Independence Day
Woo, Will Smith in the start of its Schwarzenegger-isation. It’s not MIB II-levels of “wooo”. Just like all Emmerich epics, this is bursting at the seams with shit happening, but at the same time it feels hollow.
Not much of this couldn’t be done in the 50’s, bar some dated CGI. The better parts are indeed the parts that couldn’t be done in the 50’s, at least in plain sight: the nerd hero is Jewish, and his father is really Jewish. The other hero is Black, and marries a stripper, but only before the fat lady sings.
The nerd already divorced the press secretary and punched the president off screen (before he was president), before working on a job beneath his competency. His Jewish father is always complaining, about getting another girl, getting another job, be someone. The father does get the best lines.
As for our straight arrow Woo-lliam Smith, he just wants the American Dream, and he does it by working for Uncle Sam, bombing some wedding or school bus in a nondescript Middle Eastern village.
Priests condoning marriage between a stripper with an existing child. Fucking fornication and children out of wedlock.
The First Lady bleeds to death in some ruins, but the stripper commandeers a fire engine and delivers that woman to the arms of her child, for one last hug before death.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.