Despite the sheen of 90s VFX, this is openly cribbing from midcentury B-movies. Aliens invade the Earth with hostile intent, and many American heroes save the day on July 4th. Since I'm probably one of the few people in the world who hadn't seen the movie till today, I won't bother with much plot synopsis.

If the Belgian duo shifted the tenets of European arthouse realism and brought on an age of endless copycats that wore their aesthetic banality as a badge of honor, so did Independence Day establish an oft-imitated model. More than the pictures' merits, I'm drawn to see these works by what they wrought. It's a strange comparison so let me explain. In many ways, I look at Emmerich's seminal success in the same way I might regard the Dardennes' early films. So, let's try to get most of the negative stuff out of the way and concentrate on what's good about the box-office champ. However, I'm not interested in spending the movie's anniversary lambasting the 'poor' thing. I'll be upfront with you, dear reader – I was not too fond of Independence Day. To commemorate the date, I finally watched the flick that turned Will Smith into a star of the silver screen, redefined the effects-driven summer movie, and birthed a new era of Hollywood entertainment…

Today marks the 25th anniversary of Roland Emmerich's 1996 Oscar-winning mega-blockbuster Independence Day.

This time around, however, I've decided to fix a pretty deep lacuna in my movie-watching, one that's firmly in the mainstream rather than an arthouse curio. Probably most people don't wonder why or how they have never set eyes on Valley of the Dolls or Girlfriends. Some of my recent choices for the ' How Had I Never Seen' series may have leaned towards the esoteric.

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