Why all the pseudoscience?

Rating: 7/10 (1 June 2016)

Much as I like the film from an action standpoint, I give it 7 stars for being full of just plain stupid science fiction clichés. An object one fifth the mass of the moon would show up from its gravitational effects long before getting anywhere close to Earth. Then it sheds a fleet of ships 15 miles in diameter that station themselves over major world cities. Ships that huge would be almost impossible for anything short of a nuclear weapon to damage, plus big enough to house fleets bigger than any nation's air force. But no, they have to have shields, too. Then it turns out the aliens have - you'll never see this coming - telepathy, too. In desperation, the President orders a nuclear strike. A ship 15 miles in diameter and a mile thick would suffer a hole maybe a couple of miles across. Something that, on the scale of that ship, would just buff out. But, no, the shield protects the ship. It's not like they'd be likely to have a defense system capable of shooting down any incoming weapon.
And of course, there's something big and secret at Area 51, where we have an alien ship under study. I'm surprised they didn't work in the Bermuda Triangle and the Maya calendar. Meanwhile, the First Lady has been fatally injured and turns up at Area 51 to say good-bye. Ridiculous. There's this huge underground lab with all sorts of equipment, and not a single person with any medical training? Not even someone with combat medic training? She's dying. Operate, already. She can't end up any more dead than if you just sit there and do nothing.
When the mother ship popped into town, the captive ship at Area 51 turned on, to the joy of everyone because "we couldn't replicate their power source." So then Jeff Goldblum decides to fly it by hooking up a terrestrial laptop. So if the alien ship used unknown power, how did the terrestrial PC communicate? Because terrestrial computers use ordinary electricity to send signals. The much ridiculed assumption that the aliens lack firewalls and computer protection pales into insignificance against our not being able to start up the alien systems when they can obviously use electricity.
Oh, spoiler alert, we don't all die.