Independence Day (film)

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Independence Day (ID4)
Directed by	Roland Emmerich
Produced by	Roland Emmerich
Written by	Dean Devlin, Roland Emmerich
Starring	Jeff Goldblum Will Smith Bill Pullman Margaret Colin Vivica A. Fox Judd Hirsch Mary McDonnell Robert Loggia Randy Quaid
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	July 3, 1996 (USA)
Running time	145 min. (theatrical) 153 min. (special edition)
Language	English
Budget	$75,000,000 (estimated)
IMDb profile

Independence Day (also known as its promotional abbreviation ID4) is an American science fiction movie about an attempted alien takeover of Earth. The movie features several scenes of major landmarks being destroyed by the aliens, such as the White House, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty and the US Bank in Los Angeles.

The film's success was partially credited to an extensive marketing campaign which began with a dramatic commercial during Super Bowl XXX. The movie was scheduled for release on Wednesday, July 3, 1996, but due to the high level of anticipation for the film, many theaters began showing it on the evening of July 2, the same day the action in the film begins.

Contents 1 Plot 2 Characters 3 Criticism 4 Radio spin-off 5 DVD versions 6 Other production information 7 Errors and goofs 8 References 9 See also 10 External links

[edit] Plot

The world is in shock on July 2 as an alien ship stated to be about one quarter the mass of the Moon and over 550 kilometers in diameter enters the Earth’s orbit. It then deploys several dozen smaller ships, each itself with a diameter of over fifteen miles, that settle over many of the world’s major cities. (In the United States, the ships appear over Los Angeles, New York City and Washington, D.C. A TV shot also briefly shows ships over London, Paris, Moscow, Rome and Berlin. Also, later in the film it is shown that there were attacks made on Sydney, Egypt, and sub-Saharan Africa, but this is shown in the aftermath of the attacks, not on a TV shot. It is later mentioned that Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Colorado Springs, and Houston are also destroyed; however, only the Houston attack is actually portrayed.)

Using advanced technology, the aliens destroy these cities, along with millions of people. Conventional missiles and nuclear weapons are useless against them, as the alien ships are strongly shielded by impenetrable force fields. The President of the United States, a veteran fighter pilot of the Gulf War, leads the human resistance from Area 51, where the military has kept an alien fighter spacecraft - identical to the ones used in the invasion - that crash-landed in the 1940s, to ultimate victory over the invading aliens. The movie climaxes on July 4 as the humans use the alien fighter to infiltrate the mothership, activating a computer virus to disrupt the aliens’ shields, and sneaking a nuclear missile aboard. The disruption of the shields opens a window of opportunity for humans to strike back and destroy the smaller alien ships and fighter craft.

During the counterattack, an American volunteer pilot throws his jet into the emitter of the beam weapon of the alien ship as it is about to fire, which causes a chain reaction which results in the destruction of the ship. Task forces around the world use the same weak point to destroy the rest of the alien battleships while the nuclear missile detonates and destroys the mother ship, ultimately saving Earth.

[edit] Characters

• President Thomas J. Whitmore (Bill Pullman): President of the United States throughout the movie, Whitmore is a former fighter pilot who served in the Persian Gulf War and leads the resistance against the alien invaders.
• Captain Steven "Steve" Hiller (Will Smith): A U.S. Marine Corps F-18 fighter pilot, Hiller is the only person able to bring an extraterrestrial aircraft down in the first wave of the human counterattack. Hiller’s ambition is to join NASA, and his dream to fly into space comes true when he flies the alien spaceship from Area 51.
• David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum): Employee of New York-based Compact Cable, Levinson is an MIT-educated chess enthusiast who discovers the aliens’ plans to attack after stumbling upon their hidden satellite signal, and later suggests the idea of infecting the mothership with a computer virus in order to deactivate the shields protecting the alien craft.
• Julius Levinson (Judd Hirsch): Jewish immigrant and widowed father of David Levinson.
• Constance Spano (Margaret Colin): White House Communications Director and David’s ex-wife.
• First Lady Marilyn Whitmore (Mary McDonnell): President Whitmore’s wife. Was fatally injured while fleeing the destruction of Los Angeles.
• Jasmine Dubrow (Vivica A. Fox): Exotic dancer, Steve’s girlfriend, and eventually his wife.
• Russell Casse (Randy Quaid): Vietnam veteran pilot and crop duster, claims to have been formerly abducted by aliens. He was ridiculed because of this. Although his eldest son doesn’t think he is a very good father, when Casse sacrifices himself taking out the alien ship over Area 51 (by crashing his F/A-18 into the ship's primary weapon)— thus saving Earth — he becomes a hero.
• General William Grey (Robert Loggia): Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
• Albert Nimziki (James Rebhorn): Formerly a CIA officer and the Secretary of Defense. He was fired near the end of the movie when President Whitmore had had enough with him.
• Marty Gilbert (Harvey Fierstein): David’s flamboyant boss. He is killed during the destruction of New York City, when a car blown into the air by the explosion lands on his car, with him in it.
• Major Mitchell (Adam Baldwin): Security chief at Area 51.
• Dr. Brackish Okun (Brent Spiner): Chief scientist at Area 51. While examining the alien that Hiller captured, it regains consciousness and kills all the other scientists in the medical facility, leaving Okun in its mental captivity. The alien then uses Okun as a mouthpiece when Whitmore attempts to communicate and negotiate a truce. Okun is killed as a result of the alien's telepathy.
• Miguel Casse (James Duval): Russell Casse’s eldest son.
• Alicia Casse (Lisa Jakub): Russell’s daughter.
• Troy Casse (Giuseppe Andrews): Russell’s youngest son.
• Captain Jimmy Wilder (Harry Connick, Jr.) Steve’s friend and fellow Marine pilot. He was shot down while attacking one of the city destroyers.
• Newscaster (Johnny Kim): Korean Newscaster.

