Aliens Arrive! And a Nation Stands in Line : America? It Means the Freedom to Go to a Movie at 4 A.M.

A nation of ingrates, that’s what we live in. I call up some friends, offering to buy them tickets to what is being described as only the most highly anticipated movie of the year, 20th Century Fox’s “Independence Day,” and how do they respond?

“You are out of your mind,” says one.

“Go to hell,” says another. Ah, friendship.

OK, maybe it was because I was offering to pay for their ticket at a screening Wednesday at 4:30 a.m. at the Universal City Cineplex Odeon, part of a 56-hour mega-extravaganza ‘round-the-clock marathon of “Independence Day” showings, that accounted for their, um, hesitancy. “You’d have to pay me a whole lot more than whatever it is you’re getting paid,” one stated unequivocally.

And apparently, most of Los Angeles agreed with them about the middle-of-the-night screenings, staying home in droves. Folks don’t mind seeing Earth getting pounded by alien invaders, but only at a more reasonable hour--”ID4” sold out every screening at Universal City up to and including 1 a.m. After that--well, accounts varied wildly, with different folks at work throughout Tuesday night estimating average crowds at between six and 300 for the showings after 1. (With such disparity in the head counts, these people could find work with the U.S. Parks Department.)

The overwhelming impression, however, was that the theater’s employees were underwhelmed by the turnout.

After seeing the movie with 40 other intrepid (or, at least, insomniac) souls, I staggered out of the auditorium in search of some caffeine; the guy at the concession counter deadpanned, “You must be our 7:15 rush.”

This overnight gambit may emerge as a piece of film marketing on a par with matching a grinning guy in purple tights with the slogan “Slam Evil.” Oh, well, at least it wasn’t “Striptease.”

Those who did turn up were enthusiastic. Brian Sampson got up at 2 a.m. to drive from Compton with his kids to see the movie. “It’s like the hoopla of an opening of an amusement park,” he explained. “I wanted to be the first to ride that ride, that ‘Independence Day’ ride. Now I’m going in to work an eight-hour shift.” He’d be back to see the movie again the next day, he vowed.

The Universal City ultra-plex has props from the film on display, including a full-scale F-18 fighter jet (easily overlooked outside in the dark at 4 in the morning). Inside, a miniature of one of the killer UFOs hovers ominously over a cheesy crooked paper Empire State Building (the latter, we presume, is not a prop from the film).

The film’s giant cardboard standee features a tiny TV screen that actually works and shame-faced plugs for a couple of upcoming Fox films, “Courage Under Fire” and “Chain Reaction.” (Maybe the aliens attacked because they’re sick of all this cross-promotion.)

What the theater did not have, at that hour at least, were matinee prices (even though, by my estimation, 4:30 a.m. is indeed before 6 p.m.)--or air conditioning. Repeated requests to cool off the sultry auditorium went unheeded, perhaps to create a little verisimilitude for the desert sequences.

At that hour, in that heat, a lot of us in the audience resembled the movie’s motley assortment of ragtag Winnebago-driving survivors.

Some were able to muster rock-concert levels of enthusiasm, screaming “Whooo!” when the lights went down and cheering random acts of mayhem. At the film’s conclusion, we left, sober in the realization that no matter how long we lived, none of us would ever do anything remotely as heroic as Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum did in rescuing the planet from utter annihilation. (I didn’t really give anything away, did I?)

Outside the theater, a TV crew (too wimpy to show up at 4:30) had turned up to badger bleary-eyed moviegoers, finding the pickings slim. I chatted up David and Shelley Ruth. “I was up anyway,” shrugged David, a sound editor working ‘round-the-clock himself: He guessed he had last slept “two or three hours maybe” Monday evening.

His wife didn’t mind the early hour, either. “I haven’t been this excited about a movie since ‘Star Wars,’ and I was 10 then,” she said, adding that the movie was almost able to live up to all the hype. “There were a lot of excruciatingly stupid lines that we’ll all be quoting for weeks. This’ll really appeal to the Bud-drinking, blue-collar people who’ll go and shout, ‘Yeah, kick their ass!’ ”

Of the competing summer blockbusters, Shelley said: “ ‘Mission: Impossible’ was better; ‘Twister’ definitely wasn’t.”

“Now I’m in trouble,” her husband groaned. “Our company worked on ‘Twister.’ ”

“I didn’t say the sound was bad,” she replied, adding appeasingly, “The sound on ‘Twister’ was good.”