I can suspend disbelief, but COME ON.

Rating: Null/10 (27 January 2003)

When this film first came out it had a lot of defenders. "Turn your brain off and enjoy!" "You don't have to nitpick everything!" "It's just a popcorn movie!" Hey, I like popcorn movies. I don't like films that clearly feel I, the audience member, have the mentality of a 3-year-old chimp.

Over the last couple of years, we've had a slew of superior blockbuster FX films that are genuinely intelligent, well-written, well acted and imaginative. Lord of the Rings, for instance, or Spider-man. Heck, even the new Star Wars films are ambitious and try to give us something we haven't seen before. In that light, we can look back on "ID4" and laugh. And laugh, and laugh...
You can boil the movie's problems down to the fact that these are the DUMBEST ALIENS EVER. Suspension of disbelief I can do, but I can't accept aliens that are smart enough to build interstellar spaceships and yet allow the heroes to PARK A THERMONUCLEAR MISSLE FIVE FEET FROM THEIR COMMAND CENTER. Among many, many other things. Between these guys and the ones in "Signs" who can't open a pantry door, maybe we ought to get together some money for an alien anti-defamation league. But then, in typical jingoist, propagandic fashion, we're not supposed to think about the aliens' actions, we're just supposed to accept them as evil cannon fodder whose destruction we can cheer. (In a sense, "Starship Troopers" was parodizing this movie...the aliens are SLIMY and EVIL, so the heroes feel justified in mindlessly wiping them out, without pausing to consider that the "human version" of events doesn't really make any sense...)
Seriously, though, for all the people who defend this movie and other idiocies just like it, where would you draw the line? Where would you start to get offended at just how gullible the filmmakers are assuming you are? Doesn't it bug you that the screenwriters expect you to buy all kinds of unlikely, lazy plotting? Don't you get annoyed by how stupid and irrational they have to make the aliens for the human "heroes" to triumph over them? Isn't it depressing to think how unlikely it is that a REAL alien menace probably would loudly announce its presence, use our own easily-accessible communications systems to reveal vital information, and then wait politely while the cities were evacuated? That they'd probably smear us in no time flat?
Well, whatever. But I do think this movie is worth seeing in light of recent world events. Like the makers of ID4, our leaders want us to believe that the enemy is a faceless horde that acts without reason, and is so alien and evil that suspicious events can be rationalized away in the "official" version of events. Truly, this film is a model for how all governments would like their citizens to think of their enemies. Don't bother assigning thought to their actions! Just kill, kill, kill!