Independence Day (film)

Independence Day (or ID4) is an American science fiction movie about an attempted alien takeover of Earth. The movie features several scenes of major landmarks being destroyed by the aliens, such as the First Interstate World Center, the Empire State Building, the White House and the Statue of Liberty. The film's success was partially credited to an extensive marketing campaign which began with a dramatic commercial during Super Bowl XXX. The movie was scheduled for release on Wednesday, July 3, 1996, but due to the high level of anticipation for the film, many theaters began showing it on the evening of July 2, the same day the action in the film begins.

Plot

The world is in shock on July 2 as an alien ship stated to be about one quarter the mass of the moon and over 550 kilometres in diameter enters the Earth's orbit and deploys several dozen smaller ships, each one over fifteen miles in diameter, that settle over many of the world's major cities. (In the United States, the ships appear over Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington D.C.) Using advanced technology, the aliens destroy these cities along with millions of people. Conventional missiles and nuclear weapons are useless against them, as the alien ships are strongly shielded by impenetrable force fields. The President of the United States, a veteran fighter pilot of the Gulf War, leads the human resistance from Area 51, where the military has kept an alien fighter spacecraft that crash-landed in the 1950s, to ultimate victory over the invading aliens. The movie climaxes on July 4 as the humans use the alien fighter to infiltrate the mothership, activating a computer virus to disrupt the aliens' shields, and sneaking a nuclear missile aboard. The disruption of the shields opens a window of opportunity for humans to strike back and destroy the smaller alien ships and fighter craft. During the counterattack, an American volunteer pilot flies his jet into the path of an alien ship as it is deploying its primary beam weapon, which causes it to explode and crash. Task forces around the world use the same tactic to destroy the rest of the alien battleships while the nuclear missile detonates and destroys the mothership, ultimately saving Earth.

Characters

President Thomas J. Whitmore (Bill Pullman): President of the United States throughout the movie, Whitmore is a former Gulf War pilot who leads the resistance against the alien invaders.

Captain Steven 'Steve' Hiller (Will Smith): A U.S. Marine Corps F/A-18 fighter pilot, Hiller is the only person able to bring an extraterrestrial aircraft down in the first wave of the human counterattack. Hiller's ambition is to join NASA, and his dream to fly into space comes true when he flies the alien spaceship from Area 51.

David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum): Employee New York based, Compact Cable, Levinson is an MIT-educated chess enthusiast who discovers the aliens' plans to attack after stumbling upon their hidden satellite signal, and later suggests the idea of infecting the mothership with a computer virus in order to deactivate shields protecting the alien crafts.

Julius Levinson (Judd Hirsch): Jewish immigrant and father of David Levinson.

Constance Spano (Margaret Colin): White House Communications Director and David's ex-wife.

First Lady Marilyn Whitmore (Mary McDonnell): President Whitmore's wife. Was fatally injured while fleeing the destruction of Los Angeles.

Jasmine Dubrow (Vivica A. Fox): Exotic dancer, Steve's girlfriend and eventually his wife.

Russell Casse (Randy Quaid): Crop duster, claims to have been formerly abducted by aliens. He was ridiculed because of this. Although his eldest son doesn't think he is a very good father, when Casse sacrifices himself taking out the alien ship over Area 51 (by crashing his F-18 into the primary weapon of the UFO) - thus saving Earth - he becomes a hero.

General William Grey (Robert Loggia): Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Albert Nimzicki (James Rebhorn): Secretary of Defense.

Marty Gilbert (Harvey Fierstein): David's flamboyant boss.

Major Mitchell (Adam Baldwin): Security chief at Area 51.

Dr. Brackish Okun (Brent Spiner): Chief scientist at Area 51.

Miguel Casse (James Duval): Russell Casse's eldest son.

Alicia Casse (Lisa Jakub): Russell's daughter.

Troy Casse (Giuseppe Andrews): Russell's youngest son.

Captain Jimmy Wilder (Harry Connick, Jr.) Steve's friend and fellow Marine pilot.

Criticism

While a massive commercial success (it made over $300,000,000 in the U.S. alone), the film was ridiculed by some critics for its plot, predictable storylines and poor acting. Criticism of the plot included the claim that it would be impossible to cause the aliens' high-tech computers to malfunction by infecting them with a simple computer virus (cf War of the Worlds). Many outside the United States (and some within) also derided the film for what they saw as calculated pandering to excessive American nationalistic sentiment, as the film was released in the United States over the Fourth of July weekend and was explicitly titled Independence Day. Fans of the film counter that there is nothing wrong with nationalistic sentiment. While it might be true that only the planet's most militarily advanced state would have the potential to stand against an alien invasion, fans acknowledge that it could alienate outside audiences. In fact the studio (given the scope and complexity of the film) worried that the filmmakers might not make their production deadline, and urged them to consider a later release date, though the promotional campaign depended almost entirely on the holiday tie-in. In the UK the film's PR campaign was based around the date "July 4th." rather than the name 'Independance Day'. The abbreviation ID4 was also used.

