Independence Day / YMMV

Americans Hate Tingle: Irony about the trope name aside. In the United States the film is definitely divisive, but it's hard to deny it has a pretty devoted and vocal fanbase. Outside of the US, however, although it was a smash hit when it first came out despite receiving harsh reviews, nowadays finding devoted fans is more challenging, to say the least. That said, its sequel earned nearly triple its domestic gross overseas despite getting awful reviews, suggesting there is still a fanbase for the original outside the U.S. that was willing to check it out regardless, even if they aren't as willing to show their appreciation as their American counterparts.
Angst? What Angst?: In typical Emmerich fashion; one particularly jarring example though is when Steve Hiller is leading the first strike against the City Destroyer over Los Angeles, or rather what's left of it. What do Jimmy and the other pilots as Steve mulls the fate of his loved ones? Crack cheap jokes as they're gliding over the annihilated city. They quickly shut up once they pass a wall of clouds and see the sheer size of their target.
Awesome Music: This is the movie that put composer David Arnold on Hollywood's It List. To quote producer Dean Devlin:
Leave it to a Brit to compose the most patriotic music I've ever heard.
Broken Base: Film buffs have mixed feelings about this film. Is it a plain bad film, a So Bad, It's Good film, or a genuinely good film?
Cliché Storm: Certainly enough from every other alien invasion movie to go around.
Critic-Proof: Despite how much of a financial success this film was (with a worldwide gross of $816,969,268, the second-highest gross for a movie of all time back when it was released), the film has attracted a lot of criticism and the reviews even at the time called it okay at best. Many criticized the film's plot ^note and characters in favor of its special effects, and Non-Americans criticizing the film in how nationalistic it is in its tone.
Cult Classic: It's built up a following over time, with a fan base taking a kind of pride in it being the archetypal "disposable" summer film.
Ensemble Dark Horse:
- The only reason Okun appears in the sequel and having a larger role.
- Julius is well liked for providing some of the best lines in the movie. Mostly for comedy, though he has a great moment where he stood up for his son against the freaking President and his staff no less!
- Similarly, General Grey is this for being a Reasonable Authority Figure who manages to keep a cool head, him willing to call out Nimzicki for keeping his mouth shut about Area 51 adds to his popularity.
- The guy who gives a ridiculously over-the-top salute following Whitmore's Rousing Speech.
Harsher in Hindsight:
- 9/11 was often compared to this film. It doesn't help that when they're fleeing the White House, David checks the countdown and "9:11:01" is clearly visible on it. It is a complete coincidence, but still.
- Joe Viskocil, the film's pyrotechnics expert, later lamented that his work was so realistic that it may have served as the nucleus of an idea someone had to "fly a plane into the White House."^note
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- Mary McDonnell is the wife of a president facing an all-out attack on humans from a foreign life form. She's even married to an ex-pilot with a gravelly voice. Oh, and one of the characters is named Boomer. You have to wonder if her agent is just really unimaginative.
- Bill Pullman is giving a Rousing Speech in response to aliens. Fortunately, President Whitmore is nothing like Oswald Danes.
- When the aliens first arrive, one spectator says "Oh, I hope they bring back Elvis!", and later, after escaping the mothership, Will Smith shouts "Elvis has left the building!". In his next movie, Men in Black, he asks "You do know Elvis is dead, right?", to which he's told "No, Elvis is not dead, he just went home.".
- Adam Baldwin has a supporting role and Raphael Sbarge makes a very brief appearance in the film. Over a decade later they would both become involved with a popular video game franchise also involving an invading alien race decimating humanity, has destroyed several other races in the past, and has forced multiple factions to unite against them.
- The role of President Whitmore was originally written with Kevin Spacey in mind, as he was Dean Devlin's high school friend, but the studio overruled, as an executive didn't think he had the star quality needed for the part. Nearly twenty years later, Spacey finally got to play the President, albeit a far more evil one.
- They blew up Congress!
- The novel goes into more detail about Whitmore's presidency, particularly that he's a Democratic Senator from Chicago who's facing an obstructionist Congress that refuses to pass even modest proposals. With added combat experience, though.
- The filmmakers began work on this film having complete support and co-operation of the U.S. military, on one condition: that all references to Area 51 be removed from the movie, this being back when the U.S. government was steadfast in their denial that such a place existed. Almost two decades later and what do you know? Area 51 does exist after all! No word about any alien wreckage, of course. Especially hilarious when, not much later, Stargate SG-1, which used Area 51 in a similar fashion, was so Backed by the Pentagon that two Air Force Chiefs of Staff appeared on the show as themselves! SG-1 is, of course, a spinoff of a previous Roland Emmerich film.
- This is an actual sentence from the tie-in novel Silent Zone: "For the next six days, Bridget Jones was the most powerful weapon in the United States military's arsenal." Especially funny considering the movie and both novels were released in 1996.
- One person making a phone call says, "I love The X-Files." In The X-Files: Fight the Future, a drunken Mulder is shown urinating on a poster for Independence Day. Ironically, ID4 is fondly remembered (or at least remembered) twenty years later, while Fight The Future is only remembered by X-philes. Bob Chipman, in his retrospective on the film, was quite amused by which film fired the first shots versus which one was still remembered.
