Grrrr

Rating: 3/10 (28 June 2007)

I don't think there has ever been a film which made me as angry as this one did. But then, I don't think there has ever been a film which has assumed I am completely stupid as comprehensively as this one did.
The insults to my intelligence came thick and fast. Jeff Goldblum is the only man in the world who has the vaguest idea of what the alien ships are up to. Good job his estranged wife is the President's personal assistant and not a checkout girl at Safeway, eh? They have had an alien ship in Area 52 for 50 years and no-one can figure out how to get it operational - Goldblum figures it out in 10 minutes, in between writing a virus for the alien operating system. Clearly he is the most important man on the planet since no-one else seems to have the vaguest idea what to do about this threat, so we'd better keep him safe in case our counter measures fail, hadn't we? Naaah, let's send him up to the alien mother ship and near certain death! Now, let's see, in a world crisis, when the world is (apparently) looking to the USA for a lead as to what to do, how best should we use the President? I know, let's send him up in a fighter plane against one of those ships which keeps destroying the planes we send up against it! And how about this idea of outrunning the fires of Hell as they lick at your tail (twice, or was it three times?) and your dog... that particular card was played multiple times. Then there was Will Smith finding his girlfriend in the ruins of a burnt out city. At night. From a helicopter. Not to mention how fortunate that the aliens were using Windows and didn't have a firewall installed. Not to mention......
And don't get me started on Bill Pullman's vomit-inducing 4th July speech.
See, I love sci-fi, and I love CGI/eye candy, but I felt really insulted that Emmerich and Devlin could believe that cinema audiences were so completely stupid as to swallow the lazy, lazy scriptwriting which was thrown at them. None of these criticisms was anything which couldn't have been corrected by a little bit of rewriting, but taken together they indicated contempt for an audience which, clearly, was assumed to be so devoid of intelligence that none of these things would matter to them.
I guess the box office proved them right on that one! Plus there are a lot of positive comments here, so maybe their assessment of the overall audience intelligence was right after all...
How depressing.
3 out of 10 for fun visuals. Script... minus 10.