Originally available to Patreon patrons 6th July. We recorded an episode about the 1996's biggest movie, Independence Day. For election year, we're looking at movies 'about' the American presidency, and how better to do that than to embrace the cheesy American exceptionalist pornography of this alien-invasion effects-spectacular? It's a sprawling SF comedy about incalculable mass murder and the genocide of humanity. Bill Pullman looks decent, Will Smith quips, Jeff Goldblum recycles, Randy Quaid gets an anal probe, billions die, and a good time is had by all. Don't worry, the dog survives... For now. Spoiler alert: this is deeply stupid, but we both kinda like it anyway. Features UK election chat, and US SCOTUS / Presidential debate banter. Links: Five-Four Pod on Trump vs the United States: https://shows.acast.com/fivefourpod/episodes/trump-v-united-states Jon Bois video "That's Not Entirely Accurate." Requires a subscription to the Secret Base Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/posts/pretty-good-15-107056427 Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
Before you leave office, will you let us know if there's aliens?
Because this is the only thing I really want to know.
I want to know what's going on.
Would you ever open up Roswell and let us know what's really going on there?
So many people ask me that question.
I know, it sounds almost ridiculous, but it's actually the real question I want to know.
It sounds like a cute question, but it's actually...
There are millions and millions of people That want to go there, that want to see it.
I won't talk to you about what I know about it, but it's very interesting.
But Roswell's a very interesting place with a lot of people that would like to know what's going on.
So you're saying you may declassify?
You'll take it?
Well, I'll have to think about that one.
This is I Don't Speak German.
Here we talk about the far right, their fellow travellers, and what they say to each other when they think we're not listening.
The show is hosted by Daniel Harper and me, Jack Graham.
We're both he-him.
Be aware we cover difficult, sometimes nasty subject matter, so content warnings always apply.
Okay then, well, welcome everybody to I Don't Speak German bonus episode, whichever number it is.
And yeah, it's Daniel.
It's election day here in Britain.
Yes, I am aware of that, yep.
Yeah, and it's looking like the Conservative Party is going to be, we have no results yet where I am, but it's looking like the Conservative Party after 14 years in power is going to be not just kicked out, but Almost annihilated as an electoral force, which is, although I have no enthusiasm whatsoever for Labour, I am looking forward to watching those results come in because that'll be satisfying.
And over stateside there, I believe it's some sort of public holiday where you are today.
Is that right?
It is.
Some sort of obscure public holiday.
Obscure holiday.
I believe you on that side of the pond call it ungrateful day.
This is our Independence Day and we are recording this on the 4th of July.
You are celebrating your Independence Day.
Yes, we had this in the queue to do, and then suddenly it was like, oh shit, it's July, let's just do it now.
So yeah, we are recording this on July 4th, 2024.
That's right.
Yes, we are doing a podcast about Independence Day, the movie Independence Day, on Independence Day.
Almost exactly 28 years to the day after it premiered, because it premiered on July 3rd, 1996.
It premiered on July 3rd.
That really aggravates my OCD. Do you want to know what's even funnier?
There were actually midnight showings on July 2nd, so technically it actually premiered on July 2nd.
Although I seem to remember reading somewhere that actually July the 4th is...
The legend is that it's the day when the Declaration of Independence was signed and everything.
And as usual with history, it wasn't actually.
It was...
It was signed on the 2nd and the 3rd and then published on the 4th or something like that.
Something like that.
Yeah, I forget the exact details, but I believe most of the signers actually signed it on the 2nd, but it took a couple of days to get through the mail or whatever.
So, yeah.
So we celebrate July 4th, but it's actually July 2nd.
And that is the single greatest lie about the American founding.
Everything else is very tip-top You know, very honest.
In fact, I believe it's the only lie about the founding of America.
It's the only myth or lie about the founding of America, I believe.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
The reason for all that is that John Hancock took the entire 2nd of July to do his enormous signature at the bottom.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Yeah, he took a whole 24 hours.
It turned out that he was...
I'm not even...
I was going to make a very Purell joke, but we're above that on this podcast, at least on the bonus episodes.
Well, probably less on the bonus episodes, but we don't have to...
We don't have to go there.
We're above anything.
We're not really about much, but yeah.
I've always thought it was a bit unfair on John Hancock because he was, I don't know if he was the first, but he was one of the first people to sign it.
And he does this big sort of impressive signature.
And it's like, well, you know, it's the Declaration of Independence.
It's a historical...
It's a huge historical event we're all participating in.
I'm going to give it my best.
I'm going to do a big fancy signature.
And I always think like the real assholes in this situation are the guys that come afterwards and just do normal little signatures underneath to make him look like a dick.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's one of those things.
I actually, like, I'm pulling it up now, and it's not even like he's, I mean, he does have the largest signature on the thing, but it's not like, it's not like ten times the size of everybody else's or anything, you know?
Also, this is an era before, like, lined paper, and so, you know, you're not, I don't know, people just kind of signed it.
It's like signing a yearbook almost.
Like, that's really what the Declaration of Independence was, was the yearbook of America.
We graduated and then it's all been downhill from there.
Like a washed up high school baseball player whose best years were junior and senior year when they went to the semi-playoffs.
Yeah.
Well, we stan John Hancock on this podcast.
Actually, I have no idea if we do or not because I know nothing else about him.
He's probably a slave owner.
Statistically, yes.
Statistically, yes.
So I think we can just say that.
Anyway.
But yeah, it's interesting.
We haven't actually talked to each other for a little while.
You know, all with one thing and another.
It's just the way it's fallen out.
But this is the first time...
Um, we've spoken since your country ceased to be a democracy, which is interesting.
You, you are now a monarchy I'm, I'm given to understand.
Well, it's not quite that bad, but it's close to that bad.
And I thought like, I mean, there's been a lot of stuff happening with the presidential politics in the last six weeks or so, since we've recorded or, you know, um, Namely that it remains a possibility that Joe Biden will be replaced on the ticket because of an absolutely horrifying debate performance.
I don't know how likely that actually is, but it's better than 5% in my mind, which is much, much, much, much higher than I ever thought it was going to go.
I thought they were going to stumble along with the zombified Biden until...
You know, do or die.
But there are, you know, there are at least whispers.
So we will see.
Maybe the Democratic Party will be somewhat effective in putting...
No, don't even...
You know, it's just going to be a shit show.
I was going to say, what?
What did you say?
I will say that if Bernie Sanders had had that debate performance, if he had somehow been president at this point, and he had that debate performance, they would have replaced him 10 seconds after his first question.
So, you know, that's, yeah, it's a different world.
Anyway.
And, yeah, so Supreme Court decision decides that presidents just don't have to obey the law.
You're just civilly – not only are you civilly not liable for things you do as president or things you do during your time as president, but you are now criminally not liable.
And so long as it's in any way connected to your official duties or can even be portrayed as being part of your official duties, which there's no limit given to that by the Supreme Court decision – And you can no longer provide evidence if that evidence was done using the official duties.
Which means that Joe Biden could just drone strike Donald Trump right now and just end this thing.
And really, I think that's the way.
I mean, the Supreme Court said so.
I don't see a problem with it.
I trust the Supreme Court on this matter.
Yeah, absolutely.
This is the interesting thing, isn't it?
They've not just adopted the Nixon doctrine as formulated apparently off the top of his head in an interview with David Frost, famously where he said, if the president does it, it's not illegal.
They've not just adopted that, seemingly, as the law.
They've actually gone further, because they've said, not only is the president allowed to commit crimes as part of his official...
I mean, you know, wow, where have you been?
As anything that could be even remotely construed as being part of his official duties.
And you can't even count motive.
If Joe Biden said, I want to kill this person because they're annoying me, He cannot be prosecuted for that, as long as he uses something like the presidential powers.
So if he gets the Secret Service to just go whack somebody, that is perfectly within the bounds of the law, according to the Supreme Court.
And things that the president, apparently, if I'm understanding this correctly, things the president does...
As part of his official, arguably, because this is why it's actually a power grab by the right-wing courts, which is another way of saying a power grab by the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society and Leonard Leo and all that sort of people.
What it says is that if it's deemed to be part of official duties, it can't even be adduced as evidence in a case about something else.
Right, exactly.
