Wednesday 18 April 2007
Wednesday
As Tim Vine once said, it's the little touches that make the difference. In the opening scenes of Independence Day I noticed something I'd never noticed before. I think the first, or some of the earliest, lines of dialogue from the Jeff Goldblum character are to his father, who is drinking from a polystyrene cup: 'Do you know how long those things take to decompose?'. He then criticises him for smoking cigars, gets on a bicycle and rides to work where he admonishes his work colleague for not recycling. His character is trying to save the world already. I was impressed (and, yes, perhaps congratulating myself a little bit too). It felt also that this sentiment, from a film made in 1996, was ahead of its time - perhaps ten years, because only now is there a real majority pressure to save the environment. And on the other hand, the film as a whole is remarkably conservative in form and sentiment, almost a remake of 50s disaster movies, or 40s war films, but the dialogue is sharp and funny. Interesting.
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From memory, the subtle hints, start even earlier. The very first thing you hear in the movie is, while we're watching the SETI guys discovering a blip on their radio telescope, "The End of the World (as we know it)" by R.E.M.
These things are never over the top enough in Independence Day to make them seem ridiculous but they are subtly there underlying the point.
Indeed. The intertextuality is quite rife at the beginning, although I think it fades as the film gets going. I liked the guy on the phone in Goldblum's office who we only hear for a split-second: 'I know. I like the X-Files too, but...'.
What disturbed me, however, was that Goldblum's ex-wife was responsible for the deaths of all the people in the alien's first attack. She ignored his first call, and it takes him 6 hours to drive to Washington and call her again. In this time people could've been evacuated.
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