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The president’s Independence Day (1996) speech gets me almost every time.
Especially when he crescendos, “…the day when the world declared in one voice, we will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight.”
The idea of every nation on Earth actually rallying behind a cause is such a romantic one.
I recently watched Arrival (2016) and teared up thinking about this. Probably because these days it seems to be the most fictious and implausible part of any plotline that has to deal with anything truly global.
District 9 is the most plausible exploration of how humans would deal with aliens visiting Earth.
Fun fact: that speech was a first draft. The writer made himself a note to revise it, but got busy enough with other stuff that he forgot. He remembered last minute when they were prepping to shoot the scene, but it was too late as Bill Pullman had already memorized it and had also spent time listening to unedited recordings of presidents giving big speeches throughout history to make sure it had the correct tone (this is also why he has the kind of awkward start).
I like the awkward start. It makes it feel more improvised, building confidence as he gets going. It's portrayed in the movie as him speaking from the heart, and him struggling to find the words in the beginning helps sell it imo.
Dont worry, I'm sure after the movie they all started fighting about who has to foot the repair bills and who contributed the most.
Pullman was on Saturday Night Live after the movie came out and one of the skits was Bob Dole (Norm MacDonald) dreaming that he was debating Pullman's character from the movie in a presidential debate.
Pullman is proud to have united America and defeated the alien invasion while Dole keeps trying to blame him for the state of the nation after the invasion.
Here are the only quotes I could find
President Thomas J. Whitmore: My fellow Americans, when I look back on my first term as President, there are many things that stand out. The passage of the new clean water act, the historic tax cut... but, I would have to say that my proudest moment was when I led the charge to repel the invasion of the space monsters. ...
Bob Dole: Under his administration, over seventy million Americans were incinerated by aliens from outer space!
President Thomas J. Whitmore: Well, at seems as though the Senator has finally decided to go negative. I guess he hopes to distract voters from the real issues, the ones that matter to the average American.
Bob Dole: The average American's dead!
Savage, and true, in the case of that film.
But Jeff Goldblum is still alive, so you've got that going for you, in that universe.
Yeah, that's what I mean by romantic. It's an exciting thing to imagine, even if it did take an immediate, existential calamity to make it happen. Shared trauma can quickly form very powerful bonds in humans (veterans often attest to this).
However, in reality, humans still find the most petty shit to disagree on, even at their own expense. A real post-Independence Day would immediately start an arms race to savage and assimilate all that alien tech before other nations do; tyrants would use the weakness of the fallout to grab power and wealth; people would begin endlessly arguing about how to rebuild and/or prepare for another invasion, etc.
After a few generations of humans, people would form conspiracy theories straight up denying it even happened despite entire cities being reduced to rubble. With 8.2 billion people, complete consensus on literally anything, even reality, might just be impossible.
But it's nice to imagine what we could accomplish if we did...
I get a little weepy on that one.