Originally published August 9, 1996, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1186
Independence Day is one of those rare beasts. It’s a “Yet” film.
It’s the kind of movie where people don’t ask you if you’ve seen it, or if you plan to see it. They say, “Have you seen Independence Day yet?” Of if you’re simply asked, “Have you seen Independence Day,” the inevitable response is, “No, I haven’t seen it yet.”
But you will see it. It’s a given. It’s a mandate. It’s a fact of life. Death, taxes, and Independence Day.
Have I seen Independence Day yet? My standard response at this point is: Yes. And I saw it on broadcast television thirty years ago when it was called War of the Worlds. And I saw it in the theaters about twelve years ago when it was called Return of the Jedi.
At the San Diego Comic Con, a lot of people asked me if I had seen Independence Day yet, and if I was going to do an article about it. I hadn’t planned on it. I didn’t see the point. The reason to review films is to (a) express opinions about them in an entertaining way and (b) provide a sort of “consumer” service as to whether a film is worth someone’s time.
But Independence Day is a Yet film. Opinions are beside the point; it’s not a movie that’s seen, it’s a movie that’s experienced. And consumer service is likewise immaterial. The film’s PR juggernaut has created a social atmosphere wherein you are made to feel completely out of the loop if you haven’t already plunked down a few bucks and plopped into a cushioned seat so you can watch the White House get blown to smithereens.
I went, though. It’s a Yet film and I regret that I am not strong willed enough, individualistic enough, or outright contrary enough to pass up a Yet film.
But seeing it was something of a movie going experience, I’ve decided it might be entertaining to–at the very least–describe the entire package.
I was part of a foursome which ventured to experience Independence Day at the multiplex in Horton Plaza. We buzzed over there in my rented Chrysler convertible Sebring… a car that I do not hesitate to recommend, because not only was the pick-up great and not only is it fun to ride around in with the top down (for that open road, Thelma and Louise feeling), but apparently it looks like a much flashier car than it is. Several people came up to me at the convention and said, “I heard you were tooling around town in a Mercedes.” A fan recommended that I reply to such queries with a disdainful sniff and say, “That’s completely ridiculous; don’t you people recognize a Rolls Royce when you see it?”
For those who have never experienced Horton Plaza, it’s an outdoor mall that seems to have been designed by Escher. At one point we were standing on a level looking up at the movie theater. We took a stairway up to try and get to it and discovered ourselves on an upper level looking down at the movie theater. “You can’t get there from here” was likely coined in that mall.
I was accompanying CBG editor, Maggie Thompson, and her Krause co-workers John Miller and Joyce Greenholdt. We had swung by the mall around 7 PM and purchased tickets for the 10:30 PM show. Mania for the film was such that simply walking up and buying a ticket for the next show was a notion only slightly more ludicrous than, say, the thought of spotting Jim Shooter at Buster Brown purchasing a pair of elevator shoes.
Upon returning for the performance, we managed to get in on time only because Maggie boldly spearheaded a subtle “cut on line” maneuver. Even with tacky line jumping, the best we could do for seats was about third row from the front.
As we entered we spotted other convention attendees. Joe Quesada (for whom the Spung Killcruiser “Keh-Zada” on Space Cases was named) and a group of associates were staked out somewhere in the middle, and they called out to me that they were going to be watching for Coca-Cola. This made me mildly nervous. A live, on-the-spot test of the omnipresence of Coke in movies. Never had I hoped that the Real Thing would show up in a flick, because I figured I’d look like a cluck if it didn’t. (Not that I don’t routinely look like a cluck anyway…)
I needn’t have worried. As noted in a previous column, Coca Cola made the first of its multiple appearances ten minutes into the film. I was off the hook.
But I almost didn’t see it, because I’d practically gone flash blind by that point. Throughout the first half hour, the film makers chose to have a fairly bizarre means of scene transition which consisted of a blast of white light smashing onto the screen. Presumably it was supposed to make viewers jumpy, startle us, fill us with unease, make us think of the impending possibility of the last thing we’d see before being completely annihilated by nuclear blasts. It was, in short, supposed to put us in the right frame of mind for Armageddon.
My eldest, Shana, saw Independence Day with some friends back in New York and watched it from a balcony. She thought the flashes of light were cool. And they very likely are, if you don’t happen to be sitting on top of the screen. Us, we were busy having our retinas and corneas turned into styrofoam packing chips. I warn you now: If you’re going to see Independence Day and think that there’s any chance you might be close-up to the front, for God’s sake bring sunglasses and keep them snug on your face for the first half hour. Sure, you’ll look like an ad for stereo equipment, but your eyes will thank you.
