Top 100 Movies Of The 1990's: #57 Independence Day

Box Office: $306.2 Million

Oscar Nominations: Best Sound, Best Visual Effects

Oscar Wins: Best Visual Effects

MovieRankings.Net: 72/100

Available To Stream: Starz

This is the greatest disaster movie ever. I know it has aliens but this is so much more of a disaster film than a science-fiction one to me. The director Roland Emmerich would keep trying to use the same recipe with either middling results (The Day After Tomorrow,  2012) or horrible ones (Godzilla, Moonfall). He even tried making a sequel to this movie. I've never seen it but it has a 2/100 on MovieRankings.Net. There were initially plans for a third but that was scrapped pretty quickly.

I saw Independence Day in theaters the day it came out. I was 16 and it was one of the most awesome movie theater experiences of my life up to that point. If you had asked me then, I would have immediately said it was one of the ten best movies I had ever seen. A lot of that had to do with the fact that this was basically made for teenage boys but the other part is that there had never been destruction like that in a movie before. There has been disaster films decades before that (The Towering Inferno, Earthquake) but never anything at this scope. Because it was made before CGI took over everything, the effects kinda hold up. They used models and miniatures and it is so much more effective.

There are indefensible things about this movie. The idea that you can just put a virus from your Apple computer into the aliens spaceship might be the dumbest. You could make a real case this is the stupidest movie on my list. It's also one of the most entertaining. This was the movie that launched Will Smith from star to superstar. It came out the year after Bad Boys but he was still filming The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air while he was shooting ID4. He's so wildly likable if you had told me he'd be the persona non grata at the Oscars back then, I would have thought the Independence Day plot line of aliens attacking the world is more likely to happen.

While re-watching this for the blog, I kept thinking that Bill Pullman should have had a better career. He's funny in Spaceballs and he's charming in While You Were Sleeping. I also totally buy him as the president here. I don't know if it's not having the right agent or just falling short to megastars at the time like Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks. Whatever the case, he nails the Hell out of this speech.

The heart of this movie is Jeff Goldblum. Getting him just three years after Jurassic Park helped enormously. You didn't just believe Jeff Goldblum was brilliant, you knew it. I have no idea if Goldblum is a smart guy in real life. He seems intelligent when I've seen him on late night talk shows but after watching movies like this and The Fly, I absolutely believe he is a scientific genius. 

I probably have this movie too high on this list. If I was ten years older, I can't imagine it would be anywhere near 57th place. But for me, the excitement of this movie still resonates. It was always cheesy at points even when it came out but it is also always exciting. Getting to see these giant ships just sitting there in the first act knowing they are about to destroy the fuck out of shit is great suspense. The plane barely escaping the White House and the discovery of Roswell had me at the edge of my seat in 1996. Watching it back, some of that thrill is now replaced by a sense of charm. While it's not as mind-blowing as it once was, it still holds claim as being the perfect example of what you want in a summer movie. You get major landmarks blown and Will Smith winning a fistfight with an alien. Mix in popcorn and some chilly movie theater air conditioning and it's hard to ask for much more on a July night to the movies.

57. Independence Day

58. The Rainmaker

59. Go

60. The Firm

61. Magnolia

62. The Talented Mr. Ripley

63. Tommy Boy

64. The Usual Suspects

65. In The Line Of Fire

66. My Cousin Vinny

67. Awakenings

68. JFK

69. Toy Story

70. Home Alone

71. Jerry Maguire

72. Titanic

73. Billy Madison

74. Apollo 13

75. Braveheart

76. Edward Scissorhands

77. Cape Fear

78. The River Wild

79. What's Eating Gilbert Grape?

80. 12 Monkeys

81. Stir Of Echoes

82. Mission: Impossible

83. Total Recall

84. Quiz Show

85. For Love Of The Game

86. Being John Malkovich

87. Men In Black

88. Scream

89. Alive

90. Three Kings

91. Glengarry Glen Ross

92. Die Hard With A Vengeance

93. The Blair Witch Project

94. Twister

95. Dirty Work

96. Election

97. Tremors

98. Any Given Sunday

99. The Wedding Singer

100. Clerks