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.

** The Earth scientists had access to an alien ship for 50 years. That's plenty of time to figure out how to affect its systems.

*** 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.

** True, but how similar do you think alien computers are to ours? Not a lot of similarity I would guess though - Area 51 would have to come up with the compiler as well...

*** Given that in the movie continuity, our computers were made largely ''from'' alien technology reverse-engineered by the Area 51 scientists, the answer to your question is 'Pretty damn similar to ours - in that universe, at least.'

**** 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.

****** 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.

*** Only from a human point of view. Who's to say they didn't start with a ''trinary'' system (1, 0, -1) and went from there. Then you'd have to understand their language and thinking patterns. Our machine logic may be completely different from theirs.

**** Any numerical system can ultimately be broken down into binary. Trinary systems aren't more complex, they just have a highly level of data compression. Hexadeceminal is just a way of compression binary options. And just because our machine logic may be different doesn't mean it is. Clearly it wasn't as QED.

* Why, oh why, did the aliens (who have apparently been invading planets for a long time) come up with a ridiculous and compromisable method of coordinating their attack like utilising Earth's satellite networks, when they could have ''easily'' simply synchronised their watches and attack at a predetermined time (like real life militaries do).

** Alternatively, why not just relay the signal through their own ships? What would they have done if they came across a world that didn't have convenient communications satellites hovering around? That said, using Earth's satellites had the advantage of depriving the humans of their own communication networks, so there's some utility to the convoluted plan.

*** There's also that since the aliens are ''telepathic'', they shouldn't need a broadcast timing signal at all. The only guess that even remotely makes sense to this troper was that it was their equivalent of the conqueror's taunt -- 'Puny Earthlings, make your peace with your gods, for your doom will fall upon you in X hours Y minutes.

*** They used our satellites because they couldn't transmit directly to each other around the curvature of the Earth, as stated in the movie. And their telepathy probably has limited range, and why would a taunt be hidden?

** How about the reverse engineering of alien tech means that the signal is _inadvertently_ broadcast through our satellites?

***** 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...

** You know, I certainly agree that the movie was stupid, but this section really ''isn't'' about [[Complaining About Shows You Don't Like]].

** For what we know, maybe they used salt water for their methabolism, or had awesome desalinization plants.

*** There's also that since water is freely available in space (comets, Saturn's rings, etc.), and a society with alien-tech nuclear reactors and hyperdrive probably doesn't have a burning need for petrochemical fuel, the resources they're after are likely heavy metals. And if you want those, it's time to strip-mine some planets.

**** It's also implied in the novelization that they [[I'm a Humanitarian|wanted us]] as well as the other resources.

** They attacked population/government/military centers, not resources. What the heck kind of natural resources are in the Manhattan? They'll collect the resources ''after'' killing the sapient lifeforms.

*** They could have decided to take out all lifeforms in the solar system before strip-mining every planet. At least you won't have to watch your back for any possible attacks, how unlikely that would be.

* They seem to know us well and have great biological skills. Why not just create a supervirus and THEN wipe out (if necessity arises) all of the surviving homo sapiens? If [[I Am a Humanitarian]] is one of the goals, a super-flu that makes us comatose in a matter of days is probably better than wipe out the cities on Earth that host half of our population.

** Viruses spread and mutate like crazy. If useful planets are so rare that they spent 50 years traveling to Earth, they ''really'' wouldn't want to unleash a bioweapon that could get out of hand and render the planet impossible to harvest. Besides, as far as conventional warfare went, they were wiping the floor with us [[Puny Earthlings]] anyway, so there's no reason to take that extra risk.

** The virus was for the shields. The nuke was for after that.

* Never mind cross-platform compatibility issues. Nukes, even really big nukes that don't have to be airdropped, aren't remotely powerful enough to blow up a moon-sized mothership. You could maybe handwave something about setting off a chain reaction, but there was a hell of a lot of empty space in that ship, and there's no overpressure wave in vacuum...

** The ship wasn't the size of the moon. If it was even close, that was before the dozens and dozens of city-ships split off from it. I think you're just overestimating the size of the thing, especially if we're to believe that Will Smith got out of the thing in 30 seconds.

*** Not only over-estimating, but flat-out ''ignoring'' what was said in the film: The whole kit-&-kaboodle was only one ''quarter'' the size of the moon to begin with, and as you said, that was ''before'' the city-ships detached.

**** If that was the case, we ought to have seen multiple explosion chains gradually breaching the outer hull and the mothership progressively breaking up, not one big flash and boom and instant dust and debris as was actually shown.

