Independence Day (movie, 1996)

Summary

On July 2, a SETI radio telescope captures waves emitted by a disproportionate UFO that has come to rest in Earth orbit . The Pentagon decides to keep the secret on this discovery. But soon after, huge ships enter the atmosphere and take up positions above the world’s megacities . In Washington , US President Thomas J. Whitmore ( Bill Pullman ) wonders what to do. For his part, David Levinson ( Jeff Goldblum), a computer analyst, discovers that the signal picked up by the radio telescope is nothing but a countdown. He decided to inform the president, with the help of his former wife Constance Spano ( Margaret Colin ), a White House counselor. The president then decides the general evacuation, but it is too late: from each of the ships arises a ray which destroys the cities instantly . The next day, they are only ruin and desolation, and the number of victims is very heavy … Then enters scene Steven Hiller ( Will Smith ), Captain of the US Marine Corps (USMC) … With the few survivors, President Whitmore, who narrowly escaped the destruction of the capital, decided to organize theriposte .

As soon as the Air Force One was safely on the Zone 51 military base , the first massive air attack was launched on the ships, but as soon as the battle was underway, the pilots realized that their armament could not pierce the energy shield that surrounded them. this. Crushed under the number of hunters thrown up by invading ships, the planes are shot one after the other, with the exception of that of Captain Steven Hiller, who manages to lead his opponent in a rocky labyrinth before blinding him and make it crash.

Hiller finds himself in the desert of Lincoln County , southeastern Nevada , with the alien he knocked out. He is joined a little later by a convoy of caravans pulled by people who have escaped annihilation, and he will guide to the Area 51 .

Meanwhile, in the ruins of Los Angeles , Jasmine Dubrow, Steven Hiller’s companion who survived the annihilation with her son Dylan, manages to clear several survivors of the rubble, including the First Lady of the United States , Marilyn Whitmore, whose helicopter crashed shortly after the start of the destruction of the city.

Thomas Whitmore learns that this is not the first time humans have been confronted by these extraterrestrials: an alien hunter crashed in 1947 around Roswell and was recovered in the utmost discretion by the US Air Force .

In the medical laboratory of Zone 51 , scientists begin the opening of the biomechanical combination of the extraterrestrial captured by Steven Hiller, still unconscious and held for dead, but the operation turns into disaster , because the extraterrestrial wakes up Suddenly kills telepathic scientists. After an unsuccessful negotiation attempt, the alien is shot dead while trying to kill the president.

It is then decided to use the nuclear weapon to destroy the ship above Houston , but once the explosion dissipates, the euphoria vanishes as quickly as it appeared: the ship protected by its shield is intact.

Distraught, the survivors do not know which track to explore, until David Levinson, under the blow of a hard hangover and with the help of his father Julius Levinson, has a sudden inspiration. The idea of both a wild simplicity and unprecedented boldness, involves implanting in the computer system of the mother ship in Earth orbit a computer virus that will disable signal by satellite the shields of all the alien ships.

Steven Hiller and David Levinson volunteer to fly the alien fighter in Area 51 and repaired by scientists to access the mother ship to implant the virus. On Earth , the planetary counter-offensive is launched, and Thomas Whitmore personally takes it aboard his F-18 , while David Levinson’s virus disables the shields of all ships. However, the low power of the air-to-air missiles does not destroy them, especially since the alien hunters engage in the battle to protect the mother ships.

As the ship is about to unleash its destructive beam on Area 51 again , the pilot Russell Casse, who can not fire his last missile , stuck, sacrifices himself by throwing his F-18 into the beam’s emitter. A blast explodes then the ship, hit in the heart, which crashes.

Meanwhile, their alien fighter stuck in the mothership, Steven Hiller and David Levinson are trying everything for the whole. After firing a missile with a very powerful nuclear warhead that stuck in the structure of the ship, they manage to get rid of the device that held their fighter and to leave the mothership in extremis before the explosion nuclear disintegrates it.

The film ends when Steven Hiller and David Levinson, who crashed in the desert on their return, are joined by Thomas Whitmore and their companions.

Technical sheet

• Original title: Independence Day
• Full French title: Independence Day: The day of the riposte ¹
• Québec title: Independence Day ¹
• Director: Roland Emmerich
• Scenario: Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich
• Music: David Arnold
• Photography: Karl Walter Lindenlaub
• Editing: David Brenner
• Production: Dean Devlin , Roland Emmerich , Ute Emmerich and William Fay
• Production Companies: Centropolis Entertainment and 20th Century Fox
• Distribution Company: 20th Century Fox
• Country of origin: United States
• Original language: English
• Format: Colors – 2.35: 1 – DTS – 35 mm
• Genre: science fiction
• Duration: 145 minutes / 153 minutes (special edition, 2010)
• Total budget: $ 95,000,000 ²
  • Estimated production budget: $ 75,000,000
  • Advertising budget (estimate): $ 20,000,000
• Release dates ¹ :
  •  United States : June 25 , 1996(World Premiere in Westwood , California ),  July 3 , 1996 (national release)
  •  Canada : July 2 , 1996
  •  United Kingdom : August 9 , 1996
  •  France : October 2 , 1996
  •  Belgium : October 3 , 1996