The plot to Independence Day doesn’t unfold so much as it does unravel, with building speed and greater flamboyance. In most films, the creators strive to sustain the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. Not so with Independence Day. Independence Day heaps one implausibility upon another, ignores plot hole upon plot hole, and dares the audience to walk out, knowing that you can’t and won’t. It’s the filmic equivalent of a jack-knifed tractor trailer. You stay riveted to the sight even though you know that virtually anything else you could be doing around then would be a more constructive use of your time.
John Miller was literally writhing in his seat as a space ship one quarter the size of the moon went into orbit around the earth without having any effect on earthly tides. When we learn that the aliens are attacking because they want our “resources,” John was muttering, “What’s wrong with Jupiter?” When, in an updating of War of the Worlds in which the aliens succumbed to earthly viruses, computer whiz Jeff Goldblum hits upon the preposterous notion of defeating the aliens with a computer virus, John sagged forward in his chair, covered his face with his hands, and audibly sobbed.
The absurdity of Independence Day‘s plot is already achieving legendary proportions. On the computer boards, Dean Kanipe of North Carolina listed “40 Things I Learned From Independence Day.” Among them:
12. Any bonehead with an RV can get to Area 51 by driving across the Salt Flat to the gate and flashing a captured alien to the guard.
16 Both F-18s and B-2s must close to within 10 km of a target 20 km across before engaging with both air-to-air missiles and aerial launched nuclear cruise missiles.
18. Any bonehead with rudimentary aviation experience can be taught to pilot an F-18 in 5 hours.
19. Any bonehead with F-18 flight experience can learn to pilot an Alien fighter in 5 minutes.
20. Aliens with anatomy that includes tentacles and clawed feet use flight yokes just like ours.
22. Aliens are stupid. When one of their fighters approaches the carrier, they don’t bother to communicate with the pilot.
23. Aliens are even more stupid. They pursue their targets into canyons walls and closing blast doors.
24. Aliens are unbelievably stupid. While unarmed and unarmored, they do things to pìšš øff people with hand guns.
25. Aliens are just too stupid for words to express. An alien air traffic controller can look at a fighter that has been human-modified for 20 minutes and is only 50 feet away and not
notice the welded-on missile rack until the missile is fired through his work station.
36. In 10 hours, one man with a Macintosh Laptop can code a virus in C++ that will take down a completely alien computer system.
37. Even though the Mac isn’t compatible with most other Earthly operating systems, it can interface with an alien computer.
38. Alien network security is nonexistent.
39. Rather than attacking a planet when they first encounter it (i.e., 1940s), aliens wait until the planet has developed just enough technology to possibly defend itself.
Let’s face it, folks. Independence Day makes Santa Claus Conquers the Martians look like a documentary.
And as Independence Day rakes in another million with every passing moment, one realizes that it simply doesn’t matter. Plot is irrelevant to Independence Day. Sense is irrelevant. Coherency is irrelevant. It’s like a film made by the Borg. You don’t go to see it. It comes to be seen by you.
Complaining about Independence Day‘s plot is incidental because the plot is incidental; a distant consideration compared to the publicity machine and the special effects, both of which were amazing. This film became such a pre-release part of the public consciousness that the makers of A Very Brady Sequel released a trailer a couple months ago that was a parody of Independence Day. Now I ask you: How many films have been recognizably spoofed two months before their release?
It’s like Disney World’s Space Mountain. One doesn’t come out of Space Mountain saying, “So there we were in these little rocket-like rolling things, getting a nice slow tour of what the future would be like. And then, all of a sudden, we’re hurtled into blackness at high speed and go twisting all over the place. Why? What’s the deal with that? It makes no sense at all!” Of course it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t have to. Like the Monty Python litany of rules, including (I think) Rule 5 being that there was no Rule 5, the internal logic of Independence Day is that there is no internal logic.
Make no mistake: The cast members seem like they’re having a good time. This film was being touted as the one that would catapult Bill Pullman (Casper, Spaceballs), cast here as the President of the United States, into leading man status. Unfortunately for him, the film is stolen by Will Smith as a cocky fighter pilot who longs to kick E.T.’s butt (a goal which, if the film continues at its current box office clip, will be accomplished in every sense), Goldblum in frazzled scientist mode, and Brent Spiner in a bit part as a wacko scientist who seems to have wandered in from a much more original movie. If they ever make X-Files: The Movie, they’ve got to sign Spiner up to reprise the character. (Along those lines, that’s what Independence Day needed. A cameo of Scully and Mulder, looking up at one of those giant ships with Mulder saying, “Okay, now do you believe me?”)
In short, even as you watch it, you know the film is ridiculous. You know the film makes no sense. You know it has plot holes that you could fly one of those giant ships through with room to spare. You know it’s derivative. Derivative? Will Smith’s being pursued by the alien fighters is almost a shot-for-shot riff on Han Solo keeping one step ahead of the tie-fighters in The Empire Strikes Back.