Advocates of the film point out that alien virus protection could have evolved to such a high level that archaic viruses might have passed under their notice due to a need to allocate processor power to more advanced scanning. They also suggest that the modern computers of the film may have been developed based on technology recovered from the Area 51 craft, thus making the two systems accidentally compatible. Another set of ideas suggest that the aliens had to modify their own computer systems to interface with the earth's satellite network, thus making them vulnerable to viruses. An idea that could conceivably explain a number of the plot holes is that the aliens are to a certain extent a hive-minded race; such an orderly alien society would have no concept of a malicious computer virus or of one of its fighters going "rogue." While the film posed no proof other than the seemingly psychic abilities of a captured alien to support the 'hive mind theory'; the official sequel novel, Independence Day: War in the Desert by author Stephen Molstad does mention the aliens having a hive-minded society.

Radio spin-off

In August 1996, BBC Radio 1 broadcast the 1-hour play Independence Day UK, produced by Dirk Maggs, a spin-off depicting the alien invasion from a British perspective.

Trivia

*The theatrical version of the movie was 2 hours, 25 minutes in length. A Special Edition, released on DVD, contains an additional nine minutes of footage. Much of the reincorporated material involves the Casse family. For example, it reveals that Troy is chronically ill, and receives treatment in the Area 51 infirmary upon arrival.
*In an alternate ending scene, Russell Casse (Randy Quaid) was originally denied service in the U.S.-led worldwide aerial counterattack force, so he flew his unarmed biplane with a missile attached to it, knowing he was going to kill himself in the process of taking out one of the alien space destroyers. The scene was dropped and later revised: in the new version of this scene, Casse joins the U.S.-led worldwide aerial counterattack force and flies an F/A-18 jet fighter plane instead of his biplane, and later makes the decision to destroy the alien space destroyer on a suicide run after his firing mechanism jams. According to the director's commentary, the original scene "lost some of the realism of the film" and the revised sequence "gave the character a choice to sacrifice himself or not." This scene is available as an extra on the Special Edition DVD, and featured in the junior novelization of the film.
*The scene where the alien slams Brent Spiner against the glass during the dissection has been spoofed many times including in an episode of Futurama, where the crew go back to Roswell 1947. (Dr. Zoidberg plays the part of the alien). In another episode in the first season the Omicronians attack Earth with their monument destroying weapon.
*When Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith are escaping the mothership, Goldblum uses the line "Must go faster." He also used this line in the film Jurassic Park.
*The first line of Pullman's exhortation in the climactic speech is paraphrased from the 1951 poem Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas.
*The studio did not want the film to use the title Independence Day, so Bill Pullman ad-libbed the final line in his speech to include the title.
*When David Levinson opens his laptop computer (an Apple Macintosh PowerBook) it greets him with the message, "Good morning, Dave," and an image of the visual receptor plate of the semi-sentient HAL 9000 computer as it appeared in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
* The man in the Los Angeles office building that is destroyed in the first alien attack is played by Volker Engel, the movie's visual effects supervisor.
* In the original script, the President leads a wing of ten F-15E and twenty F-111 fighters, along with newly-recruited pilots in different aircraft ranging from MiG (Mikoyan-Gurevich) to experimental aircraft, against the alien destroyer.
* While not intended to be a version of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, the film features a 'virus', albeit a computer virus, which knocks out the alien spacecraft. In a parallel to George Pal's film version, the movie features a failed nuclear attack as well as the military base El Toro.
* General William Grey's line, "They knew exactly where and how to hit us", was previously used in the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan by Captain Spock.
* The level Katina in Star Fox 64 is a reference to this movie. There is a character called 'Bill Grey' which is a variation of William Grey and Bill only appears on Katina, Sector X and Solar. The mothership in the level also resembles the motherships from the film and the enemy ships which come out of the motherships are also taken from the film. Some believe that music played during the ending credits is in reference to the score from Independence Day.
*The design of Area 51 (the interior medical areas, more specifically) in the video game Perfect Dark closely resembles that of the interior of Area 51 in this movie.
*The video game Metal Slug X parodies Casse sacrificing himself to destroy the alien ship during the end sequence of the game.
*The scene shot in New York City, depicting a panicked crowd fleeing at the sight of the alien warship, bears a striking resemblance to Mike Trim's artwork in the accompanying art booklet to Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds, in which a very similar painting depicts a fleeing crowd, complete with a fleeing policeman on horseback, seen in both the painting and the shot from Independence Day.
*After portraying the First Lady in the film Mary McDonnell later went on to portray President Laura Roslin in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica.
* The "spread the word" scene, where Morse code is used to inform the world of the aliens' demise, is humorously parodied twice in the television show South Park. It was first parodied in the episode Chinpokomon, where parents learned how to get rid of an evil Japanese toy company's hypnotic effects on the town's children, commanding a telegraph operator to "Get on the wire to every parent around the country and tell them how to bring these sons of bitches down!" The same scene was later parodied in the episode Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes, in which a similar ending sequence refers to the demise of an evil superstore bent on world domination.
* In the game Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition, there is a secret level in the fourth act called Area 51. Towards the end of the level is a very crude (and inaccurate) depiction of the launch bay and the recovered alien fighter craft. At the end of the level a screen shows an alien destroyer ship firing its primary beam weapon on Duke Burger. Duke Nukem mutters to this "Nobody jacks with our independence."
* The recon vehicle used to observe the Houston nuclear strike is a real-world vehicle, the M93A1 NBCRS, called the Fox. This vehicle is purpose designed to survive and protect its crew in nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare zones and was a logical choice for the recon mission, being well-protected from EMP (electromagnetic pulse) effects.

