Past Movie Review: Independence Day

It's hard to believe that during the July 4th weekend 20 years ago in 1996 the movie Independence Day was released. The special effects which we all saw on TV before the movie came out were spectacular, especially for the time. Even more surprising is the fact that the sequel to this movie is coming out this weekend, a full 20 years later. I am sure there is some financial reason why they didn't wait until the July 4th weekend this time around because I​ think it would have been better of they waited one more week until the release of the new one. Independence Day had everything, great special effects, some humor and a great action movie acting performance from Will Smith, who is not in the new movie.

The one thing for me that stands out in this film more than anything else is that it probably has the stupidest ending idea in this history of all movies. The ending almost ruined the whole film even though before the ending it was very solid throughout. At the low point in the war against the Aliens, Jeff Goldblum who is the lead in this movie had no idea what humanity was going to do to stop this Alien invasion. His idea at first was very good. Invade the mother ship with one of the captured alien spacecraft from Area 51. Amazingly this ship still flew and the plan was to plant a bomb in the spacecraft, fly into the mother ship and set it off. Brilliant idea. If you disable the mother ship then all the other spacecraft that were destroying many cities on planet earth would be disabled! This is a great idea and would win the war. However, because of Hollywood, because of money, because of some kind of an audience reaction test, because of stupidity or other reasons, Jeff Goldblum came up with an idea to "install a virus" into the mother ship. How can someone do this? How can a person install software invented from planet earth into Alien Software and expect it to work? So this Alien world also uses the same code we use? It uses the same binary language we use? Also, how can you interface with the alien computer? Do they use a USB port? How do you connect to their computer and how did Jeff Goldblum do this with his laptop? Why didn't the producers realize how stupid this is and that there is no logical way this idea to save the world could be pulled off? They already had a good ending with the bomb idea, why add this stupidity at the end? For me, it almost ruined the whole movie.

I am hoping that the new movie has a better ending than the last one 20 years ago. As far as Independence Day, its a very good movie despite the stupid ending.