[edit] Criticism

While a massive commercial success (it made over $300,000,000 in the U.S. alone), the film was ridiculed by some critics for its plot, predictable storylines and poor acting. Criticism of the plot included the claim that it would be impossible to cause the aliens’ high-tech computers to malfunction by infecting them with a simple computer virus. Another criticism was the fact that an object one-fourth the size of the moon and so close to Earth would cause tidal waves (see Errors/Goofs below for further information).

Advocates of the film point out that alien virus protection could have evolved to such a high level that archaic viruses might have passed under their notice due to a need to allocate processor power to more advanced scanning. They also suggest that the modern computers of the film may have been developed based on technology recovered from the Area 51 craft, thus making the two systems accidentally compatible. Another set of ideas suggest that the aliens had to modify their own computer systems to interface with the Earth’s satellite network, thus making them vulnerable to viruses.^{[citation needed]}

An idea that could conceivably explain a number of the plot holes is that the aliens are to a certain extent a hive-minded race (similar to the Borg in the Star Trek universe); such an orderly alien society would have no concept of a malicious computer virus or of one of its fighters going “rogue.” While the film posed no proof other than the seemingly psychic abilities of a captured alien to support the “hive mind theory,” the official sequel novel, Independence Day: War in the Desert by author Stephen Molstad does mention the aliens having a hive-minded society.

Large swathes of the plot appear to have been lifted from Footfall by Larry Niven.

The political overtones of the film were widely criticised by foreign reviewers; Movie Review UK described the film as "A mish-mash of elements from a wide variety of alien invasion movies and gung-ho American jingoism" [1]. Pullman's pre-battle speech, in which he states that victory in the coming war would see the entire world henceforth describe July 4th as its "independence day", was described as the "the most jaw-droppingly pompous soliloquy ever delivered in a mainstream Hollywood movie" in a BBCi review [2].

[edit] Radio spin-off

In August 1996, BBC Radio 1 broadcast the 1-hour play Independence Day UK, produced by Dirk Maggs, a spin-off depicting the alien invasion from a British perspective.

[edit] DVD versions

• The theatrical version of the movie was 2 hours, 25 minutes in length. A Special Edition, released on DVD, contains an additional nine minutes of footage. Much of the reincorporated material involves the Casse family. For example, it reveals that Troy is chronically ill (in the theatrical cut, he just throws up along the way), and receives treatment in the Area 51 infirmary upon arrival.