So they've actually gone further than Nixon did when he ad-libbed that remark.
Yeah, I mean, people talking about this as a bottom five Supreme Court decision in all of history are not overstating anything.
This is an absolutely atrocious decision, you know?
Yeah.
There's an excellent 5-4 podcast episode that was just released.
We'll put it in the show notes because that's a definite must-listen.
5-4 is a must-listen anyway, but this one is...
If you want the real details of this and the real passion of it and not us misremembering the legal doctrines, etc., go listen to 5-4.
It's really your one-stop shop for this stuff.
Yeah.
The one thing I'm going to ding that episode for is that Rhiannon wasn't there because she apparently has a real job.
Yeah, no, check that out for sure.
Yeah, no, that's absolutely essential.
I think it's the essential podcast, I think, at the moment, certainly with reference to US politics.
But yeah, we...
We have a king in Britain, but we do still have a functioning constitutional democracy.
You in America do not technically have a king now, but you do not have a functioning constitutional democracy.
And you have the opening.
Anybody who's elected president who wants to be a king can basically choose to do that.
That's the situation you're in, I think.
Yeah, pretty much.
That's kind of where we are right now.
So, you know.
So, happy July 4th, Daniel.
Happy Independence Day.
Happy Independence Day, yeah.
I'm very happy to live in this highly functional society that I live in.
The Supreme Court isn't even in the Constitution, by the way, people.
I just recently learned that.
I always kind of just assumed that it was, but it's not.
You don't have to have one.
I am not sure that's correct.
Oh.
I'm wrong.
I'm wrong on Maine.
It wouldn't be the first time.
Yeah, it's defined by Article 3.
Yeah, no, it's definitely in the Supreme Court.
I mean, the Supreme Court is definitely, yeah.
You can just cut that if you want.
That's fine.
No, I'll leave it in.
I don't give a shit.
I was like, wait a minute.
Hold on.
No, I'm pretty sure I passed social studies in the sixth grade.
I'm pretty sure it's defined in Article 3.
So I Googled it, and yes, it is defined by Article 3.
What it does not do, there's an early court case called Marbury v.
Madison, which gave the Supreme Court the power to judge laws constitutional or not.
And that power is not enumerated in the Constitution.
The Supreme Court just gave themselves that power in the late 18th or early 19th century.
I think the late 18th century.
And so the Supreme Court was definitely seen as it was a branch of government, but it was a much more restricted branch of government for basically the first 150 years that it was in existence.
And it's really only been since the Civil War, and particularly since in the 20th century, that the Supreme Court came to be as powerful as it is, as meaningful as it is.
So yeah, there is some truth in the matter that it was considered to be by far the weakest of the three branches at the time of the founding, but it is defined in Article III of the Constitution.
Okay, well, you've actually learned something serious listening to this.
The listeners probably all knew this, and I'm the only one.
I'm just jack-facting my way through it.
It's okay, I do that too.
It's fine.
I'm just doing what Trump does, basically.
I'm misremembering something that I heard somebody else say a week ago, and then I'm pronouncing a garbled version of it as fact.
The difference is that unlike Trump, I haven't got thousands of people who are paid to insist that I'm right, even though the facts clearly show that I'm wrong.
To be fair, Joe Biden also takes advantage of that same faculty.
Yeah, one of his few remaining faculties.
Yes, indeed.
So anyway.
So we can talk about Joe Biden.
I think we're going to talk more about this.
I know we want to do Frost Dixon.
I think we'll do that next.
And I think this will come up again in more detail.
But on to the serious business of talking about a science fiction movie from 30 years ago.
Yes.
Yeah, this is kind of part of our President Series, as you will know, listeners, if you're a contributor to our Patreons and you listen to these bonus episodes.
The last few, have we done three of these now?
Presidential film?
I think we've done two as part of this series.
Because we've done Primary Colours previously, but not as far as the series.
I think we've just done Air Force One and Dave so far.
Dave!
Oh, I love Dave.
Yeah, Dave.
There were several times I wanted to just re-watch Dave over the course of the last few weeks.
It's like, yeah, that was fun.
Let's watch it again.
Yeah, can I just live in this alternate reality, please?
Yes.
So this is the third, then, of our currently running sort of mini-series of bonus episodes about movies about the president.
And it's not...
It's not really about the president, this film, although there is a president very prominent in it.
President Bill Pullman fights aliens.
So yeah, Independence Day.
Daniel, what's your personal history with the movie Independence Day?
I saw this, I don't remember if we saw it opening night, but we saw it very early in its run.
Like as a family, it was that kind of big event picture.
So I would have seen this either, you know, the Friday it was released or maybe the next day.
I don't think it was even a week before I saw this theatrically.
And it played forever.
Like this movie...
Like, it would, you know, I think people, I keep wanting to explain to the youngsters that, like, movies used to stay in theaters longer than six weeks, you know?
That even today, like, the biggest hit in the world, like, it sticks around for, like, two months and then it's gone.
And they look at you blankly and say, theaters?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Um, this movie played like well into like winter.
Like I believe it was because I saw this four times theatrically, you know, I saw this over and over again.
Um, uh, This is interesting because I saw it twice theatrically.
I went back to see this.
This was the top grossing film of the year.
And it is still, I was watching some stuff today on it by happenstance, and it is still, even not adjusting for inflation, the 10th highest grossing film not adapted from a previously existing property.
Wow.
Or as being part of a, you know, so like, yeah, and most of the rest of them are Pixar movies.
Not technically adapted from a previously existing property, because this is basically War of the Worlds.
But yeah, we won't worry about that.
Yeah.
I've been doing a little bit of a project on another thing about Roger Corman movies.
We've been watching some old Roger Corman movies and talking about them on another thing that I do.
This reminds me a lot of, what if Roger Corman had had $100 million?
Yeah.
It's kind of because it's all up on the screen like everything I mean I don't know like this movie still looks great like I you know I sourced a version of it and watched it and I'm like this holds up the effects actually hold up you know partly because it is before everything goes like full CGI but like they are Handcrafting models of this.
They are definitely...
There is craftsmanship that goes into this, but that is in service of this very paint-by-numbers, fundamentally structural plot with a whole lot of...
It's not the most complex or sophisticated story, let's put it that way.
With a whole lot of funny guys in it to lighten the mood.
This is the funniest movie about an apocalypse that is not actually marketed as a comedy I've ever seen.
There's a lot of light comedy in this.
This is a comedy film about genocide.
Exactly.
And then I really never, I probably saw it like once or twice in the last like 25 years, you know, but never really thought about it.
I mean, I think we owned it on VHS back in the day.
But I never, I mean, I haven't touched it.
I'm sure I don't have it in this house anywhere.
But really never really approached it again until it was time to...
Kind of do this.
And I was like, okay, well, let's just rewatch Independence Day.
That'll be, you know, light and fluffy and fun.
And, you know, rewatching it, it was light and fluffy and fun.
Nobody on the screen is taking this any bit seriously, so why should we?
It's kind of my take on it.
Yeah, yeah.
This seems like the moment for me to admit something to the listeners, which I did admit to Daniel before we started to record, which is that I have not rewatched it for this recording, because I've been very busy, one thing, and...
I know this film so well that I just didn't feel the need.
Sure.
Because this is one of those films that I feel like I could almost sort of perform.
I've seen it so many times.
But it does leave me unable to comment on whether I agree with you about things like effects holding up and stuff like that.
I couldn't tell you.
Because it's been a very long time since I watched it for the last time.
Yeah, that's fair.
I mean, I would recommend...
I mean, I can say...
I think you would agree with me that it holds up pretty well.
I mean, it looks like a film made in the 90s, but it looks like a very good, very well-made film made in the 90s.
Very few shots feel...
when stuff does go full CGI, now you look at it and it just looks like it looks like somebody's drawn on the screen as opposed to something being there.
The model work is impressive.
What CGI is there is impressive.
Anyway, that's not really what we're here to talk about, but I thought it still looked really good.
It looked a lot better than Air Force One.
Let's put it that way.
Air Force One looks like it was shot on a stage.
You never feel like, oh, I'm watching something that looks like it's put together with five people.
This looks technically impressive.
Yeah, it does make me want to go back and have another look at it, just to judge it on that level.
