GRADE: C+

What can you say about an alien invasion film with absolutely no sense of danger or menace? Independence Day is an expensive film with ominous production design, and while I was rooting for this movie to tear the roof off the multiplex, nothing that happens on screen ever really gels. Impressive as some of the special effects are -- and some of the shots toward the end of the film are mighty impressive -- they're put to work in support of a story that hardly seems to have been written, and a film that hardly seems to have been directed.

The concept is aces, though. On July 2, an alien mothership parks somewhere this side of the moon and dispatches a squadron of 15-mile-wide flying saucers to hover over the major cities of the world. The U.S. government tries to send a friendly message, and flaky citizens from coast to coast throw rooftop celebrations welcoming the alien visitors. The aliens crash the party by decimating New York, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. On July 3, the remaining humans try in vain to fight back with outmoded weaponry, until a charming nerd posits a devastating weakness in the mothership's systems. On July 4, the counterattack begins.

What we have here is a big movie, shot on location in Los Angeles, New York City, and in the deserts of Arizona and Utah. The special effects are big, featuring not just the destruction of some very large landmarks in American cities, but also panoramic dogfights filling up the wide screen with tiny spaceships and jet fighters. This is perhaps the year's most ambitious movie, and it's almost hard to imagine that anyone in Hollywood has been doing anything but post-production work on this behemoth of a summer flick for the last three or four months.

So how do you go wrong with a project like this? Well, for starters, maybe you cast Bill Pullman as the President and ostensible leader of the resistance. Oops. Pullman has seemed ill at ease in just about every role he's ever played, and this one is no exception. Granted, he's playing a character who's supposed to be adrift, but you have to wonder how this guy ever got elected (if you read this as political commentary, maybe that's the point -- but at the very least, couldn't Emmerich and Devlin hire a speechwriter to come in and give the President's pep talks some rhetorical juice?).

Jeff Goldblum may think he's propping up his resume by continuing to play the requisite blockbuster nerd, but I hope he's socking away the paychecks for a rainy day, since this sort of noncommittal performance is likely to lead him nowhere. Judd Hirsch plays Goldblum's tiresome father as written -- a hopelessly overstated Jew, sort of like Billy Crystal with none of the charm. Randy Quaid hams it up in a supporting role as the Lunatic Who Makes Good, and Mary McDonnell is completely wasted as the First Lady. (Ironic that James Duval plays a small role, since he starred in The Doom Generation, Gregg Araki's black valentine to mainstream filmmaking, just last year.)

The tremendously likable Will Smith (the only reason to watch Bad Boys), on the other hand, almost steals the film away from the special effects team. This is the first time I can recall Hollywood allowing a black man to be the unmitigated star of such a high-stakes production, and Smith breaks the door wide open. In fact, I can't help but think that Independence Day would have been a much better movie if it had started and ended with his character. Instead, Independence Day tries hard to be an epic, purporting to bring heroes together across international borders and cultural lines even as it nurtures its quintessentially American identity.

Independence Day is a little more than two hours long, but not nearly long enough to properly contain all of its own ideas. Fast pacing is a virtue in this age of cgi effects and digital editing, but ID cuts its own expository scenes so close to the bone that they can't take advantage of their own strengths. The biggest exception comes during the film's midsection, as Smith lugs an unconscious alien across white desert sands to be incarcerated at a secret U.S. military base. Exploiting the American survivalist instinct, X-Files style SF paranoia, and outright xenophobia, these scenes feature the movie's best ideas, its most honest gags, and -- not coincidentally -- its most intense set piece, which recalls Alien and John Carpenter's The Thing.

Unfortunately, the tension level drops from there on out as the story becomes more and more ludicrous and the special effects become more and more of an end in themselves. If only there had been some way to bring alien and human face to face one more time, in a stand-off that would require a little more wit than punching keys on a keyboard, or clocking the little alien dude once across the face, Independence Day might have goosed its way to a more gripping conclusion. As it is, the movie shoots its wad early on, running out of shocks and surprises way too soon.

Most observations a critic can make are purely academic, of course, in the face of what's sure to be overwhelmingly positive audience reaction. In the absence of any other obvious science fiction or fantasy blockbusters, Independence Day is a big release valve for the kind of tension that just can't be loosed even by Schwarzenegger, tornadoes, and Tom Cruise (in that way, it's a lot like Emmerich and Devlin's previous project, Stargate). During the movie's big tearjerking scene, a woman in the row ahead of me was sobbing loudly; at a big action payoff, the teenager sitting behind me was shouting, I swear, "Yes, yes, yes! Yes! YES!" like Meg Ryan at Katz's Deli.

I know it might seem churlish to deny those pleasures, but for my eight bucks, Independence Day just didn't deliver. (After the White House blew up, I started checking my watch, which is never a good sign.) George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and hell, even James Cameron have made their careers on this sort of picture -- the budget-blowing summer extravaganza. And say what you will about the relative merits of True Lies or Jurassic Park, those movies all come with points of view that demonstrate their essential humanity. Terminator 2 is scary, funny, disgusting, and exhilarating because Cameron is a formidable narrative alchemist. Jurassic Park veers effectively from dinosaur terror to paternal tenderness because Spielberg understands that the horrific can reveal the truly humane in all of us (I suppose Schindler's List functions on the same principle).

For all its history-making FX work, what Independence Day delivers is mainly earthbound leftovers from the Star Wars trilogy wrapped around some obvious Twister-style "human drama" that involves separated spouses who still love each other. If those relationships are oddly devoid of passion, it's for the same reason that a movie involving the murder of tens of millions of people is oddly bloodless. In its misguided quest for universal appeal, Independence Day is far too calculated, takes too few risks, and shows us not nearly enough about the way human beings really react under pressure. All the right buttons are being pushed, but Independence Day doesn't have a point of view, or a beating heart.