[edit] Other production information

• In an alternate ending scene, Russell Casse (Randy Quaid) was originally denied service in the U.S.-led worldwide aerial counterattack force, so he flew his unarmed biplane with a missile attached to it, knowing he was going to kill himself in the process of taking out one of the alien space destroyers. The scene was dropped and later revised: in the new version of this scene, Casse joins the U.S.-led worldwide aerial counterattack force and flies an F/A-18 jet fighter plane instead of his biplane, and later makes the decision to destroy the alien space destroyer on a suicide run after his firing mechanism jams. According to the director’s commentary, the original scene “lost some of the realism of the film” and the revised sequence “gave the character a choice to sacrifice himself or not.” This scene is available as an extra on the Special Edition DVD, and featured in the junior novelization of the film.
• The first line of Pullman’s exhortation in the climactic speech is paraphrased from the 1951 poem Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas.
• The studio did not want the film to use the title Independence Day, but Bill Pullman ad-libbed the final line in his speech to include the title.
• When David Levinson opens his laptop computer, it greets him with the message “Good morning, Dave,” and an image of the visual receptor plate of the semi-sentient HAL 9000 computer as it appeared in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
• The man in the Los Angeles office building that is destroyed in the first alien attack is played by Volker Engel, the movie’s visual effects supervisor.
• In the original script, the President leads a wing of ten F-15E and twenty F-111 fighters, along with newly-recruited pilots in different aircraft ranging from MiG (Mikoyan-Gurevih) to experimental aircraft, against the alien destroyer.
• When Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith escape the mothership, Goldblum uses the line "Must go faster," which he also voiced in Jurassic Park.
• Near the start of this film, a cable television company employee talking during a phone call can be hearad saying, "I love The X-Files, too. I hope you get to see it." Two years later, a subtle reference to this film was included in a movie version of The X-Files.
• Independence Day was made into a video game for the PC, Playstation and Sega Saturn. The game focused exclusively on the aerial combat and allowed the player to choose a variety of planes including variations on alien craft not featured in the movie. Certain locations visited (such as Moscow) also do not appear in the film. Fans of the movie however, were not enthusiastic about the game, since it had virtually no plot and poor multiplayer gameplay.
• The recon vehicle used to observe the Houston nuclear strike is a real-world vehicle, the M93A1 NBCRS, nicknamed the Fox. This vehicle is purpose designed to survive and protect its crew in nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare zones and was a logical choice for the recon mission, being well-protected from EMP (electromagnetic pulse) effects.
• Several of the cast members' hometowns are destroyed in this film: Judd Hirsch, Margaret Colin, Robert Loggia, and Harvey Fierstein are from New York City, Will Smith and James Rebhorn are from Philadelphia, Randy Quaid and Brent Spiner are from Houston, and Adam Baldwin is from Chicago.
• The final battle in this film directly inspired a level in the Nintendo 64 game, StarFox 64.
• Casse's suicide run would be later parodied in the final boss stage of Metal Slug 2 and Metal Slug X.
• The song playing in the SETI lab is REM's "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)".
• The U.S. Military was willing to help out with the film; however, they wanted Area 51 out of the script.
• The fighters parked near the Russian military base during the Morse code sequence are Mig-31 Foxhounds.