Because I do...
There was a kind of a sweet spot for certain movies in that late 90s area where they...
The movies that had enough money to have good CGI, but they were still...
You know, like Jurassic Park is kind of the perfect example of this, where they have enough money to do, for the time, very good CGI, but they're still not dominated by it, so they're combining it with stuff like good model work and puppets and stuff like that, so...
Yeah, I imagine it's a bit like that.
Yeah, it holds up in a lot of the same way that Jurassic Park holds up.
This isn't as good as Jurassic Park, obviously.
It's not quite to that level of technical sophistication.
But it holds up in the same way because you're not looking at the bad CGI, you're looking at model work.
And ultimately, you know it's a model, but...
It just works.
I don't know.
It's just hard to explain.
So yeah, I guess...
I don't know.
I re-watched it and I had some thoughts.
But I guess since I watched it more recently, I guess...
I mean, you say you've watched it a bunch.
Did you watch it a bunch over the years?
Like you've just kind of absorbed it?
Like you just throw it on and I've watched it 30 times?
What's your experience of it?
It's one of those things where I had a very brief but intense infatuation with something, you know?
You know, like you get an album and you just listen to it and listen to it and listen to it until you can't stand it anymore.
It's a bit like that.
And yeah, I was always very prone to that, which is a shame because it kind of ruins the album for you forevermore.
You know, you have to wait 10 years and you can listen to it again and you can really enjoy it.
But even then, it's still kind of tainted by the experience of having just played it to death back in the day, which is an interesting sort of thing to pop into my head, actually, now I come to think about it, because as I recall, and it's entirely possible that this is a completely apocryphal memory, but as I recall, the reason I went to see it at all was because the REM track, it's the end of the world as we know it, and I Feel Fine is in the trailer.
I feel like that's true.
I feel like that's the...
Because for some reason I saw the trailer and the fact...
And it's a perfect example of marketing working on you on a pre-rational level.
Because the fact that a song you love is in the trailer is absolutely no reason whatsoever to go and see a film.
But I was a big REM fan.
I loved that album.
I loved that song.
Yeah.
And it was in the trailer, and I went to see the film.
And yeah, it worked on me, I think, because I had seen, and I mentioned Jaws, I mentioned War of the Worlds.
The reason Jaws pops into my head is because there's another film that I was obsessed with as a kid.
I mentioned War of the Worlds.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the 1950s George Powell movie of the War of the Worlds.
I saw that very young, and I was obsessed with that movie.
And I think the reason that Independence Day hooked itself into my brain a bit, and I was a teenager, I suppose.
I was at college.
I suppose I was like 17 or 18 when this came out.
Yeah, I was 16.
I think it's...
I'm a bit older than that then.
But I think that's why it sort of hooked itself into my brain, because it is a kind of a...
I mean, that's a bit reductive, but it is a kind of a remake of that movie.
And I was obsessed with that movie when I was a kid.
And yeah, it is a...
As I remember it, it's an overpowering movie in many respects.
I mean, the thing that...
I was along for the ride for a lot of it.
Like, you know, the...
The Randy Quaid stuff and the Will Smith stuff and all them.
Basically, the characters are just, you know, it's fine.
Yeah, they're there.
They're on the screen.
It's fine.
I don't mind.
But I'm there for, you know, the...
The spectacle, really.
It's a movie that's about...
Really, if it's about anything, it's about the spectacle of just the sheer size of the alien ships and the sheer level of devastation that they inflict.
And the movie is very conscious that that's...
That's the source of its fascination.
The rest of it is a delivery system for that, really.
And yeah, it just completely worked on me.
It's an example of just Hollywood spectacle being so vast that it achieves a kind of a corny, cheesy sublimity, I think.
And it really...
I went back to see it again at the movies.
I may have even gone back to see it a third time.
I'm not sure.
But I had the VHS and I watched it.
Over and over again, you know, trying chasing that high kind of because obviously it's very different on a little TV screen.
But that's my that's my history with it, really.
Yeah, I'm sure I watched it a bunch on VHS as well.
I mean, you know, just I remember I saw it four times theatrically and I know I saw it on VHS and like a replay on TV. But again, just not for years and years and years.
So rewatching it like so.
I was going to just get up this morning and just put it on while I was having coffee and making breakfast and stuff and just sort of like, I'm just going to watch it.
But then last night I was like, oh, let's just make sure the file works and everything.
And I just started clicking around and like, oh, this actually looks really nice.
And I just kind of got invested in a couple of scenes and then went, well, let's just start from the beginning and I'll just finish this beer and then I'll get 20 minutes in and then I'll...
And then I ended up staying up till like 2.30 in the morning and watching the whole movie.
Because it's just kind of compulsively watchable in this weird way.
There are...
It's like there are a lot of characters.
Sorry, the funny thing is, completely coincidentally, John Boyes released a Patreon video about one of the minor characters here and kind of has gone through it.
So he does his John Boyes thing and builds all these...
these you know he counts every line of dialogue every word of dialogue that every character says and he maps them out and then compares them to each other and does all kinds of very nerdy things and is telling a great story about kind of the making of the film so now I just want to tell you all the things that John Boyce said that I watched this morning and so I'm going to try to avoid
I'm getting into that but he counts about 20 major speaking roles or 20 like if you have a line of dialogue and you have a name then you count onto his little board and And he counted 20 characters.
About 20 main characters.
And they exist in various...
The presidential family is one.
The Las Vegas, Randy Quaid's family is another.
And then Jeff Goldblum is his arcline.
And then everybody comes together at the end.
And...
It's funny how well it works.
Now, I'm going to tell you that the Randy Quaid stuff did not work for me at all on first.
When I was a kid, none of this worked for me.
I thought it was just stupid.
I even liked Randy Quaid because I had seen him in a couple of the National Lampoon vacation movies.
He's very good in Christmas Vacation.
I had seen him in some other stuff.
I really liked Randy Quaid.
What about Bob?
He's in What About Bob, right?
Is he in what about Bob?
No, no, no.
He's in Quick Change.
Quick Change, which is the movie I was just about to talk about.
I loved the movie Quick Change, and he's in that.
That's why I liked Randy Quaid.
I think maybe I didn't see Quick Change until a couple of years later, maybe.
Or maybe I just...
I mean, I know I'd seen him in some stuff.
I just, like, for me, that was less interesting than the Jeff Goldblum plots and the other stuff was more interesting to me.
Yeah.
So, that's kind of the only thing that really didn't work for me as a kid.
But, you know, like, when you're, I don't know, a kid, I was 16, but it was, you know, you just kind of, you yada yada yada the stuff you don't care about.
And I think part of the reason it's, that stuff works a little bit less well for me is just that it's so, like, it's set up to be...
The big thing at the end is that he makes the big sacrifice, right?
And so you need him there from the beginning so that it kind of justifies it.
But because the movie was already two and a half hours long, and God, you can't imagine a movie being more than two and a half hours, right?
This is actually considered short today.
Yeah.
So a lot of the stuff with his family, he's got three kids hanging around, and they barely have dialogue.
After the first ten minutes of the film, they're just gone.
They're just hanging out in the background and not doing anything of any importance.
And apparently there was some more material, like there was some other stuff that was shot that would have given this resonance.
There's a longer cut.
There's a longer cut, which I've seen.
I have never seen the longer cut, so go ahead and tell me what's in the longer cut.
Well, the funny thing is, the longer cut, as I remember it, is mostly stuff concerning them.
Most of the actual...
I mean, there's lots of little extra bits here and there, but most of the actual expanded scenes or new scenes that you get in the extended cut are about that little family, about that little group of kids with their...
I think he's a stepdad?
I never got the...
I don't know, like...
It's so ill-defined to me that I just...
I don't even know the answer to that.
I mean, on Wikipedia, they're subscribed as his kids, but it could very easily be a step-parent kind of situation, unlike a wife who's left...
It feels like he's almost...
He's crop-dusted in from another movie, in a way.
It's kind of how I feel about it.
It almost feels like there's this kind of interesting little comedy-drama about this alcoholic...
Rob Duster, pilot, that just sort of wedges its way into this apocalypse, you know?
And I think that's intentional, but I think it's just, they don't really give it a chance to breathe, and so it just sort of sits there, right?
