Independence Day Gets Blown Up By Honest Trailers
This article is more than 2 years old
Screen Junkies’ “Honest Trailers” video series has given us here at Giant Freakin’ Robot a lot to laugh at since they started skewering the biggest and baddest of cinema. Inception and Prometheus are two memorable standouts. Well, now that Roland Emmerich’s rumors of an Independence Day sequel have developed enough to start dropping casting news, it seems like the perfect time to not be consumed by our petty differences anymore, and to be united in a common interest. And that interest involves skewering Independence Day for being the enjoyably corny hodgepodge of science fiction that it is.
Watching the above clip makes me think that all the films Honest Trailers uses should be at least 15 years old or older, allowing an entirely fresh stream of jokes to develop in ways that doing The Hunger Games seven months after its release can never hope for. There’s no way anybody could be making fun of Jaden Smith back then, and that’s become an essential part of life now.
From ripping on Emmerich’s insistence on blowing up the White House (see: White House Down), to name-checking a handful of the truly classic sci-fi films that were borrowed from to cobble together Independence Day‘s narrative, there are no dull moments in this video. Having just watched the movie the other day for the first time in well over a decade, I’d forgotten how truly silly a lot of it was. And I’m not even talking about Randy “What the fuck happened to my life?” Quaid and Jeff Goldblum’s immediate sobriety after pounding down the drinks. I’m talking about “Fresh Prince of the Air” Steven Hiller screaming trailer-ready one-liners to no one in particular, and the strange cadence Bill Pullman brings to many of the things President Whitmore says. By the time it gets to listing off all of the film’s details that cement it in the 1990s, I just wanted to keep screen-watching (but not sky-watching) all night.
P.S. This isn’t sci-fi related, but I love the Arrested Development nod when Mae Whitman (as Whitmore’s daughter) is shown. “Her?”
