Today, the trend in summer blockbusters is toward a kind of contextual ambiguity. Comic-book heroes, animals, cartoons—characters who are either superhuman or sub—populate plots that march toward balletic fights and gymnastic chases and enormous explosions. Whether their formulas result from the demands of “global box office” or from a more artistic impulse toward allusion and allegory, the result is generally the same: movies that evade the specificities of the world beyond the movie. Films that prefer to dwell, pleasantly and invitingly, in the realm of the figurative. Zootopia and profiling, Finding Dory and disability, Civil War and regulation, Batman versus Superman, Captain America versus Iron Man, even Aliens versus Robots—recent blockbusters, for all their explosion-happy antics, have invited and in some sense have demanded a measure of thought and extrapolation and analysis. They require some work on the part of their audiences. They are, on some level, smart.

Independence Day, though? It is many, many things; smart, however—all the film’s talk of mid-’90s computer science notwithstanding—is not one of them. There is very little allegory to be considered here. There is very little ambiguity. There is, overall, very little art.

And that, too, is one of the movie’s selling points: Independence Day is refreshingly straightforward and, in the best sense, simplistic. It is a movie about the world—under the leadership of the United States via a youthful president who is also, because of course, a former fighter pilot—saving itself from an alien invasion. The end. There is no Nolanian moodiness; there is no Whedonian irony. There is only problem, adversity, another problem, more adversity, and ultimate triumph, all capped with a funny line from Will Smith comparing a sparks-shooting spaceship to a Fourth of July fireworks display. Bim, bam, literal boom. The good guys are good; the bad guys are bad; the boy will get the girl, and vice versa, and then everyone will get on with their lives.

The simplicity is there even at the most fundamental levels. Independence Day may begin with a basic David-and-Goliath framework—Earthlings, outmatched by an extraterrestrial civilization that is, through no fault of our own, more technologically advanced than we are—but that premise quickly evolves into an even more basic tale: one of military, and planetary, triumphalism. Because, according to the film’s emotional climax if not its narrative: “We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on. We’re going to survive. Today ... we celebrate … our Independence Day!”

Hell, yeah! U-S-A! U-S-A! And also HU-MAN-I-TY! Wooooo!

Even President Whitmore (Bill Pullman)’s speech—one so rousing in its rhetoric that one of Independence Day’s eager extras greeted it with a salute that was shoulder-dislocation-level in its enthusiasm—is reassuringly, if ridiculously, simple. We’re gonna LIVE.