Jeremy’s Tophunder №19: Independence Day

9 min readJun 4, 2020

Unfortunately for all of us, I started this project back in mid-March, which means that we’ll be wrapping up sometime around the end of June, just about a week before the 4th of July. Obviously, if things had worked out differently, I would have had this post scheduled for that day, but I’ll have to settle for posting it on 4th of June instead. If you squint really hard, it almost looks the same.

And now, a long and possibly irrelevant tangent.

In college, I took a class called “Cinema Physica.” It’s by far the coolest, most fun class I’ve ever taken in my life. It was ostensibly a 100-level physics class, but designed for non-science majors. To make the physics concepts relatable for predominantly humanities students, the professor (a wonderful man named Andrew Cohen) would host weekly movie screenings in his classroom where he would bring in a bunch of pizzas and show a movie that would serve as the framework for whatever topic that week’s classes would cover. The catch is, he seemed to intentionally choose movies that made an absolute mockery of the physics he intended to teach us about. The first topic was velocity and acceleration, and that week we watched… Speed 2: Cruise Control. When we talked about magnetism, we watched whichever X-Men movie had the most cool Magneto scenes. When we talked about force and energy, we watched Armageddon.

My favorite movie from that class, though, was Independence Day. We used it as a framework to discuss propulsion, projectiles, and flight.

But before we get to what we learned, first, another random tangent.

In 2007, the wonderful television program MythBusters tested whether or not the exhaust of a Boeing 747 could flip a car. A 747 has four engines, each of which puts out about 54,000 pounds of thrust. Not only did the car get tossed around like a rag doll, the jet wash even ripped up asphalt from the old, in-disrepair runway. The car, about 100 feet behind the running engines, flipped probably 10 or 12 times and barely resembled a car by the end of the ordeal.

Not satisfied with the result, they took things to the next level, and tried to see what would happen if a full-sized school bus drove behind a 747’s engines. See for yourself:

Okay, so what does this school bus and 747 have to do with my college physics class, and what does that have to do with Independence Day?

The question we asked regarding Independence Day effectively boiled down to this — how much force would be necessary to keep the giant alien ships from the movie in the air?

Early in the movie, a character says that the mothership, which hangs out in space and launches all of the smaller ships, is about 550 kilometers in diameter, and has a mass roughly one-quarter of our moon. Luckily, that’s not the ship that comes down to Earth. What did come to Earth was 20 or 30 smaller ships, each of which was about 15 -miles- wide. If one 747 can do that to a school bus, imagine what a ship 15 miles wide would do to the ground underneath it.

After taking a few different laws of physics and a few values that we knew from the movie and shoving everything together, we delightfully realized that the aliens really had no need for the giant lasers that blew up the Empire State Building or the White House or the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles. Simply flying overhead would create enough force on the ground to reduce any building to rubble.

Anyway, Independence Day is one of my favorite ridiculous and stupid movies. I spent far more time than I care to admit going back and forth between this movie and Air Force One, the other objectively bad and ridiculous and stupid movie in my Top 20. They’re both incredibly memorable, incredibly quotable, and stupendously out of control. I eventually went with Air Force One, just for the sheer star power of Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman, which for my tastes, lands just barely north of Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum. But I did think about it. It was probably the toughest one-or-the-other ranking choice I had to make on the list.

There are just so many scenes in the movie that make me sit back and giggle at how extra everything is. My roommates in college and I had a game where we would judge movies solely by how many times a character melodramatically murmurs “My God…” or at least how many scenes a movie had that could have (or, as far as we were concerned, should have) featured a character having that reaction. Independence Day might be the all-time leader in “My God…” moments. It’s director, Roland Emmerich, might be the all-time leader in “My God…” moments in a career — his only competition is probably Michael Bay. Emmerich has directed Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, and Independence Day: Resurgence, and those are just the movies that specifically deal with the end of humankind. It doesn’t even cover his other high stakes disaster and/or alien movies like Stargate, Godzilla, White House Down, and Midway. The man almost exclusively makes movies about disasters, and just about all of them feature fat bureaucrats and politicians reacting in utter disbelief.