Errors and goofs

*The commemorative plaques left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts were attached to the front leg of the Lunar Module's Descent Stage; neither was placed on a pile of moon rocks.
*The film contains several references to the alien ship at Area 51 having crash-landed in the 1950s; however the actual Roswell incident occurred in 1947. However, this can be interpreted that the movie says the real crash was in the 1950s, while the 1947 incident was not the "true" crash time.
*When David Levinson and Constance Spano are at Area 51 in a room over looking the alien attacker craft, David opens a fridge with food and drinks clearly visible. Seconds later Constance opens the same fridge revealing that all the contents of the fridge have disappeared.
*The map of Russia shown on Sky News (in Russian) shows the city of Saint Petersburg as Petrograd, a name used only from 1914 until 1924 (when it became Leningrad; the original name St. Petersburg was restored in 1991).
*At the bottom of the same map it says "cloud phenomenon" in Russian, and "phenomenon" is misspelled - it says "fznamenon" instead of the correct "fenomen."
*The spacecraft heading for Los Angeles is initially reported to have been detected off the California coast (west of Los Angeles), yet it passes over the Casse family's trailer park in the Imperial Valley, which lies hundreds of miles to the east of Los Angeles.
*When news of the newly-appeared spacecraft from around the world is shown near the beginning of the film, the broadcast from Russia is labeled "Soviet News", despite the USSR's having collapsed five years before the release of this film, and only months after the end of the Persian Gulf War in which the President had supposedly fought.
*When the spaceship arrives at Novosibirsk, the announcer says "It is clearing the mountains." There are no mountains near Novosibirsk.
*A mounted policeman in New York City is shown turning around when the alien spaceship arrives. The camera angle changes, and from the new angle, the policeman is shown turning again.
*When the Americans are sending Morse code, they send it to a location which is subtitled as the "Iraqi Desert," yet there are mountains visible in the background. An earlier scene subtitled "Northern Desert, Iraq" also shows mountains. There are no mountain ranges near deserts in Iraq.
*In the beginning White House scene, Constance Spano is shown reading the USA Today. On the back, one can see the weather page. However, the greens and blues covering the country on the weather map suggest cold weather, which would be unusual for July.
*The message purporting to be Morse code was actually gibberish. Additionally, the Morse code keys used to send the message were so far out of adjustment as to be nearly unusable.
* In the Iraqi desert scene, we see an F-16 with French Air Force markings and an F/A-18 with Israeli Air Force markings. Neither type of plane is in service with these air forces.
*In the film, Marine Corps Air Station El Toro appears to be in the middle of a deserted area, when in fact at the time of the film the base was located in the middle of densely-populated Orange County, California.
* The Empire State Building was inexplicably moved to the center of Fifth Avenue.
* When a B-2 bomber deploys a nuclear missile against the destroyer over Houston, it is shown maneuvering away. However, due to the B-2's large frame and slow speed, it could not have escaped the ensuing blast (although the B-2 was designed to deliver nuclear strikes; "The B-2 Spirit is a multi-role bomber capable of delivering both conventional and nuclear munitions." [1]). In reality the B-2 would have launched the cruise missile from beyond the horizon. Additionally, after launching the cruise missile, the B-2 turns in one direction in one shot and in the opposite direction when seen on the satellite feed in the president's command post.
* The destroyer over Washington is shown descending very low over the White House. The Capitol Building, which is taller than the White House, should have had the top part of its rotunda destroyed. In a later shot of the destruction, the destroyer is shown at a higher level and the rotunda is intact until it is shattered by the extreme heat of the explosions.
* During the "Welcome Wagon" scene, where 2 UH-1 escort helicopters and 1 retrofitted CH-54 Tarhe fly to the destroyer over Washington to greet them with light patterns, a panel (presumably a hangar bay door) opens and emits 3 plasma bursts at the helicopters. However, one of the UH-1 helicopters escorting the CH-54 explodes before the plasma burst hits it.