**** In which case the nuke probably created the massive explosion by way of the alien equivalent of a warp core breach.

** IIRC the guards got mind-controlled too.

** The guards probably thought that the surgical staff would be smart enough to slit the alien's throat or stab it in the eye if it woke up. The surgical staff wasn't so genre savvy.

* Someone should fire the tactician who thought sending a wing of fighters armed with air-to-air missiles against a hovering, city-sized, advanced-alien-technology ship was a great idea.

** They didn't have a better idea at the time, and half-baked counterattacks are the natural consequence when your two largest cities and your capital are wiped out simultaneously.

*** No, the initial assault was an effort to test the defenses of the alien ship to see if they really could damage it. They didn't know if they could actually damage the alien vessel, but they probably weren't expecting that kind of a massive failure. Afterward, at Area 51, they were deploying the aircraft they had, with the munitions they had that survived the ''massive'' assault on all of their bases.

*** Also, they didn't yet know that there were fighter launching bays.

** That alien fighter tech was so far advanced beyond what they encountered here, there was no real reason to keep improving it. Secondly, they did become suspicious. They locked it into the docking bay and opened the cockpit shield so they could see what was going on.

*** More likely, that's because it was an "uninvited guest". It hadn't been there along the journey, hence raised suspicions.

** These aliens probably only develop their technology in big leaps when they conquer new planets. While travelling interstellar distances all their effort is probably concentrated on staying alive with limited resources, instead of wasting them on tinkering. When they have an entire planet to suck dry it's probably time to do some R&D.

** I think that the mothership was a generation vessel. When you are on a generation vessel, you do not waste time and resources on developing your technology. You use those to keep your population alive, while you crawl at sublight speeds to the next star. You clean it up, make planetfall, and improve your stuff in the following centuries. Oh,and before you ask, I think they didn't spot the ship as it entered the solar system because it was so damned black.

*** Even with the blackbody radiation, it's very hard to see unless you're specifically looking for it. It peaks in the infrared spectrum, so it's invisible to the naked eye and radio-telescopes can't detect it. It emits about 10^15 W, which isn't much when you're trying to detect something millions of miles away, so the intensity doesn't seem unusual, and unless its engine is operating exposed to space, it's not emitting a gamma-ray signature, either.

** Consider this, the A-10 was introduced to USAF in 1977, it is planned to keep it in service until 2028, maybe later. That's 51 years right there.

* That does bring up another JBM, though: don't the aliens have, like, serial numbers? The Area 51 vessel had been gone or missing (from the aliens' perspective) for ''fifty years'' or so. All of a sudden it shows up again in the middle of the assault on Earth, and attracts no real interest until it tries to move on its own? I mean, it does look like the alien equivalent of Homer Simpson is running the parking garage, but even so, that's like Amelia Earheart's plane suddenly showing up on an air traffic controller's boards tomorrow. It didn't cause a ''little'' interest at all?

** They may have welcomed it with open arms because "Johnny's back!! He made it!!", then got suspicious once in telepathy range.

** It would make sense that the scout ship, if it had FTL communications, to have some sort of "Cryostasis," technology as well. Not because they're related, but because that means that they could send the scout ship on ahead, so they can report on it. The scout arrives and sends back an FTL communication, telling them about the world. But because they want to live to see their ship/return valuable technology, they cryo-freeze themselves or something like that. This would also conserve resources, such as food and/or water, and with little to no activity, stands a greater chance of avoiding detection by locals. It would make sense for them to use freezing or stasis technology on their motherships if they are, in fact, generational ships. It helps preserve the population of the species, keeps supply consumption to a minimum, and reduces the psychological issues of being crammed in a giant ship for fifty years at a time. This last "psychology" bit could just be me projecting on an alien race, though. So if they used some sort of stasis and joined back with the fleet, that could be perfectly natural for them.

* And are we really supposed to believe that the alien invasion force consisted of their ''entire species''? Where's the logic in occupying one planet at a time instead of expanding outward like a regular empire?

*** Antimatter doesn't work like that. Just chalk it up to [[Rule of Cool]] and accept that if it had been done realistically it would have been greatly different.

** Despite common acceptance, a laser does not just damage what it hits, it is basically a very precise bomb. all of the energy in the laser is released in the moment of impact. creating an explosion.

* What about tidal forces? A spaceship 1/4 the size of the moon in a close orbit around Earth (as in: close enough to fly there in a few minutes) should cause a few earthquakes ''and'' be under some significant structural stress itself.

