Independence Day
Okay, I know some of my more... scholarly readers are wondering why I have something made by Roland Emmerich on my list. Well, the answer is that I was once eleven years old. That's how old I was when Independence Day arrived in theaters. I'm not sure if many of you remember, but it was a huge event when it came out. Seriously, could you go a day without seeing the trailer for it somewhere? This was the first time I'd ever noticed a huge summer blockbuster. I don't think we've seen the likes of it on this scale since... except maybe for when The Phantom Menace came out in 1999. And we all know how that turned out. Many now see Independence Day as a sort of joke, but for quite a few years after it came out, it was still considered THE big movie of the 1990s.
Now I still like the movie okay, though not as much as I did at the naive age of eleven. The advances in cinema at the time came together in such a way that the movie was almost overpowering to an eleven year old. DTS had just came around and megaplexes were popping up everywhere. Ones with state-of-the-art sound systems and stadium seating, which was new to me at the time. Remember, old megaplexes were not stadium seating. Heck, some of the ones I used to go to that are still around still don't have it or complete surround sound! This is the movie that made me realize how enveloping, heart pumping, and action-packed a trip to the movies could be. I'm sure it's the same sensation that the kids growing up the 1970s felt when they saw Star Wars, or how kids now felt when they saw Avatar or Avengers in today's amazing theaters. I always love to see kids come out of a movie and not be able to shut up about it. Especially movies like this one. It's made for the adolescent in us all.
I remember being scared of the scene where Brent Spiner's scientist character is puppeteered by one of the aliens. Being a semi-sheltered child, I'd never seen anything like that. I think it affected me until I was about fifteen. It helps that it started with a jump scare. I used to hate jump scares. I was very easily startled and, unlike now, didn't know the signs that they were coming.
Remember how blood pumping the destruction of the major cities was? All that fire, all that destruction... It was all an eleven year old could ask for! We loved destruction! And parents didn't mind taking their kids to see it. It was bloodless, you didn't see any bodies... I mean, how violent could a movie staring Lone Star from Spaceballs and the Fresh Prince be?! The movie was just cool. And you weren't anybody in sixth grade unless you'd seen it over the summer.
So how did it make me who I am? Well, it made me recognize that spectacle was important. It made me realize just how amazing a movie experience could be. That everyone in the world knew about this movie, and that everyone was going to see it... That movies draw us together. Even the ones not considered great in this time. A movie was an event, and I had to seek them out.
*On an unrelated note, most people don't know this, but there's very little CGI in the movie. Most of the effects were done with miniatures, which makes it even more cool.
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