Well, in the extended cut, because his kids are like mixed race.
Right, right, right, yeah.
I mean, they're clearly meant to be Hispanic.
Yeah, I mean.
Yeah, exactly.
Or Lucido.
Sorry, not to.
Yeah.
It's written.
I think it's written as he's their father and the mother is dead or gone or whatever.
And the mother is obviously supposed to have been Mexican.
Everybody, it's like the cast realize on some level that that doesn't ring true somehow.
So they play it as he's their stepdad, which works much better.
The young cast and Randy Quaid all seem to sort of realize that it plays much better if they play it as him being their stepdad.
And the extended...
Sorry, go ahead.
I just want to say that in the extended cut...
You get more scenes between him and the kids, particularly him and the older kid.
And you get the theme developed about the eldest son, the eldest kid, being kind of angry at him because of his failings.
And then coming to realize that this is a...
This is a guy who is doing his best, and he's got these flaws and frailties and so on, but he is a good guy, etc.
And it's just, I mean, yeah, they had a movie that was too long, so they cut the stuff about the poor people and the Mexican people.
Of course they did.
Yeah.
I mean, he's also like, Randy Quaid is not, like, I called him like an alcoholic, you know, bush pilot earlier.
Like, he's not just an alcoholic.
He's the alcoholic.
Yeah, like, he is the, like, 1930s comedy drunk version.
Yeah, he's a Preston Sturges alcohol.
This is, you know, like, he's on the level of, like, the liquor bottles are, like, rolling out of the plane after he lands sort of thing, you know, where he said, like, three pints of whiskey in flight.
Like, he's, like, that level of alcoholic in this film.
And it's, like, it's not like that stuff doesn't...
I mean, it works as far as it goes here, and this movie does not have an ounce of...
You know, actual seriousness about its premise and its heart.
But he does feel like he wanders in from a little bit of another genre.
And I think it's interesting how he interfaces with it.
But it's just such a bizarre decision to push it that far.
And I guess if you got Randy Quaid in the movie, you just let him go.
We'll just wait for the fences.
I don't know.
I don't want to talk about him this much.
I don't dislike him in the film, and I don't dislike that section of the film.
It's just I was saying that as a teenager, this is the stuff that really just didn't work for me.
And then re-watching it, it's like, this would work for me if there was more of it.
But there's just not.
And I think the whole film kind of has this kind of quality of being slightly...
Uninterested in sort of the dynamics between its characters because there are several husbands and wives.
There are three other sets of husbands and wives in this film, each of which has more going on on screen than what we see with Randy Quaid and his hypothetical wife.
But we have Will Smith and what's her name?
Vivica Fox.
You know, they are, she is a single mother and he is dating her.
And, you know, the whole, like, kind of, will they, won't they, is like, is he going to ask her to marry him, you know, by, or before the end of the world, basically.
And, of course, that turns out well.
But there's some good moments there between them.
This is...
gave us will smith like as a as a superstar um he was like the first guy at this point and he had done a couple of like um you know kind of kind of low-key small-scale independent stuff um but this is the he comes full-on movie star in this movie um and then the next year he makes men in black and just that goes on to make a trillion dollars or whatever and um it's just off to the races but you know he is in full-blown movie star mode here um
This movie made his career in a lot of ways, and you can see exactly why.
I mean, he's great.
He's great at it.
Yeah, he's very good at what he does, Will Smith, and I can't discount...
I kind of think the casting is the secret weapon of this film, because there's a lot of very enjoyable, likable performers in it.
Jeff Goldblum is an actor that people like to look at and like to watch, and Will Smith similarly, and You know, and I can't discount the possibility that I went to see this partly because of Will Smith, because I knew him from Fresh Prince, because that was on British TV. That used to be on BBC Two.
When I got home from school, it was The Simpsons, The Fresh Prince, and Star Trek The Next Generation, which brings us to the early 90s trifecta there.
Yeah, exactly.
Brent Spiner is clearly having a blast here.
I love him in this band.
And of course, at the time, I only knew him as Commander Data, but yeah, no, he's...
But yeah, so we have two other married couples here, two other kind of couples.
We have the president and his wife, who really only have one scene actually together, because she's in LA doing some dignitary thing at the beginning of the film, and then he's in the White House, and he's browsing about poll numbers and stuff.
We are supposed to be talking about the president here, so we'll get to that shortly.
And then she sustains injuries during the destruction of Los Angeles, and she just ends up just dies.
And they have a child.
He has a young daughter who's actually played by Mae Whitman, who was going to go on to be in Scott Pilgrim and stuff, and Arrested Development.
And it was funny to see that name and go, oh, when she was a child actress, she was in Independence Day.
And then you have your third kind of a divorced couple, and you have Jeff Goldblum and then his wife.
And this is the great coincidence that makes the plot work, right?
Is that Jeff Goldblum is this sort of brilliant hacker guy who says he spent eight years at MIT, so he's got a master's or PhD or something.
And he's working at a cable company doing satellite uplinks and stuff, and solving all their tech problems.
It's not clear to me what his job is.
His job seems to be like the resident scientist intellectual at a cable news company or something.
I mean, it's sort of implied that he's just so good at his job that he just sort of wanders around and does whatever he wants and just like, oh, I can just solve that in two seconds, you know?
So he just wanders into the office, he complains about the recycling, and then, you know...
It solves these brilliant technical problems just on the wayside.
I mean, I was going to get into this.
It reminds me, the tone of this kind of reminds me a lot of...
I don't know if you read any of the Heinlein juveniles, like Rocketship Galileo or Have Spaceship Will Travel or any of that kind of stuff.
Well, Rocketship Galileo is like...
I think it's written and published in either 1946 or 1947, and it's a story in which three young boys under the tutelage of a brilliant mad scientist construct a rocket ship in their backyard out of spare parts.
And then take it to the moon, right?
Where they find a Nazi military base, and then they have to fight the Nazi military base.
That's the plot of Rocket Ship Galilee.
Sorry, I thought you said this was a Heinlein book.
They fight the Nazi military base?
Well, if it had been published even a couple years later, they would have been communists.
They would have definitely been communists.
Yeah, no...
Uh, Heinlein, no great fan of Hitler.
He likes his fascism a little bit more low-key.
So, you know, it's okay.
Fair enough.
This movie reminds me, believe me, we could talk about Heinlein for hours if you ever wanted to actually do that.
Um, I grew up on fucking Robert Heinlein.
Um...
I have tried to read Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land and failed miserably on both occasions.
I cannot get into it.
It really helps to be like 15.
I'll say that.
It really, really helps to be 15.
It has some of that tone.
We're a bunch of whiz kids dreaming up projects and fighting the bad guys and defeating evil.
It's got a lot of that kind of moxie to it.
If you approach it in that way, it makes sense that he's the big kid.
Jeff Goldblum is a big technical wizard kid and he's got a technical wizard kid job.
And he's just kind of, you know, bouncing around in life and he's working, you know, repairing satellites, you know, because...
Yeah, if this movie had been made in the early 80s, that role would have been a teenager.
Right, yeah, yeah.
I mean, you could almost see, like, Matthew Broderick in War Games and that kind of, you know...
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, it's almost a surprise they don't make him, like...
A teenager except, well, he has to have...
And this is just the part...
You just make the character who in the film is his ex-wife.
You just make her his mum.
Oh, yeah.
No, it does.
But he has to find...
Actually, that would work even better because then the dad could have been...
The older character, Judd Hirsch, could have been the...
Yeah.
The ex-husband.
And then the kid tells, yeah, that actually, man, this actually makes more sense if you make him like 15.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
And Goldblum obviously realized that because he plays him as basically 15.
He plays him as 15.
No, no, he plays him as a teenager.
I mean, it's probably my favorite performance in the film, honestly.
It's just, Jeff Goldblum is just, he's so great here.
It's just like...
He's having a blast.
He's just having a blast.
He gets to be the smart guy in every scene.
He's on the outs with his wife, who is now the White House Communications Director for Bill Pullman's presidency.
Apparently, it's revealed in a momentary scene that at some point before Bill Pullman was president, Jeff Goldblum Punched him.
Just punched him in the face because he thought they were having an affair.
And this is the level of marital discord that leads people to prison sentences.
