Let Freedom Ring!

Rating: 10/10 (22 March 2005)

All right, where to begin? How about at the beginning? Let's go back to the two-year period between V, (miniseries 1983,) the Visitors, cannibalistic lizards from another planet, many light-years from Earth, how many? We don't know. Come to Earth presumably on a mission of peace. Their giant mother ships appear in the sky all over the world. Los Angeles is where the first miniseries is set. It's also the setting for one of the most ludicrous scenes in the movie Independence Day. That scene has them all up on the roof of L.A.'s tallest building to greet the aliens. One of them, only identified as "Elvis Fanatic," says the following: "Oh god I hope they bring back Elvis!" We know what happens after that. Every city on Earth, including Washington, New York, and Los Angeles, is destroyed. El Toro, a Marine Corps Air Station, is destroyed. Captain Steven Hiller is shot down by an alien over the Grand Canyon. In one scene, he's trying to get him off his six, and threads the needle with his F/A-18 Hornet. Hiller loses his plane, but the alien that shot him down loses his ship, so it's a fair trade. For most of the film, Will Smith is seen dragging the alien through the desert to Area 51. Since the '90s were a time of militia activity, most people cheered when the White House was destroyed. The aliens are defeated by a computer virus written on an Apple laptop, as pointed out in another review, and Russell Casse, the crop duster who claimed to have been abducted by aliens, carries a nuclear missile straight into the belly of the alien ship after Hiller and Levinson get out of Dodge. Casse is on a suicide mission. America saves the day because America's the only country to bring the nations of the world together. How do does America do it? Morse code, which by 1996, had been retired as means of communication.