4th of July: American Ingenuity (and Will Smith) Save the World…Again

Without question, my favorite 4th of July film is Independence Day (1996), also known as “ID4,” where earth engages in a desperate battle against evil extra-terrestrials (is there any other kind?).

Roland Emmerich, when he still used to make movies that entertained, pitted nerdy Jeff Goldblum, heroic Will Smith, and sensible Bill Pullman against massive enemy spaceships that were all but invincible until, ala War of the Worlds, Smith and Goldblum — the Marine fighter pilot and the computer programmer — fly a captured alien fighter ship up to the mother vessel to impregnate it with a computer virus.

Smith’s lines remain classics to this day: after opening the hatch to a downed enemy fighter, he punches the slithering alien in the, well, face, and says “welcome to earth,” and while dragging the tentacled, smelly creature back to the base, he shouts, “I coulda been at a barbecue!” While ostensibly the movie pitted “humankind” in a struggle for survival, which Pullman, in one of the film’s lamest scenes, likened to our Independence Day, audiences knew the truth: the United States solved the problem with good old American insight, practicality, innovation, and Big Hollywood’s own Adam Baldwin.

Two relatively average people, not the speechifyin’ president, account for the victory, with a great deal of help from a suddenly sober Randy Quaid, who has a few of his own choice lines (“Hello, boys. I’m baaa-aack.”)

Those of us old enough to remember the theatrical release also recall that in those days of Bill Clinton’s falling popularity, audiences cheered when the aliens blew up the White House. But President Whitmore (buffed up in the movie as a former fighter pilot himself) escaped the death ray, and more than a few noticed how conveniently the first lady was wiped out in the attack, leaving the president free to, well, date.

Despite the preachy subtext of environmental-wacko-ism, and the unlikelihood of a hungover Quaid winning the day, Independence Day reminded us that even if it is only survival itself, there are things worth fighting for.

In the world of Barack Obama, that message seems much further distant than a mere 14 years.