And this is just treated as hijinks by the film.
It's kind of amazing.
That's the level of seriousness that this film takes with the topics it brings up.
It's both bizarre and delightful.
It's just like, well, we're just not going to talk about that.
It's literally sitcom logic a lot of the time.
It's just literally a sitcom.
So...
Yeah, so we have several sets of husbands and wives here.
So this is clearly a preoccupation with the film.
And they each have three different endings where I don't think there's an implication that Jeff Goldblum and his wife are going to get back together.
I think that she's appreciating him more or something because he's taking responsibility and he's doing things.
He's not just goofing around in his cable company anymore.
But, yeah, it's...
They don't have a clinch at the end, do they?
It's one of the things I remember being slightly surprising, that there isn't an explicit reconciliation.
But as you say, the three couples have three distinct endings, because obviously the first lady dies, so the president is bereaved, leading to the classic line from the young actress, is mommy sleeping now?
Which is just like...
The worst of Hollywood absolutely distilled to a quintessence, which is not the kid's fault, obviously.
And then, of course, the happy ending, the breeding pair who get the happy ending is Will Smith and Vivica Fox.
Yeah.
No, no, absolutely.
So yeah, I guess we should talk about Bill Pullman now.
Thomas Whitmore.
Thomas J. Whitmore.
A name you can actually remember, although I did not remember it until I just stared at it.
No memory of the name at all.
I just think of that character as President Bill Pullman.
President Bill Pullman.
That's what we're going to do.
He's the guy from Spaceballs, but he's the president now.
I don't remember any of the characters' names, actually.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
None of them.
Yeah, I watched the movie last night, and I still have to look at the Wikipedia page to look at it and see what the characters' names are.
Yeah, I mean, what's your...
My take, having not seen the film in a while, why I kind of put it in this, kind of alongside Air Force One and Dave, is it's sort of a Clinton-esque kind of figure who's...
A young guy who's kind of showing his mettle and who's trying to prove that he can hang with the big boys.
And there's a little bit of that text in here.
But it's funny how divorced from the realities of the presidency this is.
I mean, again, it feels like...
This movie is not, like, about the president as a, like, as a person or as a political actor, like, having to make decisions.
This is kind of president as, like, big kid.
You know, it is.
There's a very, you know, like, he's very disconnected from his actual responsibilities of office or his actual, it's all, like, he's just, like, the homespun boy next door who just happens to have the nuclear codes, you know?
And...
This film is aggressively American.
There's a montage sequence towards the end after they build the big plan that's gonna destroy all the aliens.
And there is a montage of four or five different countries where people are speaking dialogue in either funny accents or not in English.
And that's like the sole experience that we get other than like African tribesmen and stuff like running across the wreckage or like seeing the spaceships in the air.
That is the only experience that we get outside of the United States in this entire film.
And that's just astonishing to me, you know?
I feel like we get the obligatory sort of news montage about the sources being everywhere on the planet.
They are watching Sky News towards the beginning of the film, so they are watching a non-US news.
So it is, I mean, it's definitely implied that this is happening all around the world, but in our, like, and the thing that's weird to me, or the thing that, like, the reason that's notable is that It would be one thing if this was, you know, if we were just telling the Randy Quaid story, right?
And it's just his attempts to escape from the aliens, etc.
Then it would be like a limited POV type, you know, story.
But when we've got 20 named characters who speak lines of dialogue, one of which is the literal president of the United States, and like we're not talking about like the Prime Minister of England or, you know, the Premier of Russia or whatever.
We're not seeing any kind of like No international cooperation at all.
And then when there is, it's a little like, well, the Americans finally figured out how to solve this fucking thing.
There's literally a line of dialogue where it's like, it's about bloody time.
That's it.
I remember that so clearly.
It's the one time a British person pops up in the film.
And it's a, in line with the film's sort of, because as you say, it is very aggressively American.
It's very American exceptionalist.
But it's American exceptionalist in a sort of What we would now call woke way.
It's a liberal American exceptionalist because what it's saying is, well, America is obviously the best country and essentially the only country in the world, but it's because America kind of represents everybody.
You get the famous speech where he says, you know, Independence Day is no longer an American holiday, which is a fabulous bit of spin where you get to do the full-on jingoistic rah-rah America thing.
But you're also saying, but I'm speaking for everybody on the planet, actually.
But yeah, because you get the montage where people of different nationalities all rally together at the end to make the plan work.
And the one British person in the entire film, in line with that sort of woke thing about, oh, cooperation across nationalities and differences, you see a British soldier and an Iraqi soldier And they're cooperating.
And somebody says, the Americans come up with a plan.
And the Brit, of course, says, oh, it's about bloody time.
Right.
Finally, the Americans are coming in to fix this thing.
It's like it's...
That's right.
Because, of course, it's their job, you know, because they're the ones...
Well, that's just what America does.
I mean, it's just such this, like, it's just such this, like, not even...
Like, it's not even...
I mean, you used egoistic before, and I get it.
But it's not...
It's like the world...
Oh, really?
The world relies on America.
To just be the force for good.
I've often talked about Superman.
I've talked about Superman as a representation of American foreign policy in a way.
Sort of like the American do-gooderism.
As presented as straightforwardly true.
I think you can do a lot with that.
But it is this very sense that Superman is this...
You know, guy from Smallville, Kansas, who's like kind of wandering around and like he has these superpowers and he's going around and doing good things.
And he calls himself like citizen of the world or whatever.
But he's like, it's also truth, justice in the American way that the American way is just so obviously correct that everybody just sort of aspires to it.
Like there is no sense of resistance to like that.
The American way might be seen as not like homespun apple pie and, you know, and human rights and such that it might be seen as something a little bit more sinister.
And this movie just sort of accepts that, that, you know, there is a sense of which, you know, Bill Pullman is this like Superman character.
He is this Clark Kent character, just given the powers of the president of Earth, essentially.
Exactly, exactly.
You know, which, you know, Doctor Who would eventually play with that idea in a much more insipid way, but, you know, we don't have to get into that.
Yeah.
It's interesting, I mean, you mentioned Doctor Who because it does, when I think about it, it does remind me of the way in which Doctor Who in the 1970s, in the Jon Pertwee era, the Doctor is stuck on Earth, and he's been put there to protect Earth by the Time Lords, to protect Earth from various alien invasions that are about to happen at that point in history.
And the I mean, it's partly budget, obviously, because we're talking about Doctor Who in the 70s, but it's not just budget.
There's also just ideological assumptions here.
The alien invasions of Earth are always alien invasions of Southern England.
It's just the same thing.
It's just when aliens want to take over the planet, they, of course, start in Croydon.
There's always a quarry that needs invasion.
That's what's going on in that area.
The Nesteens want to take over the entire planet Earth.
They start with high streets in Greater London.
And there's a similar, weird sort of thing happening in Independence Day, where it's just like the...
I mean, as we were saying...
Technically, the film shows you that there's a flying saucer over Paris and there's a flying saucer over London, etc., etc., etc.
But really, what it's saying is, you know, it's an alien invasion of Earth, which is just basically the same thing as an alien invasion of America.
And it's not even really America, is it?
It's like the big important bits of America.
It's New York and Washington, D.C., basically.
Well, they do kind of lampshade this and they say, like, they picked our, like, sort of, like, central hubs.
They picked, like, And then they're going to move the ships over and they're going to keep destroying smaller and smaller cities until within a matter of days there just won't be people left.
And we see that in the film because they do focus on Area 51 where suddenly they know the...
They know the American resistance, but it's the same thing in this movie's vernacular.
The human resistance is focused there, and so now they're coming remarkably slowly, by the way.
I buy it for plot reasons.
Anyway, it's fine.
But there is a sense of which they take out nerve centers first, and then they go back to mop up the rest.
It makes sense.
I don't know that you would pick...
New York City, DC, and Los Angeles as your first three American cities.
But at least in theory, the logic of that does not escape me.
I sort of get what the movie's trying to do there.
But, you know, I would attack NORAD first.
Although it's implied that they did hit NORAD as well.
So, I mean, it's kind of confused.
If it's not off screen, it's just sort of nebulous.
You can always just fill it with plastic and make the movie work however you want it to work for yourself.
