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Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day remains a cornerstone of 1990s sci-fi, and Netflix subscribers can now stream the 1996 classic. The Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum, and Bill Pullman-starring movie joined Netflix’s streaming lineup on February 1st and proved its enduring legacy when it jumped onto the streaming charts in the U.S. For those who need a refresher, Independence Day centers around a group of people who unite to launch a desperate, last-ditch counterattack on July 4th against a powerful extraterrestrial race that has devastated Earth’s major cities and left humanity fighting for survival. The movie was a massive blockbuster, securing an $817 million gross haul to become the second-highest-grossing film ever at the time.
Independence Day Redefined the Alien Invasion Genre
There are a lot of reasons why Independence Day is good, but chief among them is the fact that the movie completely redefined the alien invasion genre. The movie served as a watershed moment in cinema, effectively shifting the alien invasion genre from the quiet, paranoid tales of films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Day the Earth Stood Still to a loud, blockbuster spectacle and the widescreen destruction seen in modern films. The 1996 classic took the tropes of beloved 1950s creature feature invasion stories and blended them with the structure of 1970s disaster movies like The Towering Inferno, splitting the narrative among various characters across different locations and prioritizing global destruction and immediate, high-stakes action over intimate, psychological dread in a format that turned the genre into a summer blockbuster staple.
