Good overproduced cliched-ridden film

Rating: Null/10 (18 November 2002)

SPOILERS.
S.E.T.I gets word. Why? Who knows. The Pentagon has its own surveillance and that's the next scene. Bigger than a bread basket. Is it a meteor? Well, good golly Bob (Robert Loggia), it a quarter the size of the moon they just told you, and it looks like a giant razor stand on the infrared. And that sort of sets the tone.
It's a comedy, of committee planning, in the film, and of the film. But the overproduced special effects, which still look good, the camera work, and so on, make it a fun film to watch. Just turn off the sound and captions. Amazingly, you'll be able to follow the 'plot' step for step.
As for those who have the I-hate-America-first attitude, when I see similar complaints about James Bond or Jackie Chan or whoever else 'saving-the-world-again', then maybe such consistency would barely help their laments. It's a film about impossibly odd American resourcefulness, coupled with the bravery of fighter pilots in Russia, Israeli and Arab working together, Japanese and so on. But only Goldblum stumbled on the key.
And it's a ridiculous solution. First he discovers the countdown. But by the time the count is down, it's pretty obvious the aliens mean to do damage. So it becomes a device merely to get him on Air Force One. Then Dad breaks down with his Area 51 rant, only to have it confirmed by the bad guy insider and all around 'weasel'. So off to the only working command and control center in the whole wide world, taking AF1 and its capabilities as well, that the aliens can't track, even with the traffic, of all sorts, going in and out, and Goldblum has another epiphany. You can't shoot through the force fields of the aliens. So get them to drop shields by - what - flying up there with a 40 year old spaceship and uploading a computer virus to their operating system. Are they using Windows XXX? I mean. Is this rewriting the HD boot sector? What? It's actually the major plot point. And it makes no sense. Did Bill Gates really cut a deal with space aliens before anyone ever knew they existed - well . . that might seem superficially plausible. And I guess that version of Windows doesn't check for outdated software in order to automatically upgrade. A 40 year old space ship? It would be like trying to fool Saddam by sneaking in and trying to land with an F4 Phantom, or something. People would notice.
So, anyway. Forget everything you knew in the previous scene, basically. That's how it works. It's not just a bunch of comfortably cliched characters and plot 'twists' drawn almost from other films, as some have suggested here, but almost isolated cliched scenes without too much regard to what came before or after in the film, overall. So the monster goes beserk. Great. Fine. If this was a government lab in the arctic. But we just saw this is Area 51 and the last US military installation in operation. There's lot of guards, and they would be inside the operatory, watching through the window, and so on, especially if they thought the space man was alive. But then the Pres wouldn't get his telepathic vid-flick, though to what purpose I can't imagine. They already established that the space aliens intended to wipe out all of humanity in three days or less. What, that wasn't enough motivation? Oh, yeah, now we find out they're like a bunch of locusts. Well, now that we know that. I suppose the point there is that it's the belated answer to 'Mommy, why is this happening?' And stripper Mom could reply, 'well, there's this Hollywood system, you see . . ' But I guess that wouldn't be a very satisfactory reply.
In short, it's a watchable film, without the dialog and if you don't try to read lips. Watch for Harry Connick Jr. to embarrass himself in most scenes. You can turn on the sound for that. Will Smith doesn't do badly, but is saddled with more than a few cliches of his own. Goldblum is annoying and obviously uncomfortable, as some have noted. He's most insecure in the spaceship. So that's another bit of dialog to take in. And what's up with the flight suits? That's not a Tomcat. It's a spaceship with a force field around it. But, enough of that. It's a good movie. It's funny. Good fx. Don't expect The Godfather. But it's better than Godzilla.