To say nothing of Independence Day‘s climactic strategy, involving a small squad of rebels who must gain entrance to the bad guy’s base and take out a force field generator so that a much larger squadron of rebels in fighter planes can then attack the newly unshielded giant killer space vessel and blow it up by striking at the vessel’s vulnerable point.
This is not to be confused with the climactic strategy of Return of the Jedi, in which a small squad of rebels must gain entrance to the bad guy’s base and take out a force field generator so that a much larger squadron of rebels in fighter planes can then attack the newly unshielded giant killer space vessel and blow it up by striking at the vessel’s vulnerable point.
Throughout the film there will be sequences so familiar to you that you’ll find yourself uttering dialogue from other films… and it’ll fit. Hëll, they even do it in Independence Day. At one point Jeff Goldblum’s escaping alien ship is being pursued by a gigantic wall of flame as the space station he’s in is in the process of exploding. Londo outracing the same thing in Return of the Jedi, of course, but–getting confused as to which film he’s in–Goldblum mutters, “Go faster, must go faster,” as he did when being pursued by a T-Rex in Jurassic Park.
Independence Day doesn’t seem as if it was written, but rather fabricated around a campfire by a group of people playing the old game wherein you tell a story to a certain point, and then the guy next to you is supposed to keep it going. And you continue around the circle until you have something resembling an end. Independence Day has that same ragged, fly-by-the-seat, making-this-up-as-we-go feel.
And yet, all of the foregoing boils down to the old gag of, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”
Did I have a good time seeing Independence Day? Did I enjoy myself?
Yes.
But I think it was less for the film itself than for the company in which I was in, and the circumstance in which I saw it. One gets swept up in the entire movie-going experience: The adrenaline rush of images forty foot high, the THX-1138 sound system, the friends you’re with, the energy that derives from the audience which gives the theater a life of its own.
I think what I liked was seeing the film, but not the film itself. This may seem like an odd distinction, but I can only point to Aliens, which I saw in the same theater under similar circumstances years ago. There was that same in-the-theater high, that same adrenaline surge that makes the moment entertaining. But the difference was that I loved that film, saw it many times after that, got it on laserdisk, etc. I didn’t notice huge holes while I was watching it, and I didn’t come out of the theater and say, “What a rush, but nothing about it made sense.”
Even the abbreviation for the title makes no sense. Why do they call it “ID4?” A clumsy attempt to combine Independence Day and the 4th of July? Or a gambit to sound like T2?
Oh well. There’s already talk of a sequel. Maybe it’ll be set in the year 2040 (presuming it takes the aliens another few decades to show up for a return match) and it’ll be called War Day. Then they can abbreviate it as WD40.
That’s oil, folks.
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705… at least, until the aliens show up.)
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What a dumb but fun movie.
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You know, all they had to say was that our computer technology was based on what we had gleaned from the Area 51 crashed ship and it would have made some tiny modicum of sense that we could communicate with their network. As it was, people actually groaned at the theater I was at when Jeff sent them a virus disguised as a naked Brittany Spears screensaver.
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If there is a sequel why wouldn’t the aliens just nuke the Earth from space? It’s the only way to be sure.
Oh, you can’t nuke Earth from orbit. That leaves the food supply a little TOO well done.
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Unless that’s the alien version of a microwave…?
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I never had the issues with this film that many seemed to have. The computer virus thing least of all.
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The government had been screwing with that ship for decades. While they comment that the ship had only been fully powered up in just the recent days, they comment that they have had access to some of its systems well before that.
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Simple answer – They had worked out an interface to connect our computers and theirs long ago and the computer geeks in Area 51 knew the system well enough that they could create a program to be delivered via the interface they had already created pre-invasion.
Because in nearly fifty years aliens haven’t thought of changing their passwords or operating systems, in spite of the fact one of their ships was lost here and the natives just might have picked up a trick or two? Not very believable. Then again, look at how often Luthor just walks into the Fortress of Solitude and grabs Kryptonian secrets. Apparently this interstellar-capable race hasn’t heard of biometrics …
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“Because in nearly fifty years aliens haven’t thought of changing their passwords or operating systems, in spite of the fact one of their ships was lost here and the natives just might have picked up a trick or two? Not very believable.”
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Depends. If you were told that a backwater tribe with no modern tech and deep in the densest heart of the rain forest had found your laptop from where you lost it on a vacation, would you think that they would be able to crack your passwords? They could simply have been super-villain level arrogant and decided that we backwater Earthers could never figure out such advanced tech and systems.