** It may have something to do with the antigravity tech being used by the aliens. Demonstrated capabilities of the aliens' ships indicate that they can avoid inflicting gravity/energy bleeding damage to the surface. If they can render their ships immune to gravitational effects on Earth, its no stretch to assume they can prevent gravitational effects of their own ships from unnecessarily damaging the planet they want largely intact. Keep in mind also that just because its one quarter the size of the moon, that doesn't mean its one quarter of the moon's ''mass'' - especially as the interior of the mothership was largely hollow.

*** For one thing, it ''would'' lead to total extinction. And even if it didn't, the world afterward would be in utter ruin, condemning billions to death. Defeating the enemy conventionally is preferable for that reason alone.

*** Had it worked, they would only need a few dozen nukes to get rid of the city destroyers and a few more detonated in space for the mother ship. Doesn't sound like something to bring about the death of billions of humans. And while nukes are icky, it's not like they make large swathes of land uninhabitable. Just ask the denizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki living there today.

*** Nuclear winter is also more likely to be caused by detonating nuclear weaponry over cities. The city destroyers appear to linger over cities when not immediately in motion. Destroying Houston alone should have some severe ecological consequences (on top of the damage the city destroyers' weapons have already done; leveling dozens of cities is also going to be releasing a lot of soot into the air too) Conclusions have already been reached that a small-scale, regional nuclear exchange (of only 750 kilotons - 50 individual initiations of 15 kiloton weapons) could cause devastating global consequences, let alone detonating dozens of megaton-level nuclear weapons over cities and potentially destroying the city destroyers, which would cause further damage. The weapon deployed by the B-2 bomber outside Houston looks like a B61 (don't quote me on that - it might be an AGM-86) which is a multi-megaton-yield weapon. That one initiation over Houston has probably done more ecological damage to Earth than a regional nuclear war. Conclusion: ''nukes are serious business, don't disregard how powerful they are.''

*** The weapon they deployed on Houston was 50-70 kilotons at most, more that enough to slag the down town area. Now with modern technology you could easy build and deploy a 100 megaton warhead that is small enough(<5 tons) to be carried on one ICBM. Each one of these devices would be more than three orders of magnitude more powerful than the weapon displayed in the film. It's the difference between shooting a man with a bb gun and a 20mm anti material rifle. Since there is no way that even 20% of that 1.5 gigatons of total yield was used to propel clay sized dust into the upper atmosphere it would not cause cooling more significant than that caused by a eruption of a large felsic/intermediate volcano.

*** Why not set the bomb off ''under'' the alien ship? Let that mushroom cloud smack straight into the underside of the ship? The thing is 15km wide, it will either have to redirect the entire blast along the entire underside of its hull or absorb it all. Make it a full yield Tzar Bomba and we're talking [[Limit Break]]. The fireball for the HALF YIELD Tzar Bomba was an 8 km sphere. The mushroom cloud was 64km high.

*** Um. You realize the mushroom cloud is, like, a ''cloud'', right? It's just an aftereffect of the blast. It's not actually the damaging part.

*** Exploding it on ''top'' of the spacecraft would have been much better. You get to see if it penetrates the shield. If it does, the spacecraft crushes Houston, but at least we have the option of annihilation vs. nuclear winter. If it doesn't, then the nuclear explosion doesn't suck up material into the fireball (consequently producing very little fallout) and Houston gets destroyed by the aliens with their clean burning laserblasts. Win-win!

** Yeah, the President specifically says "Why didn't you tell me about this?" and the SefDef responds with "Plausible deniability." Also, keep in mind that the President is aware of Area 51's ''existence'' just not the secret alien-containing underground bunker. The President may be CINC, but he isn't aware of everything; most likely what happened is whoever was President when the original aircraft landed ordered it hidden, and then classified the documents, and the military just quietly pushed it under the rug when the next administration came into power.

*** Still means the man has a legitimate beef over not being told about this as soon as the alien ships showed up. At that point, the Area 51 information has become, shall we say, immediately relevant.

*** The "person who knew the information" is the Secretary of Defense; not only is he already in Washington, but how long does it take ''him'' to get an emergency conference with the President? Drive time to the White House + 2 minutes?

* Anti-gravity might explain HOW the alien ships hovered,but it does nothing to explain why they weren't affected by atmospheric conditions,especially the wind. Ships of that size would have been buffeted by even the lightest breeze and them hovering directly over a spot in a major city (especially two close the ocean like LA & NYC)is ridiculous.