* The commanding officer of the Black Knight Squadron is shown as a Lieutenant Colonel during the initial brief. Later, during the attack of the base, he is wearing Captain's Bars.
* During the attack on MCAS El Toro, several F-14 and F-16 aircraft are parked on the tarmac, and afterward the tail section of an F-15 is visible in the wreckage. None of these aircraft are currently operated by the Marine Corps.
* An F/A-18C wouldn't have enough fuel to fly to the Grand Canyon, especially one without carrying external fuel, as seen in the film.
* During the second air combat with the aliens the president's fighter fired more missiles than it can carry.
* When the alien destroyer is coming over Washington, the shadow it creates is shown going from the South National Mall to the Capitol Building. However the White House, which is situated with the West Wing facing South, is shown being covered from its Front Lawn, instead of the West Wing.
* The submarine in the beginning of the movie is a ballistic missile submarine, which under current policy would never operate in the Persian Gulf.
* The Alien at the controls of the Mothership at the end of the movie seems to be sitting on a modern day leather High Back chair, purchased from a popular furniture store on earth.
* An object in orbit around the Earth with a mass "one quarter of the moon" blowing up in orbit would probably actually cause fatal destruction of the human race. See Star Wars Technical Commentaries: Endor Holocaustfor discussion of a similar unfortunate incident.
* When Jeff Goldblum is drunk and throwing objects about, a bin falls over with the words "art dept" on the bottom.
* Capt Hiller deploys some kind of parachute to block the alien's view of the canyon wall, but the F/A-18 has no such parachute.
* Capt Hiller crashes with the alien craft in the grand canyon, and in the next scene is shown walking across the Salt Lakes of Nevada. In order to have gotten to the Nevada Desert from the Grand Canyon, Capt Hiller must have been walking at least 800 miles per hour, while dragging an alien in his parachute.
* Air-to-air missiles (used by the F/A-18s in the movie) are designed for use against other small flying aircraft. They do not contain warheads large enough to cause sufficient damage to a spacecraft the size of a city. During the finale, this fact is awknowledged (once almost every missile had been fired), but it should have been quite apparent to military commanders from the start. In addition, each alien ship created an explosion large enough to destroy an entire city, while positioned only hundreds of meters away. Anything that survived this situation would have to be incredibly sturdy. This would have been taken into account by the military brass when organizing a counter-strike.
* An object with 1/4th the mass of the moon, parked in geostationary orbit, would create tidal forces 25 times greater than the moon, causing earthquakes, flooding of coastal areas, and volcanic eruptions. Krauss, Lawrence, Beyond Star Trek (1998) ISBN 0060977574
* Destroying any of the 15-mile wide saucers would prove catastrophic to the inhabitants of Earth. The kinetic energy released by such a spaceship crashing into the ground would be thousands of times greater than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. However, if the aliens used anti-matter as fuel (which may be likely, as it is the most efficient energy source possible), this effect would be secondary. In order for an alien spaceship to rejoin the mothership, it would need to contain enough anti-matter to boost it into orbit. Destroying the saucer would destroy the containment field for the anti-matter, causing it to contact normal matter, and explode. This explosion would release thousands of times more energy than would the spaceship by simply crashing, and combined with the simultaneous demise of the rest of the alien spaceships, would be virtually apocalyptic. Krauss, Lawrence, Beyond Star Trek (1998) ISBN 0060977574

References

http://www.imdb.com

Independence Day: War in the Desert written by Stephen Molstad, created by Dean Devlin & Roland Emmerich and published by Harper Entertainment.

See also

*Independence Day UK

External links

*Independence Day on sciflicks.com
*Link to Bill Pullman's Speech in Text and Audio (americanrhetoric.com)