[edit] Errors and goofs

• The commemorative plaques left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts were attached to the front leg of the Lunar Module’s Descent Stage; neither was placed on a pile of moon rocks. The flag at the Apollo 11 site was also blown over by the ascent stage of Eagle as it left the moon.
• When David Levinson and Constance Spano are at Area 51 in a room over looking the alien attacker craft, David opens a fridge with food and drinks clearly visible. Seconds later Constance opens the same fridge revealing that all the contents of the fridge have disappeared.
• The map of Russia shown on Sky News (in Russian) shows the city of Saint Petersburg as Petrograd, a name used only from 1914 until 1924 (when it became Leningrad; the original name St. Petersburg was restored in 1991).
• The President looks above to alien ship from The White House Garden, althougt the entered Air Force One aircraft.
• At the bottom of the same map it says “cloud phenomenon” in Russian, and “phenomenon” is misspelled—it says “fznamenon” (фзнаменон) instead of the correct “fenomen” (феномен).
• The spacecraft heading for Los Angeles is initially reported to have been detected off the California coast (west of Los Angeles), yet it passes over the Casse family’s trailer park in the Imperial Valley, which lies hundreds of miles to the east of Los Angeles. Also, why it can be seen hovering over LA from the Imperial Valley is another error, considering the distance between the two places.
• When news of the newly-appeared spacecraft from around the world is shown near the beginning of the film, the broadcast from Russia is labeled “Soviet News,” despite the USSR’s having collapsed five years before the release of this film, and only months after the end of the Persian Gulf War in which the President had supposedly fought.
• When the spaceship arrives at Novosibirsk, the announcer says “It is clearing the mountains.” There are no mountains near Novosibirsk.
• A mounted policeman in New York City is shown turning around when the alien spaceship arrives. The camera angle changes, and from the new angle, the policeman is shown turning again.
• When the Americans are sending Morse code, they send it to a location which is subtitled as the “Iraqi Desert,” yet there are mountains visible in the background. An earlier scene subtitled “Northern Desert, Iraq” also shows mountains. There are no mountain ranges near deserts in Iraq.
• In the beginning White House scene, Constance Spano is shown reading the USA Today. On the back, one can see the weather page. However, the greens and blues covering the country on the weather map suggest cold weather, which would be unusual for July.
• The message purporting to be Morse code was actually gibberish. Additionally, the Morse code keys used to send the message were so far out of adjustment as to be nearly unusable.
• In the Iraqi desert scene, we see an F-16 with Royal Air Force markings and an F/A-18 with Israeli Air Force markings. Neither type of plane is in service with those air forces.
• In the film, Marine Corps Air Station El Toro appears to be in the middle of a deserted area, when in fact at the time of the film the base was located in the middle of densely-populated Orange County, California.
• The Empire State Building was inexplicably moved to the center of Fifth Avenue.
• When a B-2 bomber deploys a nuclear missile against the destroyer over Houston, it is shown maneuvering away. However, due to the B-2’s large frame and slow speed, it could not have escaped the ensuing blast (although the B-2 was designed to deliver nuclear strikes; “The B-2 Spirit is a multi-role bomber capable of delivering both conventional and nuclear munitions.” [3]). In reality the B-2 would have launched the cruise missile from beyond the horizon. Additionally, after launching the cruise missile, the B-2 turns in one direction in one shot and in the opposite direction when seen on the satellite feed in the president’s command post.
• The destroyer over Washington is shown descending very low over the White House. The Capitol Building, which is taller than the White House, should have had the top part of its rotunda destroyed. In a later shot of the destruction, the destroyer is shown at a higher level and the rotunda is intact until it is shattered by the extreme heat of the explosions.
• During the “Welcome Wagon” scene, where 2 UH-1 escort helicopters and 1 retrofitted CH-54 Tarhe fly to the destroyer over Washington to greet them with light patterns, a panel (presumably a hangar bay door) opens and emits 3 plasma bursts at the helicopters. However, one of the UH-1 helicopters escorting the CH-54 explodes before the plasma burst hits it.
• The commanding officer of the Black Knight Squadron is shown as a lieutenant colonel during the initial brief. Later, during the attack of the base, he is wearing captain’s bars.
• During the second air combat with the aliens, the President’s fighter fired more missiles than it can carry.
• When the alien destroyer is coming over Washington, the shadow it creates is shown going from the South National Mall to the Capitol Building. However the White House, which is situated with the West Wing facing South, is shown being covered from its Front Lawn, instead of the West Wing.
• An object in orbit around the Earth with a mass “one quarter of the moon” blowing up in orbit would probably actually cause destruction of the human race. See Star Wars Technical Commentaries: Endor Holocaust for discussion of a similar unfortunate incident.
• Captain Hiller (Will Smith) deploys some kind of parachute to block the alien’s view of the canyon wall, but the F/A-18 has no such parachute.
• Captain Hiller's mustache is out of limits for military standards.
• Air-to-air missiles (used by the F/A-18s in the movie) are designed for use against other small flying aircraft. They do not contain warheads large enough to cause sufficient damage to a spacecraft the size of a city. During the finale, this fact is acknowledged (once almost every missile had been fired), but it should have been quite apparent to military commanders from the start.
• An AMRAAM missle, the one stated as being used by an AF Captain in the film, cannot jam while firing from its launcher because 1)the missle is connected to the LAU-129 missle launcher by the rails and an aft detent which keeps it from sliding backwards off of the rail. An electrical plug, roughly in the middle of the missle, sends data from the weapons system to the missle and arms it, and 2) the rocket motor on the missile is far to strong to keep the missle on the rail.
• An object with one-fourth the mass of the Moon, parked in geostationary orbit, would create tidal forces 25 times greater than the moon, causing earthquakes, flooding of coastal areas, and volcanic eruptions. ^[1] On the other hand, the spaceship may have been referred to as 1/4 the volume of the Moon, rather than the mass, in which case the effects may be reduced, if not still disruptive nonetheless.
• According to our current understanding of physical laws, destroying any of the 15-mile wide saucers would prove catastrophic to the inhabitants of Earth. The kinetic energy generated as the ship fell would be enormous. When such a spaceship crashed into the ground, it would potentially release thousands of times more energy than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
• The destruction of the mother ship is seen as a giant nuclear explosion occuring nearly at the centre of the ship. Given that the ship is 550 km across, which meant Hiller and Levinsion need to cover a distance of 275 km in about 30 s. The acceleration required(nearly 62g's) could have easily flattened the pilots.
• In one shot the earth's rotation could be seen, giving the earth a day of about 2 or 3 minutes.

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Independence Day UK

[edit] External links

• Independence Day on sciflicks.com
• Independence Day at the Internet Movie Database
• Link to Bill Pullman's Speech in Text and Audio (americanrhetoric.com)