Movie critic David Sterritt in the Christian Science Monitor, July 2, 1996:

Seen in this context, "Independence Day" is a great leap backward to '50's-style paranoia. Supporters will argue that it's just for fun, but fun can be revealing. Is it mere coincidence that Hollywood's current idea of a good time is cooking up a vicious and conspicuous enemy—literally an "evil empire," to use an '80's catch phrase—and then whipping up our emotions with enough military hardware, us-against-them rhetoric, and explosive nuclear destruction to win a dozen wars? Surely this is food for thought.

[Ed.: Scholars vary in their estimates of the number of people killed by the Soviet regime from 1917 to 1987 through deportation, slave labor, deliberate starvation, freezing, terror and quota killings, but it is at least 30 million. Such estimates typically do not include combat deaths from the Russian Civil War, various peasant insurrections, World War II, or deaths from famines and epidemics that accompanied dramatic declines in productivity and living standards.]

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