- The Apple PowerBook 5300 turned out to be as dangerous to humans due to, among other things, batteries that burst into flame in some models, and was discontinued a month after the film's release. Maybe David could have defeated the aliens by gifting them a few of the computers.
- ID4 producer Dean Devlin's mother was an actress named Pilar Seurat. One of Seurat's acting roles was in a 1963 episode of the anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Her co-star on the episode was Robert Loggia, who played General Grey in ID4 thirty years later. Wonder if Devlin and Loggia were amused at this.
- Dylan has a few Godzilla toys. Emmerich and Devlin's next film was Godzilla.
- The President of the United States personally leads the charge against the invaders when the second air attack begins, being a veteran of the US Air Force. In 2020, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar would resume his medical practice to aid the fight against the coronavirus pandemic in his country.
- Bill Pullman's son, Lewis Pullman, would eventually follow in his father's footsteps and play a character who flies in an F/A-18 in Top Gun: Maverick.
Inferred Holocaust: With most of the world's major population centers blown up and massive chunks of alien debris crushing landmasses and plunging into the ocean with resulting tsunamis, the world does not look positive in the wake of the attack. (The novelisation has the Earth shielded from the debris by the Moon.) Then again, since the alternative was total annihilation, there's only so much room to complain.
Mandela Effect: When Will Smith punches out the alien, many people remember him saying "Welcome to Erf" with a stereotypical African-American accent. When watching the film, Smith quite clearly says "Earth" without such an accent.
Memetic Mutation:
- "Welcome to Earf!" Even though in the movie he clearly says "Earth".
- "Oh, shit. Um... hide."
- "We will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish, without a fight." Really, that whole speech entered pop culture and hung on for dear life. Even many people who have never seen the movie can quote parts of it.
- "Peace? No peace." was known to be quoted a lot when the film first came out. It's has been used to mock people or groups that are seen as unreasonable or can't be negotiated with.
Misaimed Fandom: During the Brexit referendum, President Whitmore's speech was liberally quoted by those in favor of leaving the EU. This completely missed the point of the speech, which was about humanity coming together in common cause.
Money-Making Shot: The alien ship blasting the White House is the emblematic shot of the movie. After that, it's the shadows falling over major landmarks, and their destruction that was the basis of the trailers. Also, the aliens' strike on El Toro base was featured prominently in advertising for home video.
Narm: The sound design doesn't make sense. Expect to hear distorted cat yowls when aliens die, for example.
Narm Charm: As previously mentioned, the Rousing Speech.
Never Live It Down: Despite their sheer destructive power and technological mastery, the aliens' campaign will always be marred by the fact that they were ultimately defeated by a computer virus programmed by an Apple PowerBook 5300. It's commonly suggested that all the aliens needed to achieve victory over humanity was to simply install or update Norton antivirus software.
One-Scene Wonder:
- The RAF pilots were a good joke for British audiences: "The Americans are planning a counter-strike!" "Well, it's about bloody time!" Tally-ho, chaps!
- The Office Golf-playing Surveillance Station Slacker and his Deadpan Snarker boss (who is played by Erick Avari).
The Problem with Licensed Games: The Angry Video Game Nerd ripped the PlayStation 1 tie-in game of ID4 apart for clunky controls, pop-up issues, and a terrible password screen, and when he played the Katina level in Star Fox 64, ClementJ642 called ID4 "complete ass" and said that that one Star Fox level was better at being ID4 than the ID4 game was.
Retroactive Recognition:
- A young Mae Whitman plays the President's daughter; she's better known as being both Katara Foe and Yay to Michael Cera.
- And Adam Baldwin.
- The President's wife is also the President. In Battlestar Galactica (2003). But here, instead of dying of incurable cancer, she's dying of incurable injuries.
Signature Line:
- "Hello, boys! I'm baaaaack!"
- An alternative would be Whitmore's Rousing Speech, particularly Bill Pullman's ad-lib "Today... we celebrate... our Independence Day!"
- Hiller in the alien fighter: "Wooo! I got to get me one of these!!"
- "Welcome to Earth!", which is often mistakenly said as "Welcome to Earf!".
- David throughout the film: "Checkmate."
Signature Scene:
- As mentioned above, the destruction of the White House is the most iconic shot of the entire film, having been in all the trailers and serving as the major selling point for audiences.
- President Whitmore's speech, with the similarly iconic line "Today we celebrate our Independence Day!"
- The arrival of the alien saucers is another iconic sequence, especially when the ships' massive shadows descend over New York, Washington, and Los Angeles.
Special Effect Failure:
- A blink-and-you'll-miss-it-example: one of the Huey choppers escorting the Skycrane explodes before being hit.◊ Worse still, the tail rotor of one of the choppers seems to stay suspended in place instead of falling out of the sky as it would otherwise do.
- When the shutters raise on the "museum" of alien corpses stored at Area 51 during the President's initial tour, the shutter can be briefly seen shaking around loose just before disappearing off-screen.
