"Independence Day"
Directed by Roland Emmerich

By SCOTT ROSENBERG "Independence Day" is big, dumb and loud

aliens are the ultimate psychological projection: since we know nothing about them, we can imagine them to be whatever we crave or fear. It's become a critical cliche to map the popularity of alien-invasion epics in the '50s to Red-scare paranoia and nuclear nightmares. "E.T." answered a need for family reassurance, while "Close Encounters" responded to our hunger for wonder. In "2001," released in 1969 at the peak of Aquarian intoxication, unseen aliens served as evolutionary catalysts. "Alien's" beasts within crystallized our fears of reproductive mishaps and cancerous growths. And the "Star Trek" universe, in which humankind takes its place among a United Nations-style federation of alien races, offers the '90s a model of diplomatic problem-solving in a multicultural galaxy. So when the summer blockbuster "Independence Day" comes along, with its drama of confrontation with overpoweringly hostile alien invaders, it's tempting to speculate about a millennial, species-wide death wish, or to postulate a yearning for some global challenge that might unite a squabbling humanity in some common noble endeavor. Don't bother. "Independence Day" may awaken such thoughts, but it doesn't have any plans for them. Like "Stargate," the previous hit from the writing-producing-directing team of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, "Independence Day" is a colossally dumb epic that happily traffics in third-hand imagery and ideas while feeding its audience maintenance level doses of humor, adrenaline and spectacle. There's precious little reward in plumbing the world-historical implications of the screenplay. As verminous alien hordes implacably advance on outnumbered human defenders who, whatever their luck or skill, must eventually succumb, "Independence Day," you quickly realize, is based on an absurdly simple concept: What if all those "Space Invaders" style video games that we've been playing for close to two decades now suddenly turned real? Well, first thing, you'd probably want to have a President who's really good at video games. "Independence Day" provides one, filling the Oval Office with a Gulf War fighter-pilot hero (Bill Pullman) who -- once colossal alien ships start darkening the skies of Earth -- serves as a cross between JFK during the Cuban missile crisis and Churchill during the Battle of Britain. (Before the film's over, you know he's going to hop back in that cockpit to get some payback.) You'd probably also want somebody really good at chess and game theory and computer programming, to psych out the game's patterns and find any hidden cheats. That's where Jeff Goldblum comes in, as a scientist for a cable-TV company who accidentally breaks the aliens' code and winds up dispensing advice at the President's side. "Independence Day" pairs off its scientists as good (Goldblum) and bad (Brent Spiner as a giggling long-haired alien expert). It does the same with its generals: Robert Loggia -- sounding like a cross between Gene Hackman and George C. Scott -- is a level-headed leader, while James Rebhorn plays a hawk who thinks we should nuke the bastards from the start. In the early stages of the confrontation, Pullman's President plays Captain Kirk and tries to talk to the invaders, world leader to world leader; once they start incinerating major metropolises -- beaming lightning bolts into architectural-landmark skyscrapers -- he begins to have his doubts. These aliens aren't looking for significant cultural exchange; their motherships hover over urban downtowns like stationary mushroom clouds whose hungry shadows blot out the sun. Thanks to the heroics of an Air Force pilot played by Will Smith, an alien warrior gets captured, but when the President asks it, "What do you want us to do?", its reply -- communicated by running bony fingers over Spiner's larynx -- is a pretty unequivocal "Die." That certainly removes any ambiguity from "Independence Day's" pageant of heroism -- which includes an exotic dancer (Vivica Fox) who saves the life of the First Lady (Mary McDonnell) and an alcoholic Vietnam vet (Randy Quaid) who redeems himself with a selfless act. Who knows? Maybe when we finally make contact with aliens, they will turn out to be genocidal exterminators. But that premise robs "Independence Day" of any doubt, strangeness or awe. The traditional language of space opera -- stretching from Buck Rogers to "Star Wars" -- isn't the only way to portray inter-species combat; great science-fiction novels like Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" have proved that. By turning its devil-faced, spider-limbed aliens into nightmarish vermin, "Independence Day" reduces the most complex cultural collision imaginable to a dull kill-or-be-killed contest. That's the sort of contest Hollywood has plenty of experience with, of course, and it's a drama audiences are comfortable with. For all its apocalyptic imagery, its Biblically roiling clouds and its panoramas of mass destruction, "Independence Day" is an easy, comforting movie, and audiences will no doubt gobble up its heartwarming reassurances. The sequences showing the leveling of Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C. have the brittle, shiny fakeness of computer-generated imagery; but even if they looked utterly convincing, the deaths of millions of civilians here carry far less emotional impact than the survival of a single pet dog. "Independence Day's" plot is full of giant credibility gaps. (The ease with which Goldblum's laptop is able to network with the alien spaceship's computers should hearten the computer industry -- it's the ultimate cross-platform interoperability.) But that's less troublesome than the film's overwhelming escapism. Horrific as it is, the alien invasion turns out to be a great thing; it lets us fight World War II all over again, with bug-eyed monsters for Nazis. It makes us feel less stupid spending the billions we still do on Cold War style weaponry. After all, if you tour NORAD today -- the Colorado command center buried deep in the heart of a mountain that's casually taken out by the aliens early on in "Independence Day" -- you're told that we still need such early-warning systems to protect our borders from drug traffickers, terrorists and maybe even aliens. I'm crossing my fingers that all the survivalist fantasies, the "X-Files" style paranoia and the longing for world-class enemies that "Independence Day" tries to play on aren't as strong, in the end, as the movie audience's common-sense skepticism. One encouraging sign: The crowd I watched the film with, which sat silently as the White House and the Capitol got flattened, finally erupted with cheers at a crack about the Pentagon's $20,000 hammers. Maybe there's hope for humankind yet.