The Film
I should really know better than to like Independence Day as much as I do. The characters are more like caricatures, the plot is a series of Hollywood clichés with holes the size of the Grand Canyon, and the jokes inspire more wincing than guffawing. And yet my wife and I are strangely hooked on this Summer of 1996 blockbuster. Maybe it's the charm of Will Smith, or the earnestness of all the players, or the science fiction archetypes and shared love of Star Wars underlying it all. Or maybe we appreciate its sheer bigness: Say what you like, it is an Event Movie from the first frame to the last.
Evil aliens arrive in a collection of gargantuan spaceships, laying waste to Earth's largest cities. Seemingly no one and nothing can stop them. Mankind is doomed. But we intend to go down swinging, and so the meager remaining American forces—a beacon for the rest of the world—unite for a final battle, coincidentally on The Fourth of July. Damn, I just made myself want to watch it again. Fortunately, it's now on Blu-ray.
The Picture
The level of detail in the 2.35:1 frame is tremendous, bits we might have missed before, like the little specks that represent fighter jets and spaceships in the long shots of the big air battles; even individual laser bolts are distinct. This movie played fabulously on the big screen, and home presentation is finally approaching that same overall impact. Sometimes I saw a little more film grain than I was expecting, sometimes less. Colors are extremely strong. The 145-minute feature arrives on a dual-layer 50-gigabyte disc, so compression artifacting is minimal-to-none.
The Sound
This is just an amazing track from start to finish. Even when I switched over to one of the commentary tracks, I did a double-take at the sudden loss of ambience even in a smaller dialogue scene. Surrounds are full, highlighted by frequent directional and discrete rear-channel effects. The ample bass is well-utilized to underscore the enormous action sequences and the entire 5.1 soundstage comes together seamlessly in the DTS HD Master Lossless Audio that Fox has provided here. High volume is not necessary for an enjoyable experience, but it is recommended. D-Box Motion Systems are also supported via an on-disc file.
The Extras
No surprise that Independence Day looks and sounds top-notch. If it didn't kick some alien ass, that would actually be newsworthy. So are there any surprises? Yes, and they're mostly the good kind.
The DVD commentary tracks; one by director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin, the other by special effects supervisors Volker Engel and Doug Smith; are carried over, along with various trailers. Not ported from DVD however is the nine-minute-longer Special Edition cut, previously available on DVD and even airing on certain cable/satellite channels. A lot of the video odds and ends from prior releases are missing too, perhaps because they don't exist in high-definition.
New to the movie is an onscreen trivia track brimming with interesting bits that Roland and Dean neglect to mention in their somewhat dry voiceover. Two of the bonus features really do exploit the Blu-ray technology however. For anyone looking to add a new dimension to the movie after one too many viewings, the Alien Scavenger Hunt Game lists a dozen items to search for as you watch. We then use the remote to center a set of crosshairs over the item and select it. Some are harder to find than others, we can ask for clues to help, and we can save our progress if we want to leave and pick up later. The reward for finding them all is an exclusive clip.
The disc also supports bookmarking, here called Personal Scene Selection, but with a twist. The movie is broken into 54 chapters and then literally hundreds of sub-chapters are noted throughout the film, so chances are that when we mark a favorite little moment in the film, we will find that it already has a specific name assigned to it, such as “They See That The El Toro Base Is Completely Destroyed.” We can also jump to one of these precise points via the Keyword Search, which lists relevant subjects A to Z. Want to find every appearance of an F-18? You're just a few clicks away. The animated menus holding everything together are also among the best I've ever seen.
Final Thoughts
I do wish that all of the existing special features had been ported to Blu-ray, so that I could upgrade and not look back. That being said, this is an outstanding next-generation edition of a home theater classic.
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