Because, I mean, they do say, like, oh, well, the cabinet just got destroyed because they attacked NORAD. But we don't see that on screen and we don't see how that fits into the larger strategy or anything.
It's just like, oh, well, they destroyed Dorad.
It's like, oh, okay.
There's another thing I remember about this movie, which is very much a direct lift from the 1950s, War of the World, which is the attempt to beat the aliens with nukes that doesn't work.
Um, that, that is something that they do in the, in the fifties, uh, movie.
I mean, for obvious reasons, cause it's a, it's a fifties cold war movie.
Everybody's obsessed with the atom bomb, et cetera.
And the idea is like the, the, the ultimate thing we have is the nuke.
So we drop the nukes on them.
And the, the, the movie's big horror is, you know, the nukes don't work.
Um, And it's interesting to compare, I think, the inflection, because obviously in the 50s movie, that's a very sort of Cold War thing.
It's a very kind of, you know, what if the nukes don't work against the Reds or whatever?
Right.
But in Independence Day, the anxiety about the nukes is much more about, as I remember anyway, it's much more about stuff like fallout and pollution, you know?
They talk about it.
It's kind of two things.
It's like, are we going to deploy nuclear facilities against an American city?
Are we going to destroy our own people?
Is kind of the first thing.
And the other thing is...
You know, well, they're going to, like, the Russians are going to notice the nuke and they're going to retaliate in that sort of, like, that it's going to create, like, nuclear winter, effectively.
And David, Jeff Goldblum's character, kind of brings up, like, more of the, like, the environmental stuff because he's the hippie, you see?
So he's the one who cares about that Namby Pamby shit.
But, yeah, so...
You're right, you're right.
For it's...
For its time, this is an aggressively what we would call woke movie.
You know, they make a point of making the Goldblum character into this sort of hippie recycling freak guy.
And there's loads of noises like this in the movie.
You get the emphasis on different religions and you get, you know, Judd Hirsch's character sort of leads a group of people in prayer, you know, and you get the...
The guy who's in every...
The asshole...
He plays the asshole character in every 90s Hollywood movie.
He's the balding nasal guy who plays that character.
He's the late 90s equivalent of William Atherton.
You know how he played that character in every 80s movie.
He plays the same character in every 90s movie.
And he's the evil White House Chief of Staff, amusingly enough.
No, no, no.
He's the Secretary of Defense.
He's the Secretary of Defense.
Is he?
Oh, right.
Okay.
His redemption is that he's allowed to sit and pray with Judd Hirsch, and there's this line like, he says, well I'm not Jewish, and Judd Hirsch says, oh nobody's perfect.
So do you know a bit of the lore behind that character, by the way?
No, no, I don't know any of the facts.
This is the point of the joint boys video.
It's behind the Patreon.
I'm sorry.
I don't follow sports, but I follow John Boyce.
He's brilliant at what he does.
So the character's name is Albert Nimzicki, and apparently a producer on Stargate, which is the previous film that Devlin and Emmerich had made together.
Was named Nimziki and they just righteously hated this guy.
And they gave him every single bad idea.
He is just there to be shit on for the entire movie.
That's the whole point of it.
And he doesn't even get a name until he's fired.
And Bill Pullman goes, you're fired Nimziki, we hate you.
It's like the pettiest thing ever.
And in fact, this team, when they made Godzilla a couple of years later, they included Mayor Ebert and his aide Siskel or something.
And we give this two thumbs down, and at the end, I think they get eaten by a Godzilla or something.
But yeah, they're not above these kind of petty slights.
But yeah, no, he is...
James Redbourne is great here, but it is delightful, that little bit of scene-chewing and that little bit of history there and the backstory.
I can't remember where I was going with that, but I was just sort of pointing out that this is a very, what was called back then, politically correct movie.
And it's making all sorts of noises like that.
Like it has the first lady being rescued by this woman who's an exotic dancer.
I mean, literally a stripper with a heart of gold.
Yeah, literally.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And it's like, oh, look, you know, she's an African-American sex worker, you know, who lives paycheck to paycheck.
But she's sissing up with the First Lady, and they're finding that they have a lot in common.
And really, we're all Americans, aren't we?
Yeah.
And nobody ever talks.
So I do, since this is a question I'm going to ask you.
We have our two, Vivica Fox and Will Smith.
Is there another African American character with a speaking role in this film, to your knowledge?
I feel like the...
The immediate superior or sergeant or drill instructor guy who briefs Will Smith and his buddy might have been African American, but I could be misremembering that.
I don't think so, but there is one that I noticed, and that is sort of like...
Once Jeff Goldblum gets to Area 51, the technician that he works with the most and who has a handful of lines of dialogue is an African-American man.
So there is one that I recall.
I'd have to go back and look at that scene and find out, but I don't think that was...
You could be right, but I don't remember it.
But yeah, so there are, but that's all the racial diversity we get in this film.
You know, you get your two, you're kind of, I guess Will Smith is kind of the lead on this.
I mean, I kind of think this is Bill Pullman's, kind of like he's the lead, but you could really call either Jeff Goldblum or Bill Pullman or Will Smith is sort of like the real lead actor here.
None of the three of them really has a commanding kind of role over the other two.
I think we mostly remember Will Smith because...
I mean, he is a co-lead, but he's...
I mean, it makes him a star, and this is just Will Smith coming in full star mode, and I think that weights him higher.
But, yeah, if you're not Will Smith or Ricky Fox and you're a person of color in this movie, you basically don't have a line of dialogue or a name.
So, you know, it's...
Worth noting.
It's woke, but it's 90s woke.
Exactly, yeah.
And Hollywood woke isn't worth much even today, so in the 90s.
But they're very deliberately going out of their way to do that sort of thing.
Is this the same team that did The Day After Tomorrow?
It is, yes.
Day After Tomorrow, 2012.
There are a couple other ones, but yeah, no, it's the same.
The Day After Tomorrow, as ridiculous as the science is, it is supposed to be a climate change movie, isn't it?
It's supposed to be an environmental movie.
I have no fondness whatsoever for this director, because of course he made Anonymous, which is the absolutely...
That puts him solidly left in terms of modern discourse, in terms of 2024.
The other very 90s woke thing this has, of course, is the lovable, sympathetic, cute, gay friend.
It has...
Harvey Fierstein himself.
Man, it's so 90s just seeing him in a movie.
It's just ridiculously 90s.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
But it does have a raging case of burial gays, because he dies.
Yeah, he dies.
And he is just a pure comic relief character from beginning to end.
And he is like, just, I gotta call my mother.
I gotta call my therapist.
It's very like the most stereotypical neurotic Jew who isn't played by Woody Allen.
In a movie like this.
It's, yeah.
You know, which, I don't know, Harvey, you can't blame the actors.
You can't, you know, it is what it is.
It's, you know, but, I mean, it is surprising how much Judaism kind of plays into this.
It's not...
Yeah.
It's not overt, but like, you know, one of our co-leads is, I mean, well, I mean, if we talk about 90s woke, you know, one of our co-leads is Jewish and one of our co-leads is an African-American band, you know?
Yeah.
And the other is like Farm Boy or whatever.
We never really learn like where Whitmore comes from, but at least, you know, there's that.
And a major like source of sort of wisdom in the film kind of running through it is Judd Hirsch's character who is, you know, You kind of get a few lines of dialogue of, you know, I haven't talked to God in 20 years or whatever, and then he's speaking to God at the end.
Oh, this is a detail that I missed until I watched that video.
When Nimziki is sitting down at the prayer circle, he's not sitting down at the prayer circle.
He's sitting down at the children's prayer circle.
Yeah, that's right.
He's trying to comfort the small children, and he has literally been put at the kids' table at the end.
That's how much they hated this guy, apparently.
That's right, yeah.
But it's also kind of, you know, he has to learn from scratch, you know.
Right, right.
Yeah.
But yeah, Judd Hirsch's character is absolutely the embodiment of benevolent wisdom, isn't it, in this film?
He is the source of it, you know.
Yeah, it is an interesting emphasis, and the emphasis on sort of marrying across divisions as well.
Like, you know, Jeff Goldblum's ex-wife is a Gentile, clearly.
She's coded that way anyway.
It's clearly implied, you know, that he's married outside of his faith.
