Racial Supremacist Propaganda With Special Effects.

Rating: 3/10 (5 July 2008)

Roland Emmerich certainly loaded this movie with astonishing special effects, and set something of a demolition standard. The infernos released by the alien vessels upon various landmark buildings are really quite stupendous.
But - oh-dear - what a wretched, predictable (and arrogant) piece of ham it is in just about every other department. I lost count of the number of gaping stares the camera lingered upon. I likewise lost count of the number of clichÃ©d comments in a script that was surely written by a committee composed of those adolescents who wear their baseball caps back-to-front, call each other 'dude', and conveniently possess IQ's that can be measured on a clinical thermometer.
It was clearly intended as a 'God Bless America' movie, as implied by the title, and though I've no problem with yanks slapping themselves on the back from time to time, this was just a little too blatant for good taste.
I'm going to risk accusations of anti-semitism here and suggest that the subtext for this work was 'American Jews save the world for an ungrateful humanity'. We have a Jewish scientist (played by Jewish Goldblum). He and he alone solves the riddle of alien invasion methodology. He and his arrogant Jewish father manage to secure seats on Airforce One, where this father goes about reminding everyone how his son has saved them all. Later, Goldblum is sent to the alien mothership where he manages to foul-up their computers with a virus. After that it's gung-ho all the way. Brains can be safely left behind.
There is one particularly offensive scene in which the father is attempting to induct a group of people into a Jewish ceremony. One person declines, remarking 'actually I'm not Jewish' to which this Zionist bigot responds 'Well, nobody's perfect.' It's supposed to be funny. And to those building illegal settlements in Palestine; it probably is. Yet I cannot imagine any other religion in which such a comment would have been allowed to pass unchecked. Certainly if the refusenik had been Jewish and had received a similar discourtesy, the movie would never have gained release. It's Jewish backers in Hollwood would have made damn sure of that (not that its Jewish Producers and Directors would have included it in the first place). Whereas if this slighted individual he'd been Muslim, There would likely have been demonstrations and death threats. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants however can have their feelings abused with impunity.
The other people to feature favourably are both of Afro-Caribbean race. Will Smith plays a preposterously gung-ho fighter pilot, stuffing it to the aliens, whilst his wife engages in civilian heroics on the ground. Together, they form a kind of ethnic apologia. They may be black, but they're still useful.
The US president is unfortunately still Christian (well; no nation's perfect), and interestingly he experiences a telepathic event with a captured alien, in which he describes them as a plague of locusts that go about the universe, using up resources wherever they can be found. That selfishness alone apparently justifies their extermination, though his insight might just as easily be a description of humankind. As HG Wells once asked in his War Of The Worlds with reference to our treatment of other terrestrial species: 'Are we such paragons of mercy...?'
Throughout the movie, these aliens are depicted as ugly, violent, smelly, and ruthless - almost as bad as Christians. No emphasis is given to their considerable scientific and technological superiority, or the fact that they appear to function as a harmonious people. They're messing with God's children on God's own Earth, and that makes them pariahs. No prizes for guessing who sees themselves as the new master race.
This is not a movie for people with brains, let alone morals or conscience. It's a shoot-'em-up of the most banal and tasteless nature. It appeals to the worst instincts and bigotries of the narrow-minded whilst masquerading as a nationalist set-piece.
Frankly; in every other faculty than that of special-effects - it stinks.