When the film Independence
Day was released in 1996 it was hyped more than any other movie. The
marketing and advertising campaign exceeded almost everything previously seen
in cinema. I remember seeing children carrying "ID4" packed lunch
boxes to school. This has been repeated with subsequent films by Roland
Emmerich. Therefore many people, including me, felt betrayed when we actually
watched it and discovered that it was a pretty lousy film. The long-unawaited
sequel Independence Day: Resurgence
was different because it was not promoted as much beforehand. I had no
intention of taking time out to go and see it on the big screen, but last
weekend when I went to the UFO Academy, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/ufo-academy-watford-2017.html,
I stayed overnight at a friend's house and he played the beginning of it on
Netflix. I couldn't help being intrigued by some of the storyline. I saw a DVD
of the film being sold very cheaply in a charity shop so decided to pick it up
and watch the rest of it. The film is set in 2016 within the scenario of the
world twenty-years after the victorious war against the malevolent
extraterrestrials. The people of earth have reconstructed society from the
devastation seen in the first film. There have been no wars between nations
because the alien invasion taught humanity to "put our petty difference
behind us" and achieve world peace. This is a vision inspired by a speech
given by US President Ronald Reagan, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag44dRO8LEA.
The militaries of the earth have pooled their resources to create the United
Nations Earth-Space Defence force that maintains a constant vigil for the
possible return of the aliens. The US
President is called Elizabeth Lanford, played by Sela Ward, and is a
not-very-well disguised fictionalization of Hillary Clinton. Many of the
characters... if you can call them that, from the first film are brought back,
with the exception of Col. Steven Hiller who was played by Will Smith in the
original. He is written out by being killed in a flying accident; however his
son steps into his place. The tagline of the film is: "We always knew they
would come back" which in itself reveals the entirety of the plot.
There is a scene in the middle of the story in which the
viewer is presented with a vision of monumental global destruction. The biggest
buildings being smashed into rubble, giant ships flying through the sky
colliding with airliners, the land itself being rent into fragments and
lacerated by huge chasms that swallow cars and lorries, monster waves
overflowing from the oceans and inundating harbours. This is another textbook
feature of Roland Emmerich's films and it takes place in nearly all of them. In
fact in 2012 the cataclysm sequence
is over forty minutes long. His films are marketed at a family audience and,
putting myself in the place of a small child who watches them, I believe this
to be highly traumatizing, see here for details: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/2012-rumours-of-our-deaths-have-been.html.
The most interesting part of the film is that humans are now using free energy
and antigravity propulsion systems back engineered from the salvaged remains of
the ET spacecraft. The UN's Earth-Space Defence includes a lot of hardware that
use this technology, from personal small arms to space vehicles. There is an
even bigger hint dropped when we learn that the weapons the humans use to
destroy the aliens a second time (Do I really need to avoid that spoiler?) are
called "cold fusion bombs". Why "cold fusion"? They must
surely know that cold fusion is a very real thing, and that it refers to a
suppressed free energy technology campaign that took place in 1989, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/martin-fleischmann-dies.html.
The notion of a future world without war sounds very appealing. Would anybody
seriously not want a world without
any wars? However I suspect that this ideal has been used to sugar-coat some
otherwise foul-tasting agendas, from Karl Marx to Francis Fukuyama. In Independence Day: Resurgence, we see the
United Nations playing a very prominent role. Some of the central characters
work for the UN in various capacities; a feature we are also presented with in World War Z, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/world-war-z-more-real-zombies.html
and: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/real-zombies-2015.html.
In a scene early in the film we see a convoy of UN trucks driving along a road
in sub-Saharan Africa . This is strange; wouldn't trucks
and roads be obsolete in a world with antigravity engines? Perhaps they are
showing us UN trucks because those trucks are an iconic sight that affects
collective human psychology. The concept of a one-world government justified by
an alien invasion, real or fake, is still one we should seriously consider
despite the no-show at the London 2012 Olympics, see here for details: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/programme-9-podcast-ian-r-crane.html.
Are the two Independence Day films
being used to inject the archetypal notion into our minds in advance of the
real thing taking place to prepare us mentally and culturally? The kindest
thing I can say about Independence Day:
Resurgence is that its special effects are magnificent. They are even
better than the original, and those were excellent. However it is still meant
to be a film and not a fireworks display. My favourite science fiction TV show
is Blakes 7 which is famous for its
low budget production design and homespun special effects. It had a great
storyline, it was well-scripted and had great characterization and acting. The
big lesson it taught sci-fi was that if you have those things then you don't
need big budget special effects. Conversely, if you have a badly-written,
badly-acted, shallow storyline with stereotypical characters then mind-blowing
SFX will not save it. Both Independence
Day films are perfect cases in point.
See here for
background: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/some-of-them-are-on-our-side.html.
And: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/blakes-7.html.
1 comment:
Post a Comment