Independence Day/YMMV


 * Acceptable Professional Targets: "Oh, my God. I gotta call my brother, my housekeeper, my lawyer. Nah, forget my lawyer."
 * Complete Monster : The aliens. The President manages to see into their minds, and realizes that they have beem traveling across the universe, conquering and strip-mining all the planets in their path. It's at this point that he concludes that peace is impossible and declares that they should "nuke the bastards".
 * Fan Dumb/Hate Dumb: Hoo boy. Being a movie that was extremely popular with the "plebes" and also rather blatantly pro-American and America-centric, the movie was destined for this. In general, let's just say that a lot of the problems people harp on endlessly about are 1) either explained in the movie if you pay attention and apply even the slightest bit of critical thinking or 2) simply staples of the genre that get little to no notice or focus in other, similar action films.
 * Of another sort, there are people that will try to use this movie as a "perfect example" of Michael Bay's obsession with explosions, glorifying the American military, and abusing reality for the sake of action. When informed that this is not a Michael Bay movie, their general response is to go "Yeah, well... still!"
 * Harsher in Hindsight: Thanks to the now disturbing images of the destruction of the Empire State Building and the White House, this movie wasn't aired for a long time after 9/11.
 * Particular the image of the shadow crossing over the Twin Towers.
 * Inferred Holocaust: With most of the world's major population centers blown up and massive chunks of alien debris crushing landmasses and plunging into the ocean (no doubt creating tidal waves), the world does not look positive in the wake of the attack. Then again, since the alternative was total annihilation, there's only so much room to complain.
 * Memetic Mutation: "Welcome to Earf!"
 * He's saying "Earth", you racist bastards.
 * Money Making Shot: The alien ship blasting The White House is the emblematic shot of the movie. After that, it's the shadows falling over major landmarks, and their destruction that was the basis of the trailers.
 * Moral Event Horizon: The aliens' blowing up several cities at once is terrible, but what truly cements the aliens' status as unforgivable, especially in-universe, is when the captive alien reveals that they want to annihilate humanity, and they have done this to countless other worlds.
 * MST3K Mantra: Try not to think too much about the Contrived Coincidences, or anything else, in the movie.
 * Narm Charm: As previously mentioned, the Rousing Speech.
 * Retroactive Recognition:
 * The President's wife is... well... the President. Except here, instead of dying of incurable cancer, she's dying of incurable injuries.
 * A young Mae Whitman plays the President's daughter; she's better known as being both Foe and Yay to Michael Cera.
 * Snark Bait: Despite how much of a financial success this film was (with a worldwide gross of $816,969,268, the second-highest gross for a movie of all time back when it was released), the film attracts plenty of snarkers - especially non-American snarkers, who typically don't take kindly to America Saving The Day.
 * Straw Man Has a Point: Nimziki gets two. We're supposed to be against his suggestion of using nuclear weapons but considering what we've seen so far that would be closest thing to a reasonable chance of success. Later he's supposed to be showing incompetence and cowardice for being against the plan to infect the mothership but the plan relies on a lot of luck, a human pilot managing to use an alien vessel, the aliens not getting suspicious and if it failed it would probably mean the end of all organized human resistance.
 * There are problems with both of these. The pushing of nuclear weapons has its problem in that they'd already seen that their weapons were completely ineffective against the aliens' energy shields, so thinking the nuke would work instead was essentially a case of "Throwing a rock didn't work? Throw a BIGGER rock!" It was, at that point, one of the only options they had so we'll give him that, though. Unfortunately that shoots his second so-called point in the foot, because the only other option he offers besides the proposed plan using the captured ship is "Keep launching nukes at them and hope eventually one gets through"; if trying a nuke was the best option at the time, then trying the infiltration was the best option after the nuke failed... if he has a point the first time, it kills his second point.
 * Toy Ship: The President's daughter and Hiller's stepson
 * Visual Effects of Awesome: It still holds up well and the scope of the movie is awe inspiring. The sense of size and scale has not been matched by any movie since.
 * Woolseyism: Will Smith's "Elvis has left the building!" was changed to "Last train to Mikkeli has just left!" in the Finnish DVD.