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Besides, we’re not talking about just using passwords here. We’re talking about full on hacking. And, correct me if I’m wrong because it’s been a while, didn’t the smaller ships themselves auto-link to the system when docked? I vaguely remember that being a part of how the thing was supposed to work.
“Apparently this interstellar-capable race hasn’t heard of biometrics …”
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Well, by the 23rd century, Starfleet has apparently forgotten about surge suppressors (so any hit on power systems makes things blow up on the bridge), and a century later lost the secret of antiviral software, and had to work out the “reboot from protected backup” routine from first principles when that Ikonian virus infected their computer. Maybe we shouldn’t feel so superior to the Locusts – all they did was forget to change their passwords for fifty years, then build a ship that apparently was made of uranium (causing the entire ship, a quarter the size of the Moon, to be engulfed in a nuclear fireball after being hit by one AMRAAM warehead…).
I think there was a line in the movie similar to : “they are using our own satellites against us”. This can mean the aliens adapted their technology to ours first to hack us. They must have left a back door open or something and Jeff got in with his laptop… Or something like that.
Macs don’t interface with Windows systems worth a darn, but can cut through an alien computer’s defenses like a hot metaphor through butter.
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I always figured they were trying to tell us something about Steve Wozniak…
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(Incidentally, amusing typo in there, PAD. Londo outracing the same thing in Return of the Jedi, of course, but–getting confused as to which film he’s in–Goldblum mutters, “Go faster, must go faster,”…
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You meant Lando, of course – unless you were getting confused about which SF it was in…) 🙂
Huh. And yet there still hasn’t been a sequel. Odd, considering how well it did at the box office… I can only assume some behind-the-scenes development fights, or maybe something over the rights?
And didn’t the X-Files movie come out like a year or two after this?
It did – and it made more sense.
Mind you, so did Mars Attacks! which came out at about the same time – plus it was a lot more fun to watch…
I enjoyed ID4 for what it was, but yeah, Mars Attacks! was just plain better. 🙂
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“And didn’t the X-Files movie come out like a year or two after this?”
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Yup. And it included a critique of ID4 in it in the form of a character pìššìņg on a poster for ID4.
Technically pìššìņg in front of the poster and not on the poster. This was the first thing on my mind when I read the X-Files reference on the column.
Seeing that movie still hasn’t made it onto my to-do list. Would it be okay if I just watched “Monsters vs. Aliens” again?
You mean it hasn’t made it onto your to-do list…yet.
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Am I just remembering the BID pieces wrong, or was there a follow up to this one right after it was originally printed? I remember reading the “40 Things I Learned From Independence Day” list, but I could swear there were more things listed in the original. I vaguely remember a silly one about Goldblum going from drunk to sober in five minutes and one really silly one taking the film to task as being derivative because it cast Brent Spiner in it.
“When we learn that the aliens are attacking because they want our “resources,” John was muttering, “What’s wrong with Jupiter?””
Well, I thought the same thing, until I watched a documentary on National Geographic which dealt with what would happen in the case of a real alien invasion (and we wouldn’t fare very well). And they borught up a point I hadn’t considered: Earth has resources that can’t be found elsewhere in the solar system. Biological resources. As a source of food, our planet is at the top, right before… Well, there’s no competion, is there?
That also explains why the aliens don’t nuke us into orbit. Why spoil the food? And also why they make all those tests. Curiously, there has ever been only a few movies and TV series that dealt with that angle: “To Serve Man” and V (the original) come to mind, as well as “Planet of the Dead”. All the others think of resources as only mineral resources.
Food supply? Coming from Mars is one thing, but from another star system? Gives a whole new meaning to ‘eating out’.
“Biological resources. As a source of food, our planet is at the top, right before… Well, there’s no competion, is there?
That also explains why the aliens don’t nuke us into orbit. Why spoil the food? And also why they make all those tests.”
Yeah, but what are the odds that humans would actually be edible to an alien species? Hëll, there are literally thousands of “biological resources” on Earth that humans cannot eat due to toxicity. We’re also limited by our digestive systems and we’re extremely vulnerable to parasites.
As for the tests, I don’t see the connection. Humans have discovered what can and can’t be eaten largely through trial and error (IOW, take a bite, swallow and if you don’t die or get sick, it’s probably safe to eat; if you do die or get sick, then it probably wasn’t safe). Unless you want to presuppose that people who’ve disappeared and their bodies have never been found were taken by aliens and eaten, most abductees’ experiences don’t seem to suggest being tested for edibility (anal probes can determine a lot, but somehow I don’t see how they would let aliens know if the test subject would be better eaten raw, roasted or deep-fried and served with french fries and cole slaw).
No, no, not eaten, they had their brains harvested as components in the computers running their giant warmecs. Didn’t you read Laumer’s A PLAGUE OF DEMONS?
