Watched once, it's a pretty good action flick, and there is a lot to like. How about the Harry Connick, Jr. cameo? A lot of good fun.

But you watch it a second time, and it all begins to fall apart. By the fourth or fifth viewing, it becomes a vehicle for ceaseless mockery. I watch it when it comes on just so I can ridicule it.

My favorite part is where Randy Quaid crashes into the alien ship and everyone in the control room cheers -- and then they see his kid there, and they kind of feel bad (for a second or two). I laugh whenever I see it, and insert my own heartless dialogue that the kid has to hear -- each more demeaning to his dad's memory than the last. "I can't believe that f'ing drunk even got the plane off the ground!" or "Score one for loserboy -- and one for the gene pool, baby!"

I also mock Judd Hirsch's character because he is such an outrageous stereotype of the "old Jewish dad" that I'm surprised the B'nai Brith didn't slap an injunction on the film. Seriously -- he is so over the top in the role that it is no stretch to imagine that if he were playing Will Smith's dad, he'd be doing it in blackface. One of the worst performances ever.

And the Kum-ba-ya ending sequence where we see all the crashed alien spaceships. I (literally) always stand up and cheer loudly. My wife can't stand to be in the same room with me because I yell to her "Honey! The Aussies got one! Yay, Aussies!" and "Honey, the Egyptians got one! Yay, Egyptians!" and "Look! Pygmies! They got one with an f'ing blowgun! Brave, brave pygmies!"

I have a lot of fun with it.

The whole concept that they could write a computer virus that 1) would work on an alien computer and 2) could be uploaded through a Mac powerbook (no matter how awesome they are) drives me so batshit crazy that I can't stand the movie. It just sits there like an unlanced boil ruining everything.

Thinking that a Mac user could write a virus kills me, I giggle like a school girl every time I see the apple. They were doing a fictional masterpiece, may as well go all the way and take it out of the realm of reality.

That part I had no problem with.

:-)

The whole infiltration scene left me annoyed. Not just the Mac-created virus, but the fact thast this massively powerful alien fleet had such crappy security and IFF measures. Plus, you forgot to mention among the stolen ideas the Huginormongous killerdeath supserspaceship with the one tiny but fatal flaw.

And besides, if you're an alien race with such advanced technology that you can travel THIS FAR, what resources could Earth possibly have that you couldn't fabrticate yourself out of raw matter?

Going back to the whole War of the Worlds thing, why didn't they just sneeze on the aliens to take them out?

I used to love the movie until 9/11. That day changed my perspective on that craptastic movie just a wee bit and I don't view it with the same affection that I once held. Sad.

I myself like the portrayal of global politics, too, where they're scouring up troops -- they've got the Chinese guy in the Mao suit, the Russian in the striped Russian navy get up (smoking, of course), the Arab and Israeli pilots glaring at each other (just a little homoerotically), the British guy in the desert (why is he in the f'ing desert, anyway?) -- and they all fall behind America! Yay Morse Code! Yay America! Yay Counteroffensive!

In real life they'd BLAME us for the damn aliens. Damn Americans with Area 51 provoked it! The aliens are RIGHT to eat the Americans! And so forth . . .

It's all George Bush's fault. It's a plot by Karl Rove and Haliburton to give that company a no-bid contract to rebuild the world.

All the plot holes & what not are why I prefer Mars Attacks. At least that movie is an homage to 1950s alien attack movies.

Yeah and how cool were heads exploding to Tom Jones music? Mars Attacks was WAY better.

I like the part where where a nerd on the graveyeard shift at SETI heard The Signal while working on his putting as R.E.M. blared "It's the End of the World as We Know It." Steve-O, from where was that ripped off?

THe Mars Attacks aliens are the best movie aliens of all time. Those things would've had Picard hogtied in the trunk with a MARS BITCH brand on his ass and dressed in Gingham.

The song choice was different, but that was riffed entirely from The Falcon and the Snowman scene down in the jar (or whatever they called the big room) and they got the warning they were going to be inspected in 2 minutes.

Steve,
am I to understand that you did not care for Independence Day?

(wording ripped-off from a Cheers episode in honor of all the ripping off ID did).

I tend to side with Steve-O in this one. If Emmerich had been chop-shopping his way through cinema history with any wit or insight, he couldn't have produced a thuddingly awful chunk of coprolite like Godzilla. Oddly enough, one of the few things I liked about the film were the aliens, who were horrible just because they really liked to be horrible. Now that's an alien motivation. Still, Steve's right again: the Mars Attacks! aliens were just as awful, and much zestier.

BTW, I assume everyone has seen the list of utterly stupid Things to be Learned from Independence Day. Very funny, although the list barely scratches the surface.

I liked the Aliens in "Spaced Invaders" best of all.

"We must link up with the invasion force!"

And, of course, the D.O.D. -- the donut of destruction.

Folks,
I enjoyed the flick, although working in the IT field for a number of years, I can say (a) it takes a LOT of work to make two programs talk to each other, regardless of how gosh darn smart the programmer. Also, (b) it seamed strange that the alien ship Will Smith flew to the "mother ship" improved with an external transponder and an external NUKE woundn't attact attention. Such as "you've been gone for sixty years, where the hell have you been? And what did you do to the car"?

So much love for The Greatest B-Movie Ever Made, though a lot of it is disguised as anger. Me, I always wonder why people fleeing Armageddon sit in traffic with 4 empty inbound lanes in view. Utron's list is good, but the biggest atrocity was the failure to appreciate the dangers of quarter-moon sized objects.