I'm breaking the rules doing this.

My rules say that I don't review movies in current release unless its something really special that not a lot of people have seen. INDEPENDENCE DAY opened two days ago and it would be all right for me to review it -- except that in those two days something like 1/4 billion people have seen it. But I don't care. I've got to talk about this movie.

The hype that surrounded INDEPENDENCE DAY seemed to appear as quickly as the alien saucers themselves. The crowds that mobbed theaters over the past several days seemed as frenzied as the city-dwellers fleeing from the spaceships over their rooftops. I thought, "Good P.R. job, Fox."

Yet I knew I would join the throngs at the box office. I like science fiction (though I can't say I'm a sci-fi nut). And I'm mesmerized by scenes of mass destruction and grand-scale aerial combat. The images of the White House blowing apart and alien spacecraft swarming over an American air base drew me to the theater. Once there, I was hooked.

Throughout the movie, all I could think was, "I've never seen anything like this..." Wait... That's not entirely true. The TV mini-series "V" depicted a vast alien force with city-sized saucers descending on the world's population centers. Another mini-series, "The Day After," showed cities being wiped away in nuclear holocaust. Jet fighters dueling with alien spaceships was a staple of the anime series "Robotech." And humans have gone hand-to-hand with slimy off-worlders in ALIENS and PREDATOR. Still, INDEPENDENCE DAY is in a class by itself.

The scale of INDEPENDENCE DAY is awesome. Everything is huge. The alien mothership has 1/4 the mass of the Moon. The destroyer spacecraft are each 15 miles wide. Their menace is global and unstoppable. New York, Los Angeles and Washington are incinerated before your eyes. It happens. It's real. It's a level of violence I've not seen in the theater before. It's breathtaking.

Acting is secondary to effects, but everyone did just fine. ("Can you do confusion, joy, panic and affection? OK, you've got the part.") There were some performances I really enjoyed seeing. I loved Jeff Goldblum as the cool-headed nerd who discerns the aliens' intentions -- and Judd Hirsch as his hilarious father. Will Smith brings all his charm and attitude to his fighter-jockey character and, boy, does it work. When he said, "Welcome to Earth," I wanted to shout, "Yeeeah, that's right!"

But I'm going to complain a little now: Despite the overwhelming odds and crushing losses sustained by the human forces, I felt they had too easy a ride in the last half of the movie. For instance, the aliens were able to disrupt radar and satellite communications. Yet, certain communications which appeared to require radio, radar and/or satellite services never seemed disrupted. There are other places where this nagged me, but I won't go into them because I don't want to spoil the plot.

And I have just one pet peeve: After the aliens destroy Washington, Jeff Goldblum warns the President against counter-attacking with nuclear weapons. He says it would trigger a nuclear response by other nations and a nuclear winter would result even if the aliens were destroyed. Problem is, the main component in the haze that blocks out the sun and causes a nuclear winter is the soot rising from hundreds of burning cities. When the aliens blasted the cities into airborne particles, they set a nuclear winter in motion. Now, subsequent views of the cities did not depict the lingering plumes of smoke one would expect. Maybe the aliens somehow managed to control the fires, which would make sense -- they wouldn't want to cause a nuclear winter on a planet they wished to colonize. But that's reading into things a little. Suffice to say, I would not have hesitated to nuke the aliens.

The level of sentimentality builds over the course of the movie. I sighed, then groaned, but never so much that it ruined the experience. This is a Hollywood Spectacle with emphasis on both the Spectacle and on Hollywood. You'll just have to take the one with the other.

I was very satisfied with INDEPENDENCE DAY. I got my money's worth and, apparently, so did the filmmakers. Every last dime of their budget is on the screen. In this regard (if not others), INDEPENDENCE DAY is in the same league as JURASSIC PARK and TERMINATOR 2.

I'll admit, INDEPENDENCE DAY is a movie to be seen, not contemplated. But don't even think about catching it on video. See it on the biggest screen with the baddest sound system you can find. And pack lightly while evacuating your home.

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