Not a movie I could even consider watching for years after 9/11. Suddenly, the idea of landmarks being blown up wasn’t fun. At the same time, my boss said she wanted to see this film because it would a certain catharsis, with the good guys then getting to punch the bad guys in the face at the end.
PAD left out my favorite “thing I learned from Independence Day”:
“Dogs are fireproof.”
The lady I was seeing at the time ID hit the theater made the mistake of asking me what I thought of the film. I made the mistake of telling her, point by point, where the film fell apart.
Her reply: “Can’t you ever just LIKE something?!” Well, no….I have this feature in my brain called ‘critical thought’. Ah, well, she’s gone, and ID remains one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen.
…”dogs are fireproof.” Heh.
Complaining about how ID4 makes little sense is like hiring a høøkër and complaining that she is a lousy conversationalist.
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Independence Day was fun for what it was, and it made cinema history for its impressive special effects. I wouldn’t want every movie to be like it, of course. Actually, I don’t want ANY OTHER movie to be like it. I’ve watched “2012” and was bored and annoyed.
It’s one of those “Don’t think about it and you’ll enjoy yourself” movies, especially how they deliberately try to push emotional buttons at JUST the right point, which I do have to give them credit for. When Pullman delivers his “Would be hokey in ANY other circumstance” Independence Day speech, I was so swept up with the crowd at that point that that speech would have sent me charging bare-handed to gnaw on the spaceship with my own teeth.
At 16, I didn’t have a problem with most of the movie… EXCEPT the part where Pullman flies the fighter jet in the final mission. Even as a teenager, I knew it was moronic for the alleged President of The United States to do that, and it didn’t make him a hero, it made him and everyone around him, morons. That was what shattered my suspension of disbelief and made me come out of the theater thinking “What a dumb movie.”
If they can’t get Will Smith for the sequel, they shouldn’t bother. His scenes are the only ones that hold up on second viewing (“Welcome to Earth!”)
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Huh. That piece of the plot actually made sense to me. They established that he was a decorated war vet and a military pilot early in the film. By the time they had gotten to the point where he was hopping into a cockpit, they were scraping the bottom of the barrel for pilots, giving crash courses to anyone with prior flight experience and setting up for the last stand that might have been the difference between humanity living on in continued existence VS getting blown to hëll by the aliens.
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Plot-wise, it made kinda sense. It certainly made as much sense as always seeing the command staff of a Starfleet vessel beaming into every dangerous scenario possible week in and week out.
My favorite moment from ID4 is just before Goldblum and Smith go to take out the alien defenses. Goldblum’s Dad (played by Judd Hersh) had spent most of the movie bemoaning the fact that his son was wasting his life, but just before Goldblum leaves Hersh says “I’m proud of you.”
All it took to impress him was for his son to be the savior of the human race.
Minor nitpick, but if the actor you’re referring to is the same man who starred in “Taxi” and “Dear John,” the man’s surname is Hirsch.
Sorry. I was too lazy to google it.
For a cranky Jewish father? That sounds about right.
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PAD
Arthur C. Clarke’s “3001,” published in 1997, also involves a computer virus saving the day. I was depressed by that book’s author’s note, in which Clarke says he’d never seen “Independence Day,” mocks the film for the cliches that others had told him about, and then says this: “I cannot decide whether to congratulate the scriptwriters on their one stroke of originality — or to accuse them of the trans-temporal crime of precognitive plagiarism.”
And I’m thinking, “You BOTH stole ‘Virus defeats the aliens’ from H.G. Wells. Deal with it.”
Never have seen the film. Nice to know I can resist “yet” films. Lesson to Hollywood: you cannot seduce the always broke–our lack of cash will always defeat you!
Me, I love the part where after bringing down that one captured alien fighter’s forcefield at Area 51, one of the good guys, I think Robert Loggia’s general character, wonders who the hëll among them could possibly fly an extraterrestrial spacecraft, and Will Smith comes by and says that he’s been in combat with them, and is well aware of their capabilities.
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Apparently being aware of something’s capabilities is the same thing as being able to utilize. This is roughly equivalent to me saying that I should be able to drive one of Mario Andertti’s Formula One race cars simply because I’ve been in the spectator stands at the Indy 500 and witnessed a fifty car pileup.
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Ya gotta love Devlin and Emmerich. Either they’re dumb as bricks, or just figure that we are.
“This is roughly equivalent to me saying that I should be able to drive one of Mario Andertti’s Formula One race cars simply because I’ve been in the spectator stands at the Indy 500 and witnessed a fifty car pileup.”
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No, it’s not. It’s equivalent to you saying you should be able to drive one of Mario Andretti’s Formula One race cars because you can drive a regular car. It doesn’t mean you can win a race with one, but you’d sure be able to drive it.
