Can't blame them for trying to camouflage this garbage as something great

Rating: 4/10 (5 October 1998)

"Independence Day" was one of the most disappointing movies from 1996. The trailer looked promising, especially with the clip of the alien ship disintegrating the White House, and I thought that this was going to be a serious movie. However, Will Smith and Harvey Fierstein are in it; so I should have known better. Also, if the human race is about to face extinction, I think people are much, much more likely to fight out of self-defense rather than out of patriotism. That little pep rally speech from Bill Pullman really undermined the movie. The virus angle was kind of interesting, if not terribly plausible. Though it would be very likely that a spacefaring race would have some kind of protection against computer viruses, it's still possible that the aliens never used computer viruses on each other so they never developed anti-virus software (or they did have such technology, but it wasn't able to detect human-made computer viruses for one reason or another). It really doesn't matter anyway. Too many stupid things happened before they even tried out the virus, including where Jeff Goldblum got the idea of using it against the aliens. To summarize this movie in six words, can I get my money back?