Word: spacecrafts
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...type of movie that "lifts up our country instead of dragging it down." Of course, those words were written before he actually saw the film. In the version of ID4 that I saw, the country wasn't just dragged down, much of it was demolished by a fire-breathing spacecraft resembling a large piece of pita bread. Millions of our compatriots were blown away in a quite grisly fashion. The First Lady, not a bit like Liddy, was zapped by aliens. There's no explicit sex, but the hero is a commitmentphobe who sleeps with a woman...
...hometown crowd at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, reacted even before Vice President Al Gore announced which of three hotly competitive designs had been chosen as the space shuttle of the future. Lockheed Martin's VentureStar, which would be built in nearby Palmdale, looks like no other spacecraft, and when Gore reached for a model airship shaped like a giant piece of pie, the group burst into applause. Undaunted, the Vice President plunged on with his scripted gag, "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand the importance of this moment...
Already besieged with criticism for his weak stands on issues, Hollywood's latest version of the President (Bill Pullman) suddenly finds his country and the world threatened by the mysterious appearance of enormous spacecraft across the globe. Thereafter follows a plausible --hey, it's the movies-- sequence of fateful decisions and non-decisions, as the apocalypse draws near...
...here. The movie therefore delivers excitement in the familiar visual vocabulary of past classics, but skillfully updated with a cheerful feel for the epic. Oh, and don't forget such hard-to-beat signature shots as the encroaching shadows and rolling atmospheric disturbances of the spacecraft, or the annihilation of a landmark...
Much of the film's fun comes from the collision of epic and everyday quirkiness, somewhat reminiscent of when Harrison Ford is momentarily thwarted in saving the United States from corruption by the "out-of-paper" beep from the printer: when the spacecraft have been hovering over the cities for a while, Los Angeleans are given the warning only Los Angeleans would need: not to fire their weapons into the air at the spaceships. When Captain Hiller finally faces off with one of the horrid space aliens, he does what anyone really, really mad would do: he slugs...