Cliche Day, but it works

Rating: Null/10 (24 June 2000)

This movie had every cliche that one can imagine, from the opening shot -- what makes the dust rise on the airless surface of the moon? -- to the last. Characters made from the finest cardboard, Harvey Fierstein playing the limp-wristed homo (if he had not made Torch Song Trilogy, I would not have forgiven him), Randy Quaid going from a crop-duster to the cockpit of an F-18 without missing a step, the stripper with the heart of gold, massive coincidences, shots stolen from other movies (compare Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum walking away from their crashed ship in the desert with Sam Shephard doing the same in The Right Stuff), "all computers can talk with all other computers", Jeff Goldblum writing a computer virus in an hour or two for a computer he knows NOTHING about, and so on and so on.
Yet, it was a very good entertainment. The special effects were great, the chase between the F-18 and alien ship in the canyons was edge-of-the-seat stuff, and much of the humour worked well.