Will Smith didn’t quite hit his peak as a dramatic actor until the 2000s (with Ali in 2001 and The Pursuit of Happyness in 2006), and didn’t quite hit his peak as a gregarious and charismatic regular dude until around the same time (Hitch, in 2005), but holy crap if the mid-late 90s wasn’t an absolute murderer’s row of Will Smith blending action and comedy in the best ways. If you were going to force me to choose between Will Smith in Independence Day and Will Smith in Men in Black for which one is the most quintessential Young Will Smith performance, you’d have to give me at least six weeks to think about it. And that doesn’t even mention Bad Boys (which is great), Enemy of the State (which is mediocre), or Wild Wild West (which is heinously terrible and I absolutely love it). I’m not sure any actor in history can match the charisma, bravado, athleticism, and humor that Smith brought to his movies in the 90s. There are plenty of actors that check one or two of those boxes better than Smith does, and there are plenty of actors that check a wide range of boxes and have more dramatic range, but I really can’t think of anyone, ever, that can duplicate Young Will Smith’s total package.

The funny part is, Will Smith doesn’t even really show up until about 25 minutes into the movie. It’s a really slow burn for the first half-hour or so. Prior to re-watching the movie recently, I hadn’t sat and watched it start-to-finish in years. I always seem to stumble across it on cable (usually around the time Jeff Goldblum and his dad drive from New York to Washington) and just ride it out for the rest of the movie. I hadn’t seen the beginning in a while, and I sat there thinking to myself, “I don’t remember -any- of this. Where the hell is Will Smith?” But the movie ramps up as soon as he gets involved.

The cast is rounded out beautifully by Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, that lady that played Jeff Goldblum’s ex-wife and was never heard from again, Judd Hirsch, Robert Loggia, Randy Quaid, that guy that’s named Baldwin but not related to the Baldwin brothers, Vivica A. Fox, Harvey Fierstein, and, yes, Harry Connick Jr. as a fighter pilot. (Fans of Arrested Development also may be interested to know that President Bill Pullman’s daughter is played by the same girl who would go on to play… that’s right — Ann Veal, aka Bland, aka Ham, aka Yam, aka Egg, aka Plant, aka Ann Hog.)

I almost just typed that Bill Pullman is my favorite fake movie President of all time, but somehow I forgot about Harrison Ford in Air Force One for a moment, so Bill Pullman will have to settle for second place. Ford has him beat with the best one liner (“Get off my plane!” definitely beats “I’m a combat pilot, I belong in the air”), but Pullman blows Ford away in terms of bad-ass monologues.

Did you just get goosebumps? Yeah, me too. Wow, what a moment.

Have I memorized that speech and recited it every 4th of July for the last decade? Yes. Of course I have. What else would you expect of me? Have I been in a bar where a drunk guy got confused and thought I was making an impassioned political statement and then threatened to fight me? Also yes. That was a fun one.

Honestly, there isn’t much that gets my heart pumping quite like Bill Pullman commandeering the PA system and calling out a rallying cry to end all rallying cries. It’s by far the coolest moment of the movie, and one that stands apart from the rest of the absurdity to remain a truly memorable movie moment. Like, it’s just one of the better movie monologues of recent history. The context surrounding the speech is admittedly idiotic, but the speech itself is pretty awesome.

Is Independence Day a good movie? I don’t know. It had pretty good special effects for its era, it has an amazing cast, and it has a ton of memorable moments. But I have that feeling that for most people, it’s closer to Armageddon or the Star Wars prequels (it’s iconic because it’s bad and dumb) than, say, The Terminator or Blade Runner (it’s iconic because it’s great). I’m not sure I agree with them. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t think it’s a movie with a ton of artistic merit (or really much at all). It’s clearly geared towards the lowest common denominator and searching for cool moments rather than high-minded science fiction concepts. But that doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad. I’m not sure where everyone else stands, but I would much, much rather watch a good version of a bad movie where nobody is trying to win any awards (like Independence Day) than a bad version of a good movie where it seems like they were (a good example here would any number of forgettable movies from otherwise great directors). We need to grade on a curve here. All I’m expecting from Independence Day is mindless entertainment, and it delivers with flying colors (literally). Most of the movies on my list that I love in spite of the fact, or perhaps even because they just aren’t very good are ranked much lower. Independence Day (and Air Force One) are both ranked in the Top 20 because they’ve given me two and a half decades (and counting) of sheer, unadulterated joy. When I was a kid, I didn’t know enough about movies to realize how over the top they were. I just thought they were cool. 20-plus years later, nothing has changed my mind about that. What can I say? Sometimes I love bad movies. I still don’t know if Independence Day is good or bad, I just know that I love it.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

8. The Departed

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring