This year’s big Fourth of July weekend movie release is a new installment in the Jurassic World series, sure to attract crowds eager for some summer entertainment. While there isn’t anything inherently patriotic about watching dinosaurs munch on people (even though it could be considered a national pastime), thematic Independence Day releases have become somewhat dated. I’m not referring to Independence Day itself, although it was a massive hit. But 25 years ago, director Roland Emmerich ventured into holiday-themed storytelling with The Patriot, a Revolutionary War epic, marking one of the few significant successes in this category in recent history.

At that time, Emmerich was also captivated by the genre of dinosaurs preying on humans; he had just directed the American version of Godzilla, which was essentially a Jurassic Park imitation, featuring baby Godzillas as replacements for velociraptors. However, the film didn’t fare well with critics or moviegoers, prompting Emmerich to shift towards a more serious project than alien invasions or giant reptiles. He turned to a screenplay by Robert Rodat, known for penning Saving Private Ryan. For the first time, Emmerich directed a screenplay that didn’t credit him or his collaborator Dean Devlin (with Devlin as producer, The Patriot marked the start of their professional split).

Yet, the most influential new presence in The Patriot may have been its star, Mel Gibson, potentially even influencing the project before his involvement. While Gibson didn’t personally rewrite the movie, it seems it was tailored to attract him, featuring a protagonist whose number of children mirrored Gibson’s own family and a Braveheart-esque narrative about a man who initially shuns war but gets pulled into combat, showcasing his tactical genius and fierce pursuit of vengeance. And, more pointedly, it’s a film focusing on the ruthless, despicable nature of the English.

Gibson plays Benjamin Martin, a South Carolina colonist drawn into the war after British soldiers murder one of his sons; Heath Ledger plays an older son who joins the Continental Army before his father does. Like a lot of Gibson vehicles, the movie is positioned to inflict maximum torture on his character so he can snap into the most righteous and bloody retaliation. Braveheart gave this formula the patina of importance; it won a bunch of Oscars, after all. So The Patriot turns on the odd spectacle of a filmmaker clumsily imitating an already-clumsy movie in front of its maker, Emmerich doing his best to cover the Mel Gibson ahistorical-atrocity epic and go further into playing the part of the old-fashioned master of Hollywood spectacle.

Indeed, The Patriot is something of an outlier in what might be termed Emmerich’s Patriotism Trilogy. Independence Day and the later Die Hard knockoff White House Down are both fantasies (ID4 in part and White House Down in full) about a sensitive and reasonable U.S. president asserting himself, and a whitewashed version of U.S. values, in a chaotic world of violence. They’re two of Emmerich’s more successful films because of how they’re able to make something cornily rousing out of the president fighting back; his more pure disaster-movie run-throughs like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 eventually wind up coming across like free-floating destruction. Though Emmerich is German-born, there’s a perverse patriotism – probably further fueled by his outsider status – in mounting expensive spectacle that can only truly take on the necessary weight by roping in a U.S. president to command the action.

In The Patriot, that presidential figure is Gibson, which tracks with his prominence a quarter-century ago; 2000 also saw the release of the rom-com What Women Want, which makes it perhaps the most commercially successful year of his career. Gibson is also the biggest star Emmerich has ever worked with by a fairly wide margin, and his presence makes this the only Emmerich movie that overloads on gravitas, rather than floating away on their own insubstantiality as the actors or material fail to provide proper counterweight. Gibson often pitches himself uncomfortably between righteous fury and goofy shtick, which, come to think of it, makes him a more fitting presidential allegory for 2025 than the waning years of the Clinton presidency.  (After all, Gibson is one of Trump’s chosen ambassadors to Hollywood, whatever that means.)

Maybe that’s why The Patriot, which should be a straight shot to the heart of Independence Day rewatches, has never surpassed Independence Day, or many far less overt July 4th-themed pictures (like Yankee Doodle Dandy, a TCM perennial) as far as seasonal rewatches go. The other movies in Emmerich’s patriotism trilogy march through their pageantry with the steadiness (and impermanence) of a holiday parade. 160 minutes of The Patriot lingers in Mad Mel’s soldier cosplay, grim while nonetheless lacking the battle-worn drama of Rodat’s Private Ryan. In a way, though, it’s the purest expression of Emmerich’s dual citizenship: a European’s understandable attempt to Learn American by doing what they’ve seen.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn, podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com, and contributing at Patse, The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.