Ah, summer. It's when Hollywood pulls out the bubblegum movies for the kids to enjoy whilst they work at forgetting everything learned last year in school. Think of the great films we'd miss if it weren't for summer vacation.

Independence Day is pure bubblegum. It's a video game come to life. Us against the nasty critters from outer space. Fun! This movie is wall-to-wall excitement and fun!

The Premise: Spaceships hover over every major city in the world. A cable TV guy figures out that they're going to kill us all off when his laptop computer finishes its next game of space invaders. Next scene: the White House gets blown up just as the cable guy and his cranky father get the president out.

And then there's the Fresh Princess of the Air Force. He, of course, is Luke Skywalker playing tag with an alien in fighter planes in the Grand Canyon. The Fresh Prince and The Cable Guy team up later to plant a virus in the nasty critters' master computer. Another argument against the client/server model of computing! If they had just disabled Java in their Netscape Navigator, we couldn't have killed them off!

Could anyone take this movie more seriously? Hell no! and thank God they didn't. This is the remake of Star Wars. It's got special effects that will blow you away, it's got humor, and of course the good guys win after getting the snot kicked out of them. The perfect summer movie.