- Some of the effects used to simulate the city destruction sequence have not aged well since 1996. After several buildings explode, it is not difficult to see that they are models.
- Several of the explosion effects on the City Destroyer when it explodes at the end are very clearly two-dimensional and superimposed on the shot.
- Very subtle, yet noticeable is the destruction of the Empire State Building, as for a few seconds it looks like, rather than high speed footage slowed to regular speed, it looks more like a VHS tape at slow-mo.
Spiritual Adaptation:
- ID4 follows a very similar plot structure to that of The War of the Worlds (1898), including an unstoppable alien force invading Earth to strip it of its resources, a trio attempting to peacefully contact the aliens only to be disintegrated in response, the protagonist spends the majority of the story trying to find his loved ones, and the aliens ultimately being defeated by a "virus". In fact, Steven Spielberg put his planned adaptation on hold because he felt that this film beat him to it. Lindsay Ellis noted the similarities (and differences) when comparing ID4 and Spielberg's adaptation of War of the Worlds.
- In an interview, Roland Emmerich claims that he actually did read War of the Worlds and felt he could do it better.
Spiritual Successor: To Stargate, given how that film also had the US military hiding an alien artifact in a secret base, and the main hero duo being a soldier and a geeky scientist.
Strawman Has a Point:
- Nimziki gets two. We're supposed to be against his suggestion of using nuclear weapons, but considering what we've seen so far, that would be the closest thing to a reasonable chance of success. Later, he's supposed to be showing incompetence and cowardice for being against the plan to infect the mothership, but the plan relies on a lot of luck, a human pilot managing to use an alien vessel, the aliens not getting suspicious, and the possibility of its failure meaning the end of all organized human resistance.
- The sequel suggests that Nimziki might have been on to something with the nukes: in 'Resurgence,' it's implied that alien shields do have a limit as to how much damage they can take, such as how the Queen's shields are depleted after taking a cold fusion blast at point blank range and a few minutes of sustained laser fire. If more nukes had been launched against the ships as Nimziki wanted, they may have eventually destroyed the shields and the ships themselves... but the resulting fallout and nuclear winter would have made it a moot point.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
- The technicians who first detect the arriving aliens get a decently colorful scene and lines before disappearing, when they feel like they could have provided some additional minor POV.
- Troy Case, who gets less development than his siblings even in the extended cut.
Tough Act to Follow:
- This movie was a massive success and one of the most well-known movies of The '90s. The sequel unfortunately failed to follow the original's footsteps.
- The same can also be said for Emmerich's subsequent films like Godzilla (1998), The Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 BC, and 2012, which, while successes, weren't as fondly remembered as Independence Day.
Toy Ship: The President's daughter and Hiller's stepson. Sunk in Resurgence, where the two are friends but Patricia is engaged to another character.
Vindicated by History: The Critical Dissonance was apparent from the start, where critics lambasted the glitz while audiences ate it up. But the general response goes in cycles over if it's a bad movie that is fun or a silly movie that can be appreciated for those merits. In the long run many have pointed out how the film manages to juggle a lot of themes, characters and big budget visual effects, many of which can feel like empty spectacle, cliches, stereotypes and broad jingoism, while actually having a lot more depth when you really pay attention.
- President Whitmore is the general "man in charge" but there is an underlying theme that he is trying to show confidence while everyone around him, from the media to his own Secretary of Defense Nimziki, are undermining his authority. He makes decisions based on the best information he has but constantly faces one failure after another (shelter in place instead of evacuation, air strike that did nothing, nuke that did nothing) before managing to rally the world together in a counteroffensive and the famous "Today, we celebrate our Independence Day" speech talks not of American patriotism but unity around the world.
- Steven Hiller is the action hero played by Will Smith, a sitcom star at the time, but is a professional soldier who survives a massacre through both skill and intelligence. His girlfriend Jasmine has a kid and works as a stripper, who is given her own story arc in rounding up survivors. Smith would go on to prove his star power starting from this film, but even then giving the face of the military subplot of the film to a black man was less common then.
- David initially appears as the Ignored Expert but once he explains what he found in clear language he is taken seriously and given full respect by President Whitmore, he isn't denied all the way to the third act. His father also gives a religious angle that is Jewish rather than Christian.
- Russell Casse at first appears to be a typical redneck Conspiracy Theorist, but in this story his talk of aliens becomes Arbitrary Skepticism and he is validated when they attack. Not only that, he's a Cloud Cuckoolander but NOT a racist asshole, he takes care of a blended family with Hispanic kids/step kids.
Visual Effects of Awesome: The Oscar-winning effects still hold up well and the scope of the movie is awe inspiring. The sense of size and scale has not been matched by any movie since. A lot of why it holds up is that most of the effects were practical effects and models, with just a bit of CGI for laser blasts and other things that don't have to look "real" to fool the eye. Shortly after this came out, these techniques were largely abandoned in favor of all-CGI effects.
Woolseyism: Will Smith's "Elvis has left the building!" was changed to "Last train to Mikkeli has just left!" in the Finnish DVD.

YMMV / Independence Day

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