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Or, more accurately, it’s equivalent to Mario Andretti saying he should be able to drive Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder because he’s raced against one and because he’s one of the best drivers in the world.
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The Smith character was an expert pilot who was more familiar with the alien crafts than anyone. Of course he’d be the one to try to fly it. He didn’t say he knew how to fly it, he said he was aware of its capabilities and was the person best qualified to learn to fly it. How is this different than Starbuck learning to fly a Cylon ship in BSG?
Are you really offering Starbuck’s piloting of a Cylon fighter as an example of plausibility??
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Smith’s character was a fighter pilot. He was trained in flying multi-engine jet fighters. This would not qualify him as a pilot of single-engine propeller craft, multi-engine commercial jets, or hang-gliders. Heck, it’s one of the qualifications to be allowed to learn to pilot space shuttles! And those are all human-designed craft, with control layouts humans are familiar with, designed for human hands and feet. The alien craft is designed to be flown by something that spends all of its flight time in some sort of biomechanical armored suit, and has feet best adapted to perching (seriously, how was it able to walk in a 1-gravity field?), as well as several tentacles for manipulation. The good captain had never even seen the cockpit; his much-vaunted “experience” consisted primarily of trying to run away, and succeeding only because his opponent was an idiot. How was he able to master the flight controls, as well as fly outside an atmosphere, just because he saw one fly? That would be akin to my claiming to be a fully-qualified 747 pilot because I used to watch them fly in and out of the local airport, back before paranoid gate security.
You guys are both missing my point. We’re actually talking about two different issues here: the plausibility of Will Smith learning to fly an alien spacecraft, and the plausibility of Will Smith SAYING he could fly it. Both Luigi’s original post and my own were both about the latter. All I’m saying is that, of course he’s going to volunteer to fly it. And of anyone on Earth, of course he’d be the one they would pick to fly it. Whether or not he can is another matter.
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But his flying ability is not irrelevant. If you needed someone to play the guitar, and your only choices were a concert pianist who once saw someone play the guitar, and a planet full of people who have never played any kind of instrument, who are you going to pick?
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As for the plausibility of him learning to fly it, I’m not even sure I have an issue with this. Alien fighters don’t actually exist, so it’s pointless and silly to surmise how long it would take to learn to fly one. You might as well complain that there’s no way Hermione Granger could learn magic so quickly.
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I brought up BSG because A. it’s a sci-fi show that people talk about in a way they DON’T talk about ID, and B. they actually made learning to fly an alien spacecraft seem plausible (the controls of any craft amount to simply yaw, pitch, and roll, so it’s just a matter of figuring out which control does what).
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Well, that and I believe he made a comment to Goldblum’s character that was a little less filled with bravado about being less sure of being able to fly it well after all the brass went away.
Robert Fuller: The Smith character was an expert pilot who was more familiar with the alien crafts than anyone. Of course he’d be the one to try to fly it.
Luigi Novi: Um, no, that’s a non sequitur. Being a pilot is only relevant with the vehicles whose controls you’ve been trained with. The only way being an expert pilot of Earth vehicles would be relevant would be if both Earth fighter jets had the same controls as the alien fighters, which is silly.
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Robert Fuller: He didn’t say he knew how to fly it, he said he was aware of its capabilities and was the person best qualified to learn to fly it.
Luigi Novi: Again, non sequitur. Being aware of its capabilities has nothing to do with utilizing those capabilities. Every person in audience who watched the movie was “aware of its capabilities”. Seeing what a vehicle can do as a spectator, or even as a target of its weapons, has jack-all to do with being at all qualified to pilot it, or even learn how to.
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And he didn’t say anything about learning how to fly it. He said he saw what they could do, and was well aware of their capabilities. That’s it. In any event, they had what, three days to prepare for the mission? The idea that anyone could learn how to fly a fighter from another planet in three days is sheer stupidity.
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Had he said, “Excuse me, sir, but I’m the best pilot in the Air Force, and if I have enough time, I can learn how to fly that thing”, that would’ve been different. Had they given him more than three days, that would’ve been better. And had they included a scene in which that captured alien had mindlinked with Will Smith instead of (or in addition to) Brent Spiner, and had him indicate that there was a knowledge transfer, that would’ve solved the problem entirely, at least from a suspension-of-disbelief viewpoint.
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But that’s not what they said or did.
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Robert Fuller: How is this different than Starbuck learning to fly a Cylon ship in BSG?
Luigi Novi: Who said it was? I’ve never seen BSG, so the point is irrelevant to what I’m saying. But if the same criteria exist in that situation, then the same fallacy applies there too. A comparison I am more qualified to make would be when crewmen of the Voyager are instantly able to pilot vessels from the Delta Quadrant on Star Trek: Voyager.