Distribution

Sources and legend : French version ( VF ) on Allodoublage ⁴ and Voxofilm ⁵ ; Quebec version ( VQ ) on Doublage.qc.ca ⁶

Distinctions

• 1997
  • Movie Oscars : Best Visual Effects, Best Sound
  • Saturn Awards (named)
  • Amanda Awards , Norway
  • Awards of the Japanese Academy (nominated)
  • BAFTA Film Award (nominated)
  • Blockbuster Entertainment Awards (Will Smith)
  • Czech Lions , Box Office Award
  • Grammy Awards , Best Instrumental Composition ( David Arnold )
  • MTV Movie Awards , Best Kiss (Will Smith and Vivica A. Fox )
  • Mainichi Movie Contest
  • People’s Choice Awards
  • Razzie Awards (nominated)
  • Satellite Awards
  • Sci-Fi Universe Magazine, Universal Reader’s Choice Award
  • Young Artist Awards , Ross Bagley

Box office

Home by the critic

The film received a very bad review from French newspapers. Thus, Vincent Remy, in his criticism of Télérama ⁹ , sees in the film “a monumental bullshit, recycling rancid Alien , Encounters of the third type , and other Cruise of Poseidon . ” Jean-Luc Wachthausen in Le Figaro ¹⁰ , summed up the film in ” twenty-two hours of special effects, computer graphics, gigantic fights that return Star Wars or Top Gun to the rank of charming gadgets ” and Yann Tobin in Positive ¹¹ felt that”The silliness of the scenario is matched only by its symbolic and sociological value, in its culture of political correctness. ”

Around the film

• Originally it was Kevin Spacey who was to play President Whitmore before the role came back to Bill Pullman . Jada Pinkett , the wife of Will Smith , was to play Jasmine Dubrow, but had to give it up since she was playing in The Naughty Teacher the same year and it is Vivica A. Fox who gets the role. ^{[ref. necessary]}

• The film grossed $ 817,400,891, a performance that ranks it among the biggest box office successes in the world .

• The end of the Chinpokomon episode of the South Park series is a cover of the film, including Morse communication.

• The Katina level of the Star Fox 64 video game is a direct nod to the movie’s events.

• In the ending kinematics of Metal Slug 2 and Metal Slug X , a pilot of the Rebel Army plane sacrifices himself by heading into the source of the beam of the mother ship while it was loading it, just like the character of Russel Casse in this film.

• In the van of Russell Case , Troy the youngest son, watches a scene from the movie The Day on which the Earth Stood (1951), on television, whose reception is disturbed by the communication signals of the extraterrestrials.

• When Will Smith aka Captain Steven ‘Steve’ Hiller arrives at the base of Zone 51 with an alien still alive, one of the speakers launches “Guess who’s coming to dinner” reference to the movie Devine who comes to dinner? (1967) Stanley Kramer with Sidney Poitier .

• When Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith settle into the ship to implant the virus in the mother ship, Jeff Goldblum installs his laptop and when launching a welcome image appears hinting a voice saying “Hello, David. This voice and the welcoming image are references to the film 2001, Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey (1968) and his computer character Hal 9000. The welcome image is the red eye from Hal 9000.

• The film appears in 2010 in a long version “special edition” containing 8 minutes extra scenes ¹² .

• In the movie Stonehenge Apocalypse , implicitly refers to the movie Independence Day in the sequence showing the discovery of the countdown (it is a similar pattern that is discovered).

Adaptation in video games

Independence Day is the video game adapted from the movie. Developed by Radical Entertainment , it was released in 1997 on Windows , Saturn and PlayStation .

Next

In 2009, Roland Emmerich announced not one but two sequels to the film. They will take place in our time but in a world that has evolved greatly thanks to the extraterrestrial technologies recovered from wrecks ^13 , 14 . In February 2011, however, he reported that the writing of the script did not advance: “I refuse to write anything before there is new. ” He said ¹⁵ .

Independence Day: Resurgence comes out in 2016.

See also

Related Articles

• Military science fiction
• Spaceship and spaceship-world
• Chronology of science fiction cinema
• Area 51
• List of movies, TV movies and science fiction series
• List of movies with UFO
• List of extraterrestrials in the cinema
• List of actors who played a president on the screen
• List of the biggest successes of the global box office

External links

• (en) Independence Day [ archive ] on the Internet Movie Database
• Independence Day [ archive ] on Allociné

Notes and references