And the Randy Quaid, you know, the missing wife or girlfriend or whatever, she's clearly supposed to be a Mexican.
Yeah, and it ties in with kind of the performatively, but I feel like kind of sweet and well-intentioned emphasis in the film about humanity overcoming divisions and so on.
It's very 90s Star Trek.
It's very Counselor Troi saying, oh, when we made first contact, humans all decided that we didn't need nation states anymore.
Yeah.
I mean, it's very, and now I'm actually, so they released like a 20 years sequel to this, 20 years later sequel to this.
Oh, yes.
Yes, I wanted to talk about this.
So have you seen this?
This is a film that is so bad.
That I fell asleep in the cinema.
I was so bored that I actually fell asleep.
And I woke up and I realized that I'd been asleep for like 40 minutes.
And I thought...
Okay, so what's happening now?
And I tried to watch some more of it for another 5-10 minutes, and it was so bad that I got up and walked out.
This is possibly the worst, at least in terms of an actual theatrical cinema experience for me.
I've walked out of films before.
But I have fallen asleep in films before.
This is the only film where I have both fallen asleep and walked out.
Wow, nicely done.
I have never really had any answers to the 20 Years Later sequels.
Just out of principle, if anything, it's like, you know, I... I got my fill of that in the 90s.
It's fine.
I don't need to revisit this.
Like Halloween H20. Right.
We've seen a lot of them.
I did see Bill and Ted face the music because I thought that one looked interesting and they actually had something to say with it.
And I think there's kind of something there.
So you're not stoked for Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice then?
Yeah.
I mean, I saw the trailer and I'm like, what's this?
It's that sort of thing.
I'm glad the actors and I'm glad everybody's getting a paycheck again.
It's fine.
But I just don't need to see it.
And ID4, like 20 years later, was really like a thing where I'm like, I... This is beneath even my notice.
Like, I kind of knew it happened, and I just never, I never paid it a single bit of attention.
It was just, it came and went, didn't even impact.
I had no idea what it was even doing.
I'm just like, Independence Day, 20 years later, not interested.
I just never...
Well, essentially, the same thing happened to me, and I went to see it.
I was sat in front of the thing, and it slid off my brain.
I read the Wikipedia entry for this, And now I'm actually fascinated.
But even if you say it's terrible, I'm legitimately fascinated in terms of thematically what they're doing.
Because what we're kind of saying is the film, the original film is kind of doing the, we're all going to stand, we're all Americans now.
And it's the melting pot idea, right?
This whole concept of that coming in the face of this disaster, coming in the face of the invaders has made us all one now.
And apparently the sequel is like, there's like an Earth Defense Force that's run by Jeff Goldblum's character.
And like the UN is sort of in charge, like we have a one world government and like it's just the Americans.
And that kind of fascinates me just on the level of like seeing what they did with it in the 90s.
I'm really interested in what like 2016, like this team is going to do with that like theme, even if the movie is terrible, which I assume it is.
I am, I'm, I'm genuinely interested.
So I might try to, I might try to like, Get that in and play it in and see if I can get anything out of it.
I tell you what, if you give it a go, I'll give it another go.
And maybe we'll be back here to talk about whatever it's called.
Independence Day.
I think it's Resurgence or something like that, yeah.
Yeah, some shit like that.
Resurgence, yeah.
Even the title just runs off your brain.
But yeah, we've been talking for about an hour and 20 minutes, and certainly we could talk more about the presidency and some of the other elements of it, but it's really, this is all surface.
It's just, you know, there's nothing deeper going on here, you know?
Yeah, he's not really the president.
It's like he's in charge by default because he's just the nicest guy in every room.
Right, right.
Yeah.
And just like, you know, the one nod to politics they have is that he's...
At the beginning, his communications director is saying, you're polling badly, and they're saying you look like Oliver, asking for scraps from Congress as opposed to being a commanding presence.
And they're like, hey, I actually kind of like that line.
I mean, it's just like, again, the Boy Scout grown-up who gets to be president.
It's also like it's supposedly stated that he was a fighter pilot in the Gulf War.
Yeah.
So five years ago, he was enlisted in the Marines or whatever, or the Air Force, and now he's president?
I don't know exactly how that works time-wise.
But okay.
Whereas Randy Quaid, it's directly stated that he was a Vietnam pilot.
And so, you know, we do kind of get that sense of there is a little bit of friction there between the experiences of like fighter pilots in Vietnam versus the fighter pilots in Desert Storm who basically, you know...
Then he ran over the Iraqi military in two months and walked away victors.
Yeah.
Gunned down, retreating teenage conscripts and buried them alive.
Exactly.
Yeah.
There is a kind of a...
I mean, the thing that sticks in my mind is like the last line of the Randy Quaid character, which is something like, as my generation said, or in my generation's words, up yours or something like that.
Yeah, no.
As my generation said...
Up yours!
And it's like, man, that is the most...
It's not even on the nose.
It's just like, man, what is...
That's one bit that did not age well.
It's like, yeah, up yours...
In 2024, up yours is not seen as the Vietnam generations.
No, and the boomers heroically save the world.
It's a bit off, as predictions go.
Yes, no, definitely.
Although, you know...
Apparently in the books, because there was a novelization of this, there's a novelization of the sequel.
And then there are four other books that delve into the prequels of the events that happen.
And apparently there's a lot more politicking and stuff that goes on.
And they get into some more of that backstory.
And again, I don't want to get into this lore.
I don't care about this universe.
This is the...
Goofy, fun popcorn movie.
But I am, like, genuinely fascinated to see, like, if these things are actually legitimate.
Because everything that I've kind of seen online is like, no, these are actually pretty good.
Like, this is actually, like, for a movie tie-in, like, this is, like, way better than average.
And I'm just, oh god, please do not get me interested in this.
But apparently in the original, because the novelization, typically those 90s book novelizations are written based on a shooting script.
And so there are often big differences between the finished film and the novelization.
But apparently, because at one point we see Randy Quaid in his camper in his Winnebago.
And he's dragging his propeller plane.
He's just brought that along with him.
Apparently, in the original script, he mounts a missile onto his prop plane and then flies that up into the heart of the mothership and destroys it, which honestly is the better ending.
That's almost like the Han Solo ending.
Han Solo comes in and gets the fighters off of him so that Luke can fire the photon torpedoes or whatever into...
The Star Wars nerds are going to get really mad at me now.
Oh my god.
It's okay.
I can front Nazis.
I think Star Wars nerds I can deal with.
It's fine.
I like Star Wars.
I just don't remember what they call it.
But yeah, no...
But apparently that was a plot point in the book, and I'm assuming that was in at least one of the shooting scripts, because I don't think they would have changed that for the book.
So that's...
I don't know.
I find that interesting.
And one of the things I was noticing just about some of the dogfights and just the sort of mechanics of it, the...
How it's presented on screen.
It looks very much like the original Star Wars.
It looks very much like Eagle 4 firing 2 or whatever.
It's a lot of that sort of stuff.
I get that there are only so many ways to shoot dogfights of that nature, but even in the graphics that they use in terms of the little screens where they show the pilots that have gone down, the planes that are down, it feels very 77 Star Wars to me.
And that's gotta be pretty deliberate, yeah.
I think, like, you know, every text is a tissue of quotations, as we know.
Some texts are more tissue of quotations than others.
And this is very, very definitely, like, made of loads of bits of other stuff.
Like, I've already mentioned it's lifting from the 50s George Powell movie.
War of the Worlds generally.
As you say, the original Star Wars, particularly the spaceship fights, it's also directly riffing on the X-Files with the concentration on Area 51 and Roswell and the fact that they have a crashed alien ship and the whole idea of Randy Quaid as being an alien abductee, which is left, as I remember it, that's left interestingly ambiguous.
It's completely ambiguous.
I think the movie is better.
This is where I keep saying I want the Randy Quaid version.
I want his story.
I want a whole movie of this character kind of confronting this, but not being part of the action until the very end.
Because I just...
I find...
I like it...
A dramedy about this alcoholic bush pilot whose wife left him and he's raising his kids and just trying to get by based on PTSD who nobody believes him from being alien abducted.
It is very ambiguous.
I don't think we're supposed to feel one way or the other about it.