Robert Fuller: But his flying ability is not irrelevant. If you needed someone to play the guitar, and your only choices were a concert pianist who once saw someone play the guitar, and a planet full of people who have never played any kind of instrument, who are you going to pick?
Luigi Novi: It wouldn’t matter. They’d both be equally as likely to be able to pull it off. Your argument seems predicated on the idea that “Well, a piano is a musical instrument, and so is a guitar, so therefore, the one would lend itself to the other”, which is ridiculous. “Musical instrument” is just a word. The fact that both objects fall under the category denoted by that word does not have anything to do with the various criteria by which an individual would be able to learn each one. One could argue that a super-fast typist or expert needlepoint maker would be just as likely as the piano player to learn to play a guitar, since all three engage in activities requiring dexterity with their fingers.
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Robert Fuller: As for the plausibility of him learning to fly it, I’m not even sure I have an issue with this. Alien fighters don’t actually exist, so it’s pointless and silly to surmise how long it would take to learn to fly one. You might as well complain that there’s no way Hermione Granger could learn magic so quickly.
Luigi Novi: Wrong. Even fictional premises within sci-fi/fantasy are constructed on terms that have to be internally consistent, and yes, they are also subject to the logic of some aspects of external reality, at least in some cases. The fact that a given premise lies within a work of genre fiction does not mean that an audience cannot make assessments about its plausibility, or the quality of its writing.
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To employ one example, when the Enterprise is thrown 4 billion kilometers through space in an episode of NextGen, and are able to see a supernova taking place at their previous location just 1 minute later, despite the fact that it would take 3-4 hours for the light from that nova to do so, that is not mitigated by the fact that it’s a genre show, or by the fact that “Starships don’t actually exist”. This is because the relevant logic here pertains to the speed of light, which isn’t likely to change by the 24th century, and is not predicated on the reality or fiction of starships.
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To use an example involving Hermione, it is ridiculous to think, given the events of Prisoner of Azkaban, that the Ministry of Magic would allow a 13-year-old to use a time travel device, of all things, just so that she could take some extra classes. The fact that witches and time time travel devices “don’t actually exist” does zilch to mitigate this. This is because the relevant logic here pertains to the danger of time travel, the inability of humans to wield such a dangerous power, the even greater lack of responsibility of a teenager to be given such a device, and the relatively frivolous purpose of extra school work, none of which is predicated on the reality or fiction of magic or time travel.
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The existence of alien fighters in the film, therefore, is irrelevant.
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This is because we can surmise that the controls for spacecraft designed by and for a race of spacefaring extraterrestrials light years ahead of us technologically, whose anatomy doesn’t even conform to that of humans, would be radically different from anything we have on Earth. To think a human fighter pilot would able to instantly learn how to fly such a craft, just because he “saw” them in action, and was “aware of their capabilities”, is just plain dumb, and an example of crappy writing.
“It wouldn’t matter. They’d both be equally as likely to be able to pull it off. Your argument seems predicated on the idea that “Well, a piano is a musical instrument, and so is a guitar, so therefore, the one would lend itself to the other”, which is ridiculous. “Musical instrument” is just a word. The fact that both objects fall under the category denoted by that word does not have anything to do with the various criteria by which an individual would be able to learn each one. One could argue that a super-fast typist or expert needlepoint maker would be just as likely as the piano player to learn to play a guitar, since all three engage in activities requiring dexterity with their fingers.”
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Wrong. There are skills and knowledge that a pianist possesses that would make him more qualified to learn the guitar than someone with no musical training. There’s music theory, and the ability to read music, which is universal from one instrument to another. A guitar chord really isn’t all that different from a piano chord. He would have a much more highly developed sense of tone and rhythm than someone not versed in music. Things are related, you know. Nothing exists in a vacuum. A trombonist can easily pick up the trumpet, even though the the mechanics are different. Likewise, a fighter jet pilot would be more likely to be able to learn how to fly an alien spaceship than someone with no flight training. Just like a fighter jet pilot makes a better astronaut than a mailman does. I don’t understand why I have to keep explaining this to you.
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“To think a human fighter pilot would able to instantly learn how to fly such a craft, just because he “saw” them in action, and was “aware of their capabilities”, is just plain dumb, and an example of crappy writing.”
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How’d we get from three days to “instantly”?
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If you sent a Toyota Prius back in time to the Roman Empire, and told them they’d better figure out to operate it or else you’d destroy their entire civilization, do you really think it would take them more than three days to learn how to drive around the block with it?
