Thirty years ago we celebrated our Independence Day!

It occurred to me that it was thirty years ago today that the science-fiction blockbuster Independence Day came out in theaters...

I saw this movie seven times that summer!  The only other movies I saw during the summer of '96 were Twister and A Time to Kill.  And I can tell you exactly on which dates I saw Independence Day each time.

It was on July 4th that was the first time.  I was working a summer job at a bindery and we had a few days off for the holiday.  Ed, my best friend at Elon, and I caught the movie at the now-non-existent Janus Theaters in Greensboro, North Carolina.  We loved it so much that we caught it again two days later.  And then a little over a week later my friend Bennie from Belgium was visiting for a week, and we saw it together. Then a few days after that my friend Johnny announced that he was engaged and asked if I would be one of his groomsmen.  I said yes and to celebrate I took him to see Independence Day, too.  The following weekend I saw the movie for the only time on my own.  Then the following week Ed and I caught it again and then a few days before classes started at Elon he and saw it once more with our friend Gary.

To this day I cannot explain what it was about that movie that had me going back over and over to see it.  Maybe it was getting stoked about Star Wars's special editions coming out in a few more months and it made me want to see any big-screen sci-fi blockbuster at all.  So Independence Day was preparing me mentally for that.

Well, I could say more, but actually I already did.  Here is the essay I wrote in 2006 about Independence Day and it's pretty much what I would write today if I had to all over again.

(In case anyone's wondering, I have not seen the sequel.  It came out during me and Tammy the Pup's epic journey across America and for various reasons I didn't catch any movie that summer while we were out and about.  I really don't care to see it either.  The original movie was too much "lightning in a bottle" and I don't want to diminish thinking that.)

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Two sequels to INDEPENDENCE DAY being produced

"Welcome to Urf"... again.

(Hah-hah-hah, did you see what I did there? Did you?!)

Word breaking this afternoon is that TWO sequels to the 1996 sci-fi blockbuster Independence Day are in the works. Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich are trying to get everyone from the original back on board. Right now the follow-ups are titled ID Forever Part One and ID Forever Part Two. How clever...

I have extremely mixed feelings about this. Yeah, even considering how much of a fan I was - and always will be - of the original. 1996's Independence Day was a unique product of its era. It should remain as much. At the same time it was such a great concept now tied down to being so dated a film that it's one of the few movies that I could see a reboot/remake being in order. Just as long as those eyeball-goggling practical effects make a return.

Oh yeah, it's also been announced that the sequels will be filmed in 2-D and then converted to 3-D in post-production...

"AWWW HELL NAW!!!"

A tip o' the hat to this blog's good friend Drew McOmber for passing along news of this... thing.

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Two INDEPENDENCE DAY sequels?! Awwww hell nawwww!!!

IESB.net is reporting that Twentieth Century Fox is about to commit to two sequels to Independence Day: its 1996 mega-blockbuster about aliens arriving on Earth to wipe out humanity on the Fourth of July. Will Smith is already set to return as Steven Hiller, the hotshot pilot he played in the original.

Do we really need this? For its tenth anniversary in 2006 I posted an extensive write-up about Independence Day. As much as I still love the movie, too much time has gone by since the original. It remains a product of its era and to make sequels to it would make a mockery of that. Well, I think so anyway.

I do think that Independence Day could be rebooted (since that's the route every other movie franchise seems to be going these days). I mean, think about it: who in America wouldn't want to see the White House and Congress blown up once more?

I saw Independence Day seven time in the theaters that summer. Having alien invaders make a smoldering crater out of Washington D.C. all over again would have me coming back at least TWICE as many times just to see that!

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Best way I know of to celebrate this Independence Day

Go to Best Buy or FYE or wherever, and get the DVD box set of HBO's recent John Adams miniseries (came out last month, we got ours a couple of weeks ago). And watch the whole thing while waiting to go out and eat hot dogs and see fireworks this evening.

If you read this blog during the time HBO was running it, you know fully well that I thought this was one of the most masterful and poignant miniseries to have graced the medium in a very long time.

Watch John Adams, and then think about the America that Adams and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and all those other guys worked and fought to give us... compared to the America that we have today.

"Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it."

And after the movie that I watched with a friend last night there's more that I probably could say about it... but I'd already seen Mongol (back in December at Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 in Austin, Texas) and I promised Phillip that I wouldn't write anymore about it 'til he did. Suffice it to say, it's ironic that such a beautiful foreign-made film could evoke so much thought about our own state of affairs.

Let's put it this way: when you see Temudjin (better known as Genghis Khan) in this movie, you'll quietly wish that we had someone like him running for President!

For what it's worth, Happy Fourth of July, my fellow Americans.

And I hope we get to celebrate many more of them.

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