*** Weight = Force = mass x acceleration constant of gravity. So long as you are in an environment where the gravitational constant (e.g. ''earth''), weight and mass are linearly related. You are also heavily underestimating the force of the winds. Skyscrapers sway constantly several meters or more due to regular wind activity, and significant engineering is required to prevent them from tearing themselves apart ''in normal everyday weather conditions''. And the alien ships are flat discs with a vertically protuding spine. In short they are presenting sail and aerofile-like profile in three of four possible directions of airflow. Something the size and shape of those alien ships, no matter what it was made of, no matter how much it weighed, no matter what its mass, would move significantly in the regular winds, unless it was actively counteracting those forces constantly. Possibly they were using their antigravity tech to actively change the local value of the acceleration of gravity, on the fly.

**** Anyway, [[Rule of Cool|we're talking about city-sized spaceships that can defy gravity and obliterate hundreds of square miles with a single shot,]] [[Completely Missing the Point|and you're worried about WIND?]] Just accept that there's technology at work that we can't understand and move on.

* Why would the aliens start an attack on Earth by striking the cities FIRST? Attacking the major (and minor) military installations would have been much more effective and required the expenditure of much less energy...which would definitely be something that aliens from another solar system would have been concerned about.

** They probably haven't come across a civilization with technology compared to ours before, so they were doing what they always do: Wipe out population centers. They wanted to wipe out everyone, so best to hit the biggest clusters first before they scatter and hide. Also, until the climax their ships were invincible anyway, so they weren't concerned with attacking military installations because they weren't a threat.

*** It's simple supreme over-confidence. The aliens did not bother to attack military targets first because they thought that the military was NOT a threat, at all. If you want to exterminate an anthill, you usually don't bother with surgical strikes to remove the soldiers first.

*** It wasn't over-confidence, it was exactly the right amount of confidence. The military was absolutely no threat whatsoever. Every single time they tried to fight the aliens, they failed horribly, usually sustaining massive casualties. In the end, humanity was only saved by the fact that the producers didn't want a downer ending.

*** The aliens obviously considered the militaries some kind of threat, or at least a nuisance to be swatted away. Otherwise, why attack on July 4th weekend? Why not August 18th? The film even stated the aliens knew when to strike and how and where. The above posts go into enough detail why they hit the cities. To expand on it, the end of the film showed shock troops in formation aboard the mothership. For whatever purpose they were to be used for, destroying cities greatly simplified the battlefield they would've fought in. Roland Emmerich doesn't leave a lot to the imagination with his movies.

**** The general said "WHERE and how to hit us".

***** Except that David likened the aliens' attack to a chess strategy. They were likely collecting information about Earth for the previous ~50 years. As much a wallbanger as it was, they did take over communications satellites; so if they kept up-to-date on hijacking the latest technology the humans had, collating important dates and holidays isn't much a stretch. Not that it probably would've matted at all, the aliens had the technology and luxury to attack whenever they wanted.

****** He compared them ''parking over the major cities and coordinating a simultaneous attack'' to a chess game. He said nothing about the date. The date was a coincidence. The president even said in his speech that "perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July".

** The answer might be in the novelization: while the big ships take care of the cities, the fighter escorts destroy all military installations within range.

** Actually, this troper remembers a scene, don't remember which, but a military aide tells General Grey "NATO and Western Allied installations were hit first."

*** Yes, Boomer survives. During the final battle, they briefly show a clip of Jasmine's son talking to the President's daughter as they hide out in the Area 51 bomb shelter together. And sure enough, Jasmine's son has Boomer sitting right next to him. So yeah, the dog lives to see the happy ending.

** I'm watching the movie on DVD here, and I can confirm that Boomer is seen sitting between Connie and Jasmine when they approach David and Steve's downed ship in the last scenes.

* No, really, what was that African ship targeting? Out of all ships shown in the conclusion, it's the one that makes the less sense. So we see one crashed in what seems to be Mesopotamia (presumably on its way to Baghdad or Basra). There's another one in Egypt (on its way to or from Cairo). Then there's the Australian one (on its way to Sydney). Then there's that one ship, crashed against the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro in the middle of the Tanzanian wilderness, nowhere close to any major African power or population centers...

** The probably hit it while it was moving somewhere.

**** It was headed to Antananarivo next. Just to kill you. And the [[Pandemic|President of Madagascar]].

 

** 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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[[Category:Independence Day]]

[[Category:Headscratchers]]