Independence Day/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

* Where did the wedding ring Will Smith's character is wearing after his marriage (which occurs about 2/3 of the way through the movie) come from? All male characters shown wearing wedding rings before that point still have them afterward, and the only ring the groom was carrying around was for his bride.

** It was in the container too, just under the shell.

* Just how did the Apple Mac virus be compatible with the alien computer system when Will Smith and [[Jeff Goldblum]] ended up in the main alien mothership?

** Just because it was written on a Mac doesn't mean it has to affect a Mac. The computer is just a tool to send a signal into the alien system. We can send computer signals through phonelines, radios, or even optic nerves. The hard part is the interface. Since Jeff discovered that the aliens were interfacing with our systems, deliberately or not, all he had to do was figure out a) how to reverse that process and b) discover how the alien systems arranged their command protocol structure. From there it would have been simple to scramble that structure at least for the time needed to destroy the mothership.

*** They've had an alien ship for 50 years, but according to Dr Okun ''"See, we can't duplicate their type of power so we've never been able to experiment. But since these guys started showing up, all the gizmos inside turned on. The last twenty four hours have been really exciting!"'' so they have no clue as to what it's operating system is

*** He could easily have meant that major systems like propulsion, weapons, and shields were inoperable, but there'd probably be a small onboard backup supply for very basic things like a simple computer interface.

** Given that Area 51 has been studying the alien scoutship for circa ''50 years?'' Really, the only implausibility would be if they ''hadn't'' bashed together some kind of adapter in that span of time.

*** WINE can't even run half of the windows apps properly yet we're supposed to buy that a virus written for a completely [[Alien OS]] is supposed to work? Have they not heard of sandboxing? Even if they had a compatibility layer to communicate using earth's satellites you'd think an alien species capable of interstellar flight would be aware of security concepts like sandboxing or perhaps not tying the fighter control system into the power core system. Also, even if the ships were able to communicate with the mothership there's no reason to assume that the OS is the same OS from 50+ years ago. I'm sure updates would have happened in that time span and still allowed for remote fighter control.

**** Or, to suit the 50-year time frame better, accessing the Colossus or ENIAC with an iMac. I suppose that it could work if you assume that the alien computer technology has plateaued pending the next technological revolution (akin to vacuum tubes/transistors) for the entire five decades, or at least that significant advances weren't integrated into the fleetships. That is not entirely impossible given the probable limitations on what seems to be a society of nomadic [[Planet Looters]] that would have to build such a mobile fleet well in advance to move in force, but it's not necessarily plausible either, and it leaves aside matters of software interface and compatibility. Even trying to get Win95 to talk to [[Win XP]] can be a bit of a hassle, and that is a single decade's difference with a single evolutionary tree that was designed. Creating a working interpreter/adapter to cross-link alien and human computers with no knowledge at all of what changes and advances the ET has made on their own for five times that length begins to stretch disbelief a bit, especially given that even human computers alone are divergent enough to be unable to communicate with each other.

***** Unable to communicate with each other? Um, the TCP/IP protocol runs on every OS in the world!

***** Plus, you're forgetting that the iMac only has to communicate with the alien fighter that Area 51 has been studying for 50 years. The uplink to to the mother ship is by using their own fighter as a ''relay''. The backwards compatibility problem thus ''lies entirely on the aliens'', in that all that's needed is for their ''mothership'' to be able to sustain a network connection with an earlier model fighter.

****** And any interstellar empire would have to be capable of long-term backwards compatibility simply because when you send out a subgroup of your fleet to scout space for decades, you need to be able to work with your scouting party when they get back. Unless the alien civilization has a way to update every part of its computer infrastructure at the same pace, parts of it will be screwed after a while if there isn't at least 50-year of backwards compatibility available.

****** Also, most technologies plateau after a while. If you have a system that's worked perfectly well for the last 10,000 years, why bother to update it.

***** Okay, the fact that this bugs so many people bugs * me* . First off, it's the world's most expensive B-movie, so really it's not worth overthinking. Second, assuming that the Area 51 brain trust has been picking apart the fighter for decades, they would probably have a pretty good idea how to interface with it from Earth computers. Second, I've always found it ludicrous that somehow the fact that he's using a Mac makes it even less likely -- the PowerBook 5300 was in fact notoriously boring as far as hardware specs go (well, except for the igniting [[Li Ion]] batteries, but that seems to have been a problem for almost anyone who's ever used them). Goldblum's character most likely had access to the Area 51 technical data on the fighter's computers, and in all likelihood they also had a PCMCIA version of the interface kicking around. (I'm willing to handwave the driver issue.)

****** Actually, this wiki exists ''for overthinking''. And it's far from a B movie.

***** You sure? They had to find Area 51 ''somehow''. Despite entirely overlooking it in their original assault, the aliens were moving in on it less than a day after the captured alien had been killed there.

****** 1) They may have been homing in on the downed ship that Will Smith destroyed, it wasn't that far from the base. 2) Area 51 is visible from space. 3) It was probably the only military base that still had any significant activity going on and 4) The RV Armada went there after Will Smith hitches a ride.

**** We can as well speculate (because, why not?) that alien death throes are a stronger telepathic signal than the usual communication.

*** None of that changes the fact that the plan could have been completely scuttled by a [[Dr. Strangelove|CRM-114 Discriminator]]. Aliens apparently have never had to deal with their enemies sending fake or confusing orders...

** Picking out a few bursts of morse code amidst the massive slew of vastly more complex signals sweeping across the globe would be like finding a needle in a flash flood during an earthquake while a hurricane is passing overhead, during a meteor strike and a volcanic eruption. There's a reason why the ECHELON system is such a big deal.

** Its implied that the aliens may have actually detected and decoded the Morse code transmissions. The city-destroyer turned and started making a beeline for Area 51, with the general pointing out that "I guess our secret's out, they're heading straight for us."

 

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