Silly, inept, but actually quite a lot of fun

Rating: 6/10 (14 July 2013)

Independence Day is one of those films that virtually defines "willing suspension of disbelief". The amount of "will" involved is substantial, but taken on those terms, it can actually be an enjoyable film (though fluffy enough to stuff a mattress). I wonder why I am inclined to give more latitude in this regard to some movies than others. It's a puzzle. Armageddon occupies approximately the same stature as Independence Day, and I was more than willing to be savagely dismissive of the former, whereas the latter gets a much more cushioned clubbing. Both films suffer from essentially the same maladies, cartoonish, one-dimensional characters, enough action-movie clichés to choke a hippo, and plot holes larger than the spaceships themselves (which are pretty f-king huge.)
These spaceships (which appear to be about a mile or so in diameter, with no visible means of propulsion and no apparent way of staying in the air--more on that in a moment) appear one morning over the major capitals of the world and... well, do nothing. Circling F16s, radio greetings and cute halter-clad teenage girls holding up "Welcome to Earth" signs garner no response. But David Levinson, a rogue scientist played by a suitably befuddled Jeff Goldblum, detects a synchronized radio pulse linking all the ships together and realizes that they are counting down to... something. Something pretty sinister, he assumes. Turns out to be true. The aliens, it seems, are bent on destroying humanity and taking over the planet. The aliens unleash their weaponry, destroying many of the earth's major cities and all seems lost, until Levinson and cocky air force pilot Steven Hiller, played by Will Smith, hatch a plan to pilot a captured alien saucer to the "mothership" in orbit around earth and disable the master computer system coordinating the attack.
Plot holes and other absurdities abound. IMDb lists almost two hundred "goofs" for this film (which must be near the record, I would think.) Anachronisms, plot holes, character errors, audio-video unsynchronized, continuity errors, crew/equipment visible, errors in geography, factual errors and revealing mistakes all indicate that this is something rather less than high art, as a work of cinematic craftsmanship.
MAJOR SPOILER FOLLOWS:
By far the biggest plot hole is nothing less than the central plot device by which we earthlings defeat the supposedly technologically far superior aliens. Goldblum and Smith commandeer a two-person alien saucer (this is the one that crash-landed in Roswell New Mexico in 1947 and has been in storage at Area 51 ever since, according to the film) and fly it to the alien mothership. There they upload a computer virus into the mothership's main computer system, thus disabling the entire alien attack.
Bear in mind that a computer virus is really just a computer program like any other, the only difference being that a virus is deliberately designed to do something nasty (to be completely technically accurate, it's unclear whether the program in question is really a "virus." A computer virus a program designed to self-replicate and spread to other connected systems, hence the name. The "virus" in the movie is certainly an example of "malware". Does it self-replicate and spread? Unclear.)
The point is, to write a virus requires not only a thorough knowledge of the system it is to run on (so you know which vulnerabilities to exploit,) but also an ability to program in a language that system understands. A program written for a PC will not run on a Mac, and a program written for Linux likely won't run on either. Okay yes, that's not entirely accurate; but I'm trying to make a broader point here, that being: what are the odds that someone could write a program that would run on a computer system designed by ALIENS? Or use the appropriate communication protocol to upload it? Do the aliens use TCP/IP? What are the odds that any malware could, within seconds, completely disable an entire multi-node command and control system for an whole fleet of spaceships? Oh, and in a blatant example of product placement, the laptop used to upload the virus is a Macbook. Good thing the aliens use Apple computers too, huh?
END OF SPOILER
So,why do I hang onto this movie (yes, I do own it) and actually give is a decent rating? Because actually, it's rather fun. Yes, it's stupid, juvenile, ineptly made, ridiculously plotted and acted, and contains more holes than Swiss cheese, but taken on its own terms (one could almost call it camp), it's really quite an amusing couple of hours. Some of the shots of the alien mothership are actually kind of cool, too. Watch for Brent Spiner (Data on Star Trek TNG) as a quirky, neurotic Area 51 scientist who's been in the lab so long he has no idea relate to actual humans.
Oh, and just how DO these spaceships stay in the air? One can assume they must weigh an awful lot, but they are able to float like soap bubbles above our biggest cities without doing any damage. Simple physics, i.e. Newton's Second Law of Motion, would demand that some sort of downward force be required to support all that weight. In physics terms, there would be no difference between supporting the ship's weight in the air, or on the ground, and that downward force would be borne by whatever is underneath. Even some sort of "levitation beam" would still need something to push against, and that something would be the ground below. In reality, the saucers wouldn't need to deploy their "primary weapon"... the weight of the spaceships alone would crush the entire city beneath them. I suppose you could argue that a sufficiently advanced alien civilization could have mastered some sort of anti-gravity technology, thereby nullifying the Earth's gravitational field in the vicinity of the ships. Maybe so. I rather think Einstein would have something to say about that.
I know: nitpicky.