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Bill Pullman is the heroic U.S. President. The First Lady is the equally courageous Mary McDonnell. Pullman's advisors include general Robert Loggia, the ever-negative Secretary of Defense (James Rebhorn), and hottie Margaret Colin. The latter once had a relationship with smart geek Jeff Goldblum, whose father is plainspoken Judd Hirsch.
Other characters include cocky fighter pilot Will Smith, his Perfect 10 stripper girlfriend Vivica A. Fox, and oafish crop duster Randy Quaid, who finally gets a chance to redeem his life and win the respect of his three half-grown kids, none of whom look like him and seem to be embarrassed to even know him.
Annoying minor roles are filled by enthusiastic mad scientist Brent Spiner and raspy-voiced homosexual Harvey Fierstein. When the major cities are oven-roasted, the only good news is that Fierstein is on the menu.
How others will see it. If two and a half hours of escapist fun is what you are looking for, then Independence Day will pass an afternoon agreeably. It is an expensive movie with a large cast strewn with recognizable character actors, and has plenty of cool explosions of buildings, jets, and spaceships. People run, people die, and the aliens have huge heads and squid tentacles, as if they come from the deep ocean instead of another solar system. It is all as you expect it to be, but it will give you nothing more than that, except perhaps a vague and undeserved sense of patriotism. Take that, space aliens!
How I felt about it. No film critic is needed to tell you that Independence Day is bogus. The challenge is not how to evaluate it, but how to cogently ridicule this sprawling, preposterous blockbuster. Perhaps the best method is to bring up specific examples of its outlandishness.
Can't aliens take off their own flight suits? Smith's alien pal gets dragged like a corpse across the desert, then becomes this enormous, frisky creature once the flight suit is removed. He can also speak to the President through Spiner, a neat trick in any event although his manners leave much to be desired.
Smith sees the alien spacecraft he is supposed to fly in a few hours for the first time. Does he check out the control panels? Discuss its mechanics with engineers? No, he gets married to his girlfriend. This wedding is attended by Goldblum, who also has better things to do in preparation for giving the aliens a computer virus.
Speaking of which, it seems highly unlikely that Goldblum would have the ability to concoct a virus in a few hours that runs on an alien operating system and is based on 40+ year old alien software. This would be the equivalent of my learning to write fluent Chinese in the course of an afternoon. Sorry, no one is that smart.
Can't forget the charmed life of the hottie stripper. She is one of a handful of survivors when her city is firebombed. While wandering the city afterwards, whom does she come across but the First Lady, also one of the few survivors. Then a plane shows up to whisk her to safety. Where she is reunited with Will Smith, who happens to be the only survivor from his squadron. Did she win the lottery that day too?