebhorn as Albert Nimziki; the Secretary of Defense and a former CIA officer, later fired by President Whitmore.

Production

The idea for the film came when Emmerich and Devlin where at a press conference for Stargate. One reporter asked if Emmerich believed in aliens. He said he didn't, then the reporter said "What if you wake up one day and see a massive spaceship the size of a city overhead?" Emmerich turned to Devlin and said "I think I have an idea for our next film".^[7]

The name in its promotion ID4 was chosen due to legal troubles over using the title Independence Day.<ref name'"trivia">Trivia for Independence Day (1996) IMDb. Retrieved on October 16, 2007

Filming locations

The film was shot in United States, Kenya, Egypt, Iceland, Sweden and Australia.

• United States
• Los Angeles, California
• Fontana, California
• Blue Ridge, Georgia
• New York City, New York
• Colorado Springs, Colorado
• Dallas, Texas
• Grants Pass, Oregon
• Utah
• Michigan City, Indiana
• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• New Mexico
• Washington D.C.
• West New York, New Jersey
• White Sands, New Mexico
• Mount Kilimanjaro, Kenya
• Pyramids of Giza, Egypt
• Reykjavík, Iceland
• Stockholm, Stockholms län, Sweden
• Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Soundtrack

The score of the movie was composed by David Arnold, performed by , and conducted, and arranged by Nicholas Dodd. Arnold won BMI Film & TV Award,^[7] and Grammy Award.^[7] The CD was released by BMG Classics, one (or two)^[8] day before the movie was released.^[9]

Novels

Author Stephen Molstad wrote a tie-in novel to help promote the film shortly before its release in the summer of 1996. The novel goes into further detail on the characters, situations, and overall concept that the film lacked.

Following the success of the film, a prequel novel entitled Independence Day: Silent Zone was written by Emmerich, Devlin, and Molstad in February 1998.^[10] The novel is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and details the early career of Dr. Brackish Okun.^[11] The novel goes into much detail on the aliens' technology and goes into even further detail of the crash at Roswell, New Mexico. Okun discovers that a second craft crashed in a part of Mexico nicknamed the "Silent Zone." Future Secretary of Defense Albert Nimziki has a small role in the novel as the director of the CIA.

Molstad wrote a third novel, Independence Day: War in the Desert in July 1999. The novel is both a midquel and sequel to the film. Set in Saudi Arabia on July 3, Captain Reg Cummins of the RAF and many of his fellow pilots lead a successful attack on one of the many "city destroyers." The novel mainly deals with Cummins and his pilots fighting a ground war with aliens that survived the destruction of their ship, which the characters infiltrated earlier in the novel to dispose of any survivors. The novel also goes into detail of the aliens' psychic abilities, their use of ground vehicles, their hand-held weapons, and also contains a subplot of a blooming relationship between Cummins and a Saudi noble's daughter. Cummins and Colonel Thompson are the only characters from the film to be featured in this novel (they being the two British pilots briefly seen receiving the Morse code message); however, President Whitmore is mentioned.

Right after the success of Independence Day, it was considered that these novels should be made into movies, but the idea was scrapped.

Reception

Ratings
Australia:	PG
Chile:	TE
Finland:	K-12
France:	U
Germany:	12
Iceland:	12
India:	U/A
Ireland:	PG
Italy:	T
Netherlands:	AL
Norway:	11
Peru:	14
Portugal:	M/12
Singapore:	PG
South Korea:	All
Spain:	7
Sweden:	11
United Kingdom:	12
United States:	PG-13

Box office performance

• Domestic Total Gross: $306,169,268^[1]
• Foreign: $510,800,000^[1]
• Worldwide: $816,969,268^[1]

Independence Day took £6.8 million at the box office during its opening weekend in the UK.^[12]

One factor of The box office success of Independence Day is due to the heavy marketing campaign behind it.^[13]

Reviews

Independence Day is ranked as fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with a 63% positive rating, with 19 out of 30 critics giving it positive reviews.^[14] It has a 59% on Metacritic.^[15]

Many viewers felt that the main plot was simply a cursory re-telling of the H. G. Wells novella The War of the Worlds, after lacing it with contemporary social and environmental issues, and packaging it with "eye-popping" special effects.^[16][17] The primary plot twist between the two is that a man-made computer virus is substituted for a naturally-occurring disease as the driving factor in defeating the marauding aliens, promoting the concept that man has more direct control over the outcome of the desperate situation than in Wells' original story. However, the remainder of the plots are nearly identical: earthly military technology is largely ineffective in resisting the invading aliens; the aliens' primary purpose in invading Earth is to harvest resources from the planet (either humans as food in H. G. Wells' original story, or natural resources in this adaptation); and once the aliens are defeated, humanity becomes united through their struggle against a common foe. Even a minor plot point where a primary character is unexpectedly re-united with his wife (estranged in this adaptation, separated by the chaos created by the invading aliens in H. G. Wells' original) is captured by both stories.