I don't think we're supposed to assume that he was or was not.
I think it's just a thing that's in the movie.
It's just a bit, and it's just riffing on the fact that the X-Files was hegemonic and everybody knew the idea of alien abduction and stuff.
I think it's actually funnier if he was not abducted, but he believes he was.
I think it's actually more interesting.
And then when the aliens show up, he's like, I've been telling you for 10 years!
Yeah.
He believes that, you know, these are the aliens that abducted him, but actually it's completely different aliens.
That would be funny as well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What if there are multiple sets of aliens?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, in this film, it's made explicit.
They're the anal-probing aliens that they just really want to have, you know, a sexual experience.
They're the nice ones.
And then they're the genocidal aliens, you know?
That's right.
There's the aliens that are just interested in how our bums work.
And then there's the aliens that want to exterminate us.
But this film makes it explicit that the Roswell crash is one of the invading aliens.
So, like, they've been scouting the planet for 50 years or something?
I don't know.
I don't know.
But I think it's just...
I think part of what this movie is doing at the time is saying, yeah, yeah, we know about...
We like Star Wars.
We like the X-Files.
Because it's doing it with loads of stuff.
Obviously, Star Trek is referenced via the casting of Brent Spiner.
The sort of dog rule H.R. Giga design of the aliens is obviously a reference to Alien.
I mean, that happened in loads of stuff in the 90s.
Species does it.
Species and Starship Troopers to some degree.
Starship Troopers, yeah.
No, but this is very much a movie, isn't it?
And part of what it's doing, well, I mean, X-Files and Star Trek aren't primarily movies, but yeah, it's just denouncing itself as this big sort of pop cultural thing.
It's just doing that, isn't it?
I think that's part of why it's doing it.
It's almost like a greatest hits thing.
That's it.
No, that's it.
You're right.
That's exactly it.
It's doing a compilation.
It's doing an anthology.
It's doing a, you like all this stuff, or here it all is mixed in together.
Yeah, absolutely.
And again, we could talk about some of the themes.
There's some interesting stuff going on in the background here, but there's not...
There's not a lot to this, but it is a fun rewatch.
And if you haven't seen it in a while and you've got access to it, put it on one night.
Put it on late.
Put it on for a Saturday afternoon.
Imbibe your beverage of choice.
It's mostly pretty inoffensive as well.
A lot of these movies, they've got that one joke that's just really, really painful.
And here, I don't get any of that.
It does feel good-natured enough that if you're allowed to talk about a hooker with a heart of gold in the midst of the mass destruction of half the planet, then...
You know, which is the one thing that's so bizarre about these movies.
If you can cope with that, then this is going to be a fun time for you, I think.
I think this works.
And particularly if you're 25 and you have no memory of this and you have no knowledge of this era of cinema, if you watch this, I am very interested in what you come away with because...
I think you and I are going to see two very different movies.
Yeah.
The other thing I always remember, and I think this is pretty infamous, is that they win by introducing a computer virus into the computers on the alien ship.
So, you know, implying that the aliens...
Computers are compatible with Windows 95.
Well, it's not even that.
It's a Mac.
He's got a Mac.
He's got a Macintosh at that time.
And he's programming in Visual Basic.
That's the thing.
I remember conversations at the time about how silly all this is.
It doesn't make...
I mean, computers in movies don't make sense regardless.
I think...
No, they're just magic.
Yeah, I think treating this with the sort of...
Like, reading quality into it, like, of course it's ridiculous, but the whole thing of, like, you could put all this together in three days is ridiculous, right?
I think if you wanted to take this movie, if you wanted to sort of make this a little bit more serious, you would have this take place over, like, months.
And there's, like, you know, we're hiding from the aliens.
There are, like, these assaults happening everywhere.
But we're kind of holed up in Area 51, and we're, like...
Jeff Goldblum is taking the combined knowledge of the 50 years that they've been studying this thing and he's looking at it and he's building the code patterns because he's just that brilliant guy with software.
And I think that because it's a film and because it's doing this, it's like, yeah, this is going to be three days because that's how it works with Independence Day.
That's just the way we do this.
Yeah, there's a sort of ticking clock thing, isn't there?
Yeah.
And I think if you took this movie and took it down a couple of notches and made it a little bit more invested in what's actually supposed to be happening, a lot of this would make a little bit more sense.
You could put a little bit more dialogue in to sort of hole up some of that or shore up some of that.
But I think ultimately, the movie's not interesting to that, and the movie that I kind of have in mind is probably a little bit more serious.
You could take it more seriously.
You could treat it as a little bit more of a narrative and something that's really trying to say something.
But that's not what this film is trying to be, and we can't blame it for not trying to be that.
Yes, it's completely ridiculous that in four hours he builds a program that can infect an alien mothership with a virus.
But that's what's cool about it, you know?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's from a cultural moment where people just didn't think of this sort of storytelling in those terms.
This was the era where you made a Batman movie and it had steel nipples on the costume and Arnold Schwarzenegger's making endless jokes about cold.
And then a few years later, Christopher Nolan makes the movies that he makes.
The cultural moment has shifted.
Yeah.
You make this now, it's a 10-part Netflix series about post-traumatic stress disorder and, you know, living in it.
As I remember it, anyway, what I saw of it, that's kind of the problem with the sequel, because it brings in this idea of, like, President Bill Pullman as this embittered old man, and he's suffering from trauma about what happened all these years ago, and it's like...
It's this weird mismatch.
Because the original movie is just...
It's basically...
I mean, we've kind of said this already, but it's basically just a kid's film.
It's popcorn.
I mean, Avengers, the Avengers Endgame kind of runs into this because it's suddenly like this is five years post-stap, right?
And so everybody's got...
So the first half hour has to be about...
Everybody's trauma kind of responding to this.
Support groups.
Exactly.
And I think that's a movie that I think...
I mean, it's one of the highest grosses...
Is it actually still the highest grossing movie I've made?
I think not.
But anyway, it's one of them.
And I think that actually it works there because it just sort of...
It gives you...
A, it's three hours long and so it has the time to do it.
And it also builds some of our...
But it doesn't linger on it.
And the same thing here, it doesn't linger on it.
We get moments of like, oh my god, cities are destroyed.
Endgame is the end of a story that's been running for 10 years.
If you're watching Endgame, then you've seen all this leading up to this.
Yeah, you're kind of on board for it.
But, you know, it is kind of funny, like, we show up for our movie, like, in-game, and, you know, what we're looking for is, like, I want to see Captain America kick some ass, you know?
I want to see Tony Stark, you know, beat Thanos' ass, and then, you know, we start out with, like, and there are PTSD discretion groups, that sort of thing, and it is kind of a mishmash, but it is, I don't know, like, I think we've just learned better how to do Tone now.
Yeah.
But I think a 10-part miniseries about a group of stragglers trying to live in the ruins of an apocalyptic alien invasion, I think that would be a fascinating series if they did it well.
But that's clearly, again, not what this movie is going for.
And so, again, I'm not going to dig it for not being that.
It's all spectacle.
And it's all in fun.
As we said at the start, it's basically a comedy about the world being destroyed and Yeah.
But it is fundamentally an aesthetic experience.
It's watching the White House explode.
It's watching the Empire State Building explode.
That's the point of the film.
Right.
Obviously, it's not the first disaster movie, and there was a rash of movies around about this time, like a meteor hits the Earth, and you see New York destroyed, and so on.
There's lots of that around about the time.
But for some reason, this was the one that did it best and did it most...
Well, this is one of the first.
Deep Impact and Armageddon and stuff, they come out a couple of years later.
They're after.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
So that's why then.
This is the trailblazer of that.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
Okay.
All right.
I think we're done.
I think we are.
Yeah.
So Independence Day, it's got a president in it and it's a film and we've just talked about it and you've just listened to us talk about it.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
Very much.
For your dollar and for your attention and for your friendship and all that sort of stuff.
And for putting up with us and not putting out mainline series episodes a little bit more often.
But we're working on it.
We're just having scheduling and personal issues.
But believe me, we're coming back.
It's happening.
IDSG resurgence coming soon.
The dark, bitter sequel.
20 years later.
20 years later.
All in gray.
So, thanks everybody for listening and see you soon.
