Contradicting Popular Opinion:
A.K.A.
An Enquiry Concerning Why Your Favorite Movie Sucks: Independence Day
INTRO
It dawns on me that I often refer to Independence Day as the biggest, dumbest movie of all time. In the interest of fairness (and that is what we are all about here), I shall defend this position.
Ah, Independence Day. Man this movie really plays the actors against type, huh? I mean Jeff Goldblum as a scientist? Will Smith as a wise-cracking, sci-fi action hero? Randy Quaid as a sloppy drunk?
Against my better judgment, but to the benefit of my sloth, I will occasionally use the putrid abbreviation ID4.
GET ON WITH IT!
So first things first. I think we all know, at least at some level, that Independence Day is a ridiculously stupid movie. Let’s look at the facts. It’s a movie about enormous spaceship and big flashy explosions. It has this weird super-patriotism thing going on. In it, the President takes things into his own hands, strippers are beautiful and clean with a heart of gold, and drunks sober up to be heroes.
In it, there is still something called the “Soviet News” despite the significant lack of a USSR.
In it, Will Smith punches out an alien.
In it, fighter jets are agile enough to maneuver in the Grand Canyon.
In it, Jeff Goldblum saves the world with a Powerbook.
I mean, c’mon this thing isn’t even compatible with a terrestrial PC let alone something alien.
What the f*ck?
ID4 is about going to the movies, oohing and aahing at stupid shit on the screen while being vibrated by the DOLBY. It forces you into being a 4-year old.
If you watch Independence Day on a small screen, dollars to donuts, you get bored out of your mind. There is nothing beyond the big screen oohs and aahs. Well nothing that isn’t reediculously stupid.
Intuitor dissects some of the numerous problems with the movie’s dubious physics. It’s definitely worth reading, if you’re into that sort of thing. It’s more comprehensive on some of the tech shit than I’ll be. But f*ck it, I’ll go over a couple of the main physics problems with you, for shits and giggles.
To start, the movie shows the earth spinning WAY too fast. That’s the first thing they show. The rate of rotation on ID4‘s Earth would lead to days being less than 5 minutes long. Seriously, watch it and time it.
Second, we have a spaceship 1/4 the size of the moon. Presumably it has traveled from another solar system. This presents two distinct problems.
A) Such a ship would have a significant enough gravitational pull to f*ck shit up. it would f*ck up the tides, and cause all sorts of Old Testament shit:fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria.
B) Bringing the ship to a stop require a massive release of energy.
You see, in space inertia is king. You have a ridiculously large object, moving at ridiculous speed. There is no friction to slow it down, being that space is a vacuum.
In order to slow down or stop, the ship would have to fire some sort of matter or energy in it’s direction of travel. Action-reaction, and all that business. BUT since the inertia of this spacecraft is so great, the amount of energy required to stop it in would be massive. Earth fryingly massive.
After this the movie hits us with one dumb thing after another. You have city-destroying death rays that can be outrun!
OUTRUN!
These are city-destroying explosions people! Needless to say, you are getting burnt up, no matter how fast you run the 40. And if you do manage to outrun everything, well, all the oxygen would have been consumed, so welcome to the wonderful world of suffocation.
Of course the movie is just as bad at geography as it is at physics. You have the film-makers putting New York city’s Empire State building in the wrong spot. That is just about THE most recognizable landmark there is.
Want more bad geography? The film-makers place mountains near Iraq’s deserts which just isn’t so. They put non-existent mountains near Novosibirsk, too. Maybe they just really like mountains. They even make the perfectly flat site of the Apollo 11 moon landing hilly. Maybe these mountain-lovers never saw that whole “Eagle has landed” footage.
But then again, the moon in ID4 appears to have air as well, so there you go.
From a logical standpoint, why are the aliens still flying their own jets? Maybe Stealth scared them away from using drones. Who knows?
Of course, everybody flies a jet in this movie sober or otherwise. Even the President flies a jet! The President even manages to fire 5 missiles at the aliens, despite only having four on his plane. How noble! He now has -1 missiles! If he loads one missile onto his jet he will be empty!
Oh, and then there is the whole Roswell thing. The real story of Roswell is that the government was testing some hi-tech shit there in 1947. Some folk saw the shit and thought, “ALIENS!” The government, in an act of surprising competence, encouraged this thing. They encouraged a fake cover-up about aliens to cover-up what they were really doing. Neat huh?
Anyway the movie, takes the Roswell mythos and runs with it. But they seen to think that 1947 was “sometime during the ’50s.”
Oh well.
Things get dumber from there too. Despite differing cultures and anatomy, our man is able to fly the alien ship. And for some reason the aliens haven’t made any major changes to their ships in the last 50 years. Oh those crazy aliens.
Then in the final climactic battle we manage to shoot down the alien ships. The Macintosh virus has somehow destroyed their shields. Anyway, these are the medium-sized alien ships.
You know the ones that are about 15 miles across?
Presumably these things are made of some sort of metal. That would kind of be like a city falling to the ground. A rather large city, too.
That would probably be a bad thing.
And these things are carrying some sort of fuel. Fuel of the quantity and quality that can keep a 15 mile long ship floating.
All I’m saying is something has got to give.
And in the end, like all movies of this type, it is the youngest and coolest of us that survive to repopulate.
Outro
In his book, Sex, Stupidity, and Greed, Ian Grey devotes a section to individuality and assimilation. In it, he mentions ay artist by the name of David Wojnarowicz and his writing on the illusion of the ONE TRIBE NATION. This all-caps concept describes the fallacious “all-American idea that we are all the same under various skins.”
We aren’t. We are different. That is how it is.
This eventually leads Grey into writing about Independence Day. Allow me to blockquote.
Here, America is assimilated all to hell. You’ve got Harvey Fierstein as a caricature of a caricature Mom-loving gay (but he’s so cute!), Jeff Goldblum as a Really Smart Jew (What a hunk!), various powerful females who can still look good in high heels (take that Hillary!), and Will Smith as a can-do Negro (good boy!).
Q: What is the most efficient way of taking the power out of “marginalized” groups?
A: Assimilate the f*ckers.
That is, make them all nice, pleasant revisions. Why buy a bunch of sheets, burn crosses … when you can just make everyone an honorary Normal American[?]
And you all think I’m angry.
Anyway, there are a bunch of better sci-fi movies out there to watch. Will Smith’s movie Men in Black isn’t a great movie, but it is quite watchable, and it contains some ACTUAL physics in the scene with the “noisy cricket.”
If you want an alien movie that is equally stupid, you can check out the anti-ID4, Signs. It goes small where this movie went big, but still suffers from an utterly ridiculous plot, where stupid shit happens quite often and reliably.
M. Night is generally a superior director, and Signs has some really effective moments, despite being afflicted with Downs Syndrome.
ID4‘s director, on the other hand, has proven that this film was no mistake, by going on to make movies of equal size and stupidity. I will mention neither him, nor his movies by name for fear of giving him power.
