Experience the sci-fi epic that launched a new era in blockbuster filmmaking with this newly restored edition. Director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin join forces with an all-star cast that includes Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman. When powerful aliens launch an all-out invasion, the world’s only hope lies in uniting for one last strike to save mankind. Actors Will Smith Bill Pullman Jeff Goldblum Mary McDonnell Judd Hirsch Margaret Colin Randy Quaid Robert Loggia James Rebhorn Harvey Fierstein Adam Baldwin Brent Spiner James Duval Vivica A. Fox Lisa Jakub Ross Bagley Mae Whitman Bill Smitrovich Kiersten Warren Harry Connick Jr. Giuseppe Andrews John Storey Frank Novak Devon Gummersall Leland Orser Mirron E. Willis Ross Lacy David Pressman Vivian Palermo Raphael Sbarge Bobby Hosea Dan Lauria Steve Giannelli Eric Paskel Carlos LaCamara John Bennett Perry Troy Willis Tim Kelleher Wayne Wilderson Jay Acovone James Wong Thom Barry Jana Marie Hupp Matt Pashkow Robert Pine Marisa Morell Michael Winther Dexter Warren Paul LeClair Capt. Michael “Chewy” Vacca Director Roland Emmerich
Source: Independence Day
About the Movie
July 2: a mothership a quarter the size of the Moon takes position over Earth and deploys city-sized saucers above the world’s capitals. July 3: after a disastrous first contact, the saucers open fire, and landmarks from the White House to the Empire State Building are vaporized in walls of flame. Humanity’s counterattack is swatted aside by the aliens’ energy shields.
July 4: the survivors regroup — a Marine pilot (Will Smith), a cable-TV scientist (Jeff Goldblum) who spots the countdown hidden in the aliens’ own signal, a alcoholic crop-duster with an old score to settle, and a President (Bill Pullman) who climbs into a fighter jet. Their plan is pure desperation: fly a captured alien craft into the mothership, upload a computer virus into its systems, drop the shields for a few minutes, and give every remaining air force on Earth one coordinated shot.
Why This Movie Matters to Sci-Fi
Independence Day reinvented the alien-invasion movie and, with it, the summer blockbuster itself. Roland Emmerich took a 1950s B-movie premise and staged it at a scale never seen before — its city-destruction sequences, done largely with enormous practical models, reset every audience expectation and launched two decades of disaster spectacle. It made Will Smith the defining movie star of the era, features perhaps the most famous presidential speech in film history, and grossed over $800 million, proving that old-fashioned, crowd-pleasing sci-fi spectacle could dominate the modern box office. War of the Worlds walked so that ID4 could level the White House.