I’m starting to think Robert was one of the writers of ID…
X-Files had it right 🙂
Robert Fuller: There are skills and knowledge that a pianist possesses that would make him more qualified to learn the guitar than someone with no musical training. There’s music theory, and the ability to read music, which is universal from one instrument to another. A guitar chord really isn’t all that different from a piano chord.
Luigi Novi: Playing an instrument is not just about reading music or knowing chords. Each one has its own mechanics to manipulate, and to argue that skill manipulating one necessarily translates into skill manipulating another is an assumption.
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Robert Fuller: How’d we get from three days to “instantly”?
Luigi Novi: Via the use of hyperbole, as is normally found when speaking in shorthand. 🙂
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Robert Fuller: If you sent a Toyota Prius back in time to the Roman Empire, and told them they’d better figure out to operate it or else you’d destroy their entire civilization, do you really think it would take them more than three days to learn how to drive around the block with it?
Luigi Novi: I have no idea how long such a process would take, and neither do you.
“Playing an instrument is not just about reading music or knowing chords. Each one has its own mechanics to manipulate, and to argue that skill manipulating one necessarily translates into skill manipulating another is an assumption.”
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That’s not what I’m arguing. I’m arguing that knowing how to play one instrument makes you better qualified to learn the other one than someone who doesn’t any instruments. And now I’m done arguing, because I’m just repeating myself and this is pointless.
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“I have no idea how long such a process would take, and neither do you.”
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Just like you have no idea how long it would take to learn how to fly an alien spacecraft. Thank you for making my point for me. Boom, lawyered.
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Luigi, you’re arguing and nitpicking at this point just for the sake of arguing and nitpicking. You don’t like the film. We all get that by now. However, your not liking it and not watching it more than one or two times years ago does tend to make some of your arguments look a little ill-informed and poorly thought out as you’re mischaracterizing some events in the film a bit to argue against them and cite them as examples of “just plain dumb, and an example of crappy writing.“
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It didn’t really have many more glaring moments of things that were “just plain dumb, and an example of crappy writing” in it than most of the pop culture sci-fi hits of its time. You just don’t like it, so rather than just say that you’ll rip it to shreds in ways you wouldn’t do to thins you liked.
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I know for a fact that you’re a Trek fan and likely a bigger one than me. There’s not a single season of any of the Trek shows nor a film in the series (outside of the tail end of Voyager, most of Enterprise and Nemesis because I just gave up watching at that point and don’t remember them well enough to discuss them) that I can’t find numerous plot hole problems and massive examples of things that were just dumb and examples of crappy writing in. Hëll, I flat out love Doctor Who, very likely much more than you do, and I’ll freely admit to the fact that the history of Who involves a small ton of stuff that doesn’t stand up to logical scrutiny and plot points that were written into stories for convenience’s sake rather than truly smart storytelling.
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Bladestar mentioned X-Files. I loved X-Files until the last couple of seasons. There really aren’t too many episodes I can’t sit down and destroy large aspects of when it comes to the writing or poorly thought out arcs that ran in later seasons.
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Hëll, most of the people here that would likely slag on ID4 would hold up the 1989 Batman film as a great film. I loved it the one time that I saw it in the theater. Giant roller coaster of a film and an amazing visual experience in the theater. I bought the VHS tape the day it came out. I’ve watched the tape two and a half times. That tape is still in the same spot that I stopped watching it at over a decade ago. That film was 99% hype and visuals. Once the hype wears off and the visuals lose their newness, that film is a lot of crap with a few good moments here and there. That film is loaded with stuff that qualify it as “just plain dumb” and it has a lot you can point to as examples of “crappy writing.”
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Hëll, if anything, you could say that Tim Burton failed as a filmmaker more than the ID4 guys and that Batman was a failure as a film more so than ID4 was. Burton talked a big game about all the things that his Batman was going to be and be about in the subtext, execution, etc. What he ultimately gave us was a hallow film with cardboard characters and more than a few cliches that had some nice visuals going for it and a couple of kickass performances by the two lead actors in the film. Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich said upfront that they wanted to deliver a summer popcorn film that was fun and a throwback to the kind of “gee wow” sci-fi/alien invasion stories, serials and films that they loved growing up and that would have some nice nods to some of the classics that they loved. It was meant to be a fun roller coaster ride of a movie with heavy doses of that “gee wow” vibe and lots of fun daring-do moments in it. They succeeded in everything they said that they wanted to do.
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I can’t watch Burton’s Batman these days. It it bores me to tears at this point and really only has enough visual kick to still interest me even a little in specific scenes in about five minutes of the entire film. ID4 I can still put on and just enjoy for what it is, for what the guys who made it said it was supposed to be, and have fun with it. And it holds up as an entertaining film a hëll of a lot better than Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever and Batman and Robin do combined.