TODAY WE CELEBRATE OUR INDEPENDENCE DAY (SEQUELS)!!!

No, no, it peaked with the I Touch Myself video by the Divinyls. (And no, I didn't just check Wikipedia to find that out ... OK, yes I did.)

 

Independence Day is one my favorite movie-going experiences ever. I had bought five tickets ahead of time and two people bailed, so I ended up scalping the extras for three times face value. Seriously.

I enjoyed every second of that movie and it holds up remarkably well.

 

I enjoyed Independence Day, which I actually saw on July 4 of that year. It felt good to actually have an official day off from my paper (it was a weekly) and do something fun.

Deep Impact, to me, frankly sucked. Too many weird "coincidental" things happened in that movie that prevented a suspension of reality.

 

Point, Bubbler.

 

Independence Day was a great movie to see in a crowded theater. Seeing it again made me realize how derivative and completely unoriginal it is.

Deep Impact? The tidal wave couldn't wipe Tea Leoni off the face of the earth soon enough. Oops, sorry - spoiler alert.

 

Armageddon is the biggest piece of shit ever filmed. Worst movie I've ever seen in a theatre. By a mile. And I walked out of The Marrying Man and paid to see "The Getaway" and "Malice" (no, I'm not an Alec Baldwin fan). Awful awful awful awful awful.

I agree w/qtlaw: Independence Day was halfway towards a genre-changing movie before it lapsed into predicable and boring bombast. But that first half was awesome. Zero interest in a sequel w/ or w/o Smith, though.

 

Surprised to see the hate for Deep Impact. I thought that movie was pretty solid. I thought the idea of the national bunkers and the massive crowds trying to get into them was cool and easy to imagine. On the whole it seemed like a much more realistic approach to a comet or asteroid than the blockbuster, special effects star-studded bash Armageddon. Anything with sweet lines for Morgan Freeman is automatically 1,000 times better than anything with any lines from Ben Affleck.

 

It is hard not to get fired up when Bill Pullman makes his speech at the end of Independence Day. Makes me want to hop into a fighter jet with 2 hours of training and kick some alien ass.

 

Both incredibly unrealistic and ridiculous, but I can't help but enjoy them.

And personally, I thought Mars Attacks! sucked.

 

My biggest problem with Deep Impact was Tea Leoni - I kept figuring they cut the subplot that she was a former anchor with a dependency on sleeping pills - soooo lethargic.

Duval and Freeman almost made up for it.

Armageddon actually kind of works in the so cheesy its funny kind of way. But I don't think that's what Michael Bay was going for.

 

Watched it while on plane to Cape Town. Really liked it.

Some of my South African wife's family and friends enjoyed it, others did not. Some for pure movie reasons, others I think for, well, more political reasons.

 

"Deep Impact" was by far the most 'scientifically credible' (about 9 on a scale of 100 compared to 2.3 and Negative 10,000) of the three movies, and also by far the absolute dullest.

The other two are goofy fun popcorn movies.

In many ways ID4 is the prototypical Fox Media propaganda piece:

-- Our way of life under threat by murderous nasty-looking collectivist aliens
-- The Gubbmint covers everything up and has been doing so for decades
-- The $50,000 Toilet Seat!! I read about it in an e-mail from Aunt Ethel!!
-- Young fresh-faced Presidents are probably naive, stupid and gullible
-- First Ladies who are business-oriented career women deserve to be killed in helicopter crashes
-- Jewish guys always chomp on cigars and spew out pithy peasant wisdom
-- Black guys are only interested in going to barbecues and dating strippers
-- Scientists are usually smelly long-haired hippies
-- You can only tell a President is really serious once he decides to "Nuke the bastards."
-- Computer nerds rule the world
-- Black chicks are unwed baby-mamas who take their 6-year-old sons to their jobs at the strip bars
-- Drunken PTSD-burnout Vietnam vets with mixed-race rugrat kids will eventually save us, along with a POTUS who's a fighter pilot
-- THE DOG NEVER GETS KILLED