The patriotic overtones of the film were widely criticized by foreign reviewers. Movie Review UK described the film as "A mish-mash of elements from a wide variety of alien invasion movies and gung-ho American jingoism".^[18]

Bill Pullman's pre-battle speech, in which he states that victory in the coming war would see the entire world henceforth describe July 4 as its "independence day", was described as the "the most jaw-droppingly pompous soliloquy ever delivered in a mainstream Hollywood movie" in a BBCi review.^[19]

The movie was nominated for the Academy Award for Sound,^[20] and a Saturn Award for Best Director, Best Science Fiction Film, Best Special Effects, Best Actor for Jeff Goldblum, Best Actor for Will Smith, Best Costumes, Best Music, Best Performance by a Younger Actor for James Duval, Best Supporting Actor for Brent Spiner, Best Supporting Actress for Vivica A. Fox, and Best Writer.^[7][21] It also was nominated for a C.A.S. Award for "Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing for a Feature Film",^[7][22] and a MTV Movie Award for Best Action Sequence, Best Breakthrough Performance for Vivica A. Fox, Best Male Performance for Will Smith, and Best Movie.^[7] For its short comings, it was nominated for a Razzie Award for "Worst Written Film Grossing Over $100 Million".^[23]

Awards

• Academy Award for Visual Effects^[7]
• Saturn Award for Best Director, Best Science Fiction Film, Best Special Effects^[7]
• Amanda award for Best Foreign Feature Film^[7]
• Blockbuster Entertainment Award for Favorite Actor - Science Fiction, Will Smith^[7]
• Czech Lions award for box office^[7]
• Golden Screen award for Golden Screen, Golden Screen with 1 Star, and Golden Screen with 2 Stars^[7]
• International Monitor Award for Electronic Visual Effects^[7]
• Kids' Choice Awards Blimp Award for favorite movie^[7]
• MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss^[7]
• Mainichi Film Concours award for Best Foreign Language Film^[7]
• People's Choice Award for Favorite Dramatic Motion Picture^[7]
• Golden Satellite Award Outstanding Film Editing and Outstanding Visual Effects^[7]
• Universe Reader's Choice Award for Best Actor in a Genre Motion Picture, Best Cinematography for a Genre Motion Picture, Best Director for a Genre Motion Picture, Best Science Fiction Film, Best Score for a Genre Motion Picture, Best Special Effects in a Genre Motion Picture, Best Supporting Actress in a Genre Motion Picture and Best Writing for a Genre Motion Picture^[7]

Legacy

• The Katina level of the video game Star Fox 64 is a homage to the climactic battle scene of the movie, featuring squadrons of friendly aircraft dog-fighting swarms of alien ships beneath a giant saucer-shaped mothership. The mothership also destroys the base by shooting a laser beam into it, like the movie, and is destroyed by blowing up the laser emitter. Also, the start of the Bolse level features enemy aircraft that bear a resemblance to the fighters in Independence Day; they are also protected by invincible shields, much like the movie. The character Slippy Toad spoofs Will Smith's character with the line, "Those ships are shielded, too!" Also the leader of the Katina Army shares his name with Robert Loggia's character, Bill Grey.
• In the Invader Zim episode "Future Dib," Dib tries to upload a virus onto Zim's computer with the comment, "I hope the Irkens just happen to use the same operating system I have."
• In the computer game Supreme Commander, one of the super units, the Aeon CZAR, bears no resemblance to the alien destroyer depicted in Independence Day but has a similar city destroying energy beam similar to the movie.
• In Gen¹³ Bootleg #9, while discussing movie ideas with Freefall, Grunge'' says "having a 'story', let alone a good one, is strictly optional nowadays... Independence Day sure proved that!"
• The movie, Returner was influenced by independence Day.

Radio spin-off

In August 1996, BBC Radio 1 broadcast the 1-hour play Independence Day UK, produced by Dirk Maggs, a spin-off depicting the alien invasion from a British perspective.

DVD versions

• The theatrical version of the film was 2 hours, 25 minutes. A Special Edition, released on DVD, contains an additional nine minutes of footage. Much of the reincorporated material involves the Casse family. For example, it reveals that Troy is chronically ill (in the theatrical cut, he just throws up along the way) and receives treatment in the Area 51 infirmary upon arrival.

References

External links

• Independence Day on sciflicks.com
• Independence Day on Rotten Tomatoes
• Link to Bill Pullman's Speech in Text and Audio (americanrhetoric.com)