Getting home from work today, I just wanted to take a nice long shower and watch whatever action movie happened to be on TV. For some reason, TNT wasn’t showing Air Force One, so I had to settle for Independence Day.
It’s weird to think that I saw this movie when I was five. My brother and I were eating cherries, making jokey kid-comments about the special effects and being sooo happy that the dog survives. I’m kind of surprised that my parents let us watch this, but they’ve always been fairly liberal with movies. Didn’t really care as long what we watched as long as there wasn’t Tarantino-levels of blood or language.
It’s weird to watch it now. I can’t take it seriously on one level, but there’s still this interest in it. It is what it is, nothing more or less: A melodramatic alien action-adventure flick, but it’s a strong movie-memory for me, so I end up watching it whenever… well, whenever there’s nothing better on. It’s a bit of my childhood, wrapped up in a neat little package.
It helps that I own Movies in 15 Minutes that contains the Independence Day parody. Keeps me on my toes and interested in the plot after I’ve seen it a million and a half times. Hell, if you have an inkling to buy Miss Cleo’s book, the Independence Day parody is worth the price by itself.
The movie, itt’s not bad, really, it’s just not great. Not a lot of people will be talking about it in a generation or two. Perhaps 90s “vintage” t-shirts will take advantage of it and its quotes in five or ten years, much as the movies of the 80s have been mined for dusty pop culture references. But it’s a handful of melodrama, an action movie that hints at the possibility of apocalypse. We’ve got a lot of these movies now that are about life, post-apocalypse. Is there still a need for an action movie that just hints at it?
