By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
When you think about it, the holidays are something of a paradox: they’re all about coming together as a family, but far too many Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners start with some nice wine and end with the nastiest arguments this side of Reddit. If this sounds a bit like your own holiday experience, then you’re probably wistful for a time when your family could function around each other like normal human beings. For those who want to bring the family together again, here’s some good news: you can stream Independence Day, the movie that brought the entire country together, on Hulu today.
Independence Day Is Full Of Greatness
If you’ve never watched Independence Day (on Hulu, in theaters, or anywhere in between), you should know that it has a wonderfully simple premise. When aliens invade the planet and begin killing humans en masse, the fate of the entire world rests on the shoulders of a hotshot jet pilot and a quirky computer tech. Whether or not they succeed, though, may ultimately come down to the contributions of everyone from an inspirational United States president to an alcoholic Vietnam veteran.
One compelling reason to check out this creature feature is that the out-of-the-world cast includes Will Smith as the cocky pilot and Jeff Goldblum as the top-notch computer technician. Bill Pullman plays the president facing the greatest crisis in world history, and his wife is played by Battlestar Galactica queen Mary McDonnell. Other memorably awesome actors in this film include Vivica A. Fox, Brent Spiner, and Randy Quaid (in what is almost certainly the best film of his career).
Watching Independence Day on Hulu is a great way to revisit the iconic speech that Pullman’s character gives to bring the world together against a common threat. In real life, the world most certainly came together to transform this Hollywood blockbuster into a galaxy-sized hit. Against a budget of only $75 million, the movie earned a staggering $817.4 million, profits which eventually drove 20th Century Fox to release a sequel that is (we’re sad to say) inferior in basically every way.
Bringing Audiences Together
Independence Day brought the world together before Hulu was even a twinkle in a streaming executive’s eye, and it also did something nearly impossible: brought together audiences and critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the movie has a critical score of 68 percent, with critics generally remarking that the film makes up for its thin characterization with all of the thrills and spectacle we expect from a great summer blockbuster. As for audiences, the Popcornmeter for this movie is 75 percent, showing that casual movie fans were generally even more hyped for this movie than their critical counterparts.
All these years later, it’s clear that it was more than hype that helped make this film such a monster hit. Will Smith’s charisma helps him steal every scene, and his manic energy meshes so perfectly with Jeff Goldblum’s knight in nerdy armor. For that matter, Bill Pullman is the perfect cinematic president, and after he combines a rousing speech with death-defying heroics, you’ll likely wish our own politicians could be even half as inspirational and awesome.
In many ways, Pullman’s character underscores the heart of the film…when you revisit Independence Day on Hulu, you may be surprised to discover that this film is so much more than the sum of its explosive action set pieces. Everyone remembers the iconic sight of the aliens blowing up the White House, and because of that, it’s hard to remember that this movie is less about tearing things apart and more about putting things together. As we descend further into the chaos of a country divided by everything from politics to social media, this movie’s vision of international unity is a fantasy we can definitely get behind.
Will you find Independence Day as inspirational as I did when you stream it on Hulu, or is this one film you’d like to “welcome to Earth” by throwing to the ground? You won’t know until you check it out for yourself. Afterward, you can help us try to answer one burning question: how the heck did the aliens develop interstellar travel before they invented malware-blocking software?
Stream Independence Day on Hulu.
