Independence Day From the Laws of Physics and Common Sense

Rating: 1/10 (14 January 2020)

Here is what I learned from this film: 1) there is sound in the vacuum of space, as shown in the opening scene as the alien ships approach Earth, 2) if a city is about to be destroyed by a hovering alien ship and there is a massive gridlock traffic jam in the outbound lane of the highway, it will not occur to any of the drivers to switch over to the empty inbound lane and get the hell out, 3) if a massive fireball is approaching you are in a tunnel, just duck into an alcove and the flames will rush by without filling in all empty spaces and roasting you alive, 4) if you crack the computer code from an alien fighter ship held by the government since the late 1940's, you can be sure the aliens will still use the same program for both their fighters and the Mother Ship after 50 years, enabling you to hack into the Mother Ship's system from a laptop even though their technology must be hundreds of years more advanced than ours, and 5) if you are a smart ass fighter pilot like Will Smith with no prior flight experience with alien fighters, you can easily fly an alien fighter right up into the Mother Ship, which in fact would have to be in orbit around the Earth, requiring complex maneuvers on the part of Will Smith to leave orbit at 25,000 mph and then match the orbital speed of the Mother Ship to link up with it. Not to worry though, since the film, like in a cartoon, shows the Mother Ship as stationary in the sky, so Will Smith just flies up to it with no need to fret about oxygen in the vacuum of space and no need to worry that the aliens will notice that their computer system has been hacked or that one of their fighters is making an unauthorized approach.