A Rant Related to Independence Day, The Film.

For the last few years I have noticed an increasingly attack towards the film Independence Day, specifically the way the aliens are beaten with a computer virus.   The most recent comment that set me off is this one where some critic labeled the aliens as lame, by the way to take a page from Glenn's "book" imagine the commenter wearing a tweed jacket and with a pipe in their mouth, "Large-scale alien invasions are often thwarted by the smallest things. In "War of the Worlds," it was germs. In "Signs," it was water. But lamest of all were the invaders in "ID4," who were beaten by spyware. Don't aliens know not to open email attachments from an unfamiliar senders? If you're going to take over a planet, make sure your Norton Anti-Virus is up to date." Please note that my response is written in what is called "in universe," where I will be treating the events as real for the sake of argument.

If this critic had bothered to do some critical thinking some of the answers to his own question are found in the film, first is the discovery, by the character played by Jeff Goldblum, of the aliens using our own satellites to coordinate their attack I will elaborate on that in a moment, second is the revelation that there was an alien craft in the possession of the government, not just any alien craft but the same kind as that of the invaders. Further it is reveled that the ships systems just started activating when the aliens entered in to our Solar System, suggesting that it was more then power that the ship was lacking but software.

Follow my logic here for a moment, first with the question, that wasn't answered in the film, of "why did the ship crash in the first place?" if you consider the way the aliens coordinated their attack and the fact that the crashed ship didn't work until the aliens were within a specific range it is feasible to argue that instead of the issue being one of power but one of software. The idea of sending that kind of information over the airwaves at such long distances might seem impossible at the moment but two hundred years ago the idea of flying with planes as we know it to day was impossible. This fits in with the filtering down effect the virus has in the film, disabling all alien ships shields.

Also to answer those critics, we can't keep sixteen year-olds from hacking into the Pentagon and other government systems, so how impossible is it for you to see the feasibility of that part of the plot. And hackers with their viruses, worms, and trojans keep evolving their tactics, that was why Goldblum's character went up, so that he could change the way it would enter the system if necessary. Lastly on the point of computer viruses and other malware counter measures are only good if they know how to counter it. Lastly one could muck up a system by simply inserting inert code that would stop the targeted program from running properly, basically crashing the program.

Another common complaint made by the critics is the heavily American point of view, this one is simpler to answer if we did have an alien invasion they are going to target the super powers and major nations first, as portrayed in the film, also if anyone would have a chance of fighting back against the invasion it would be the super powers with their technological advantage. And to bring in another science fiction series for an example the Doctor Who series with the government agency Torchwood, where they would take in alien technology examine it and reverse engineer it for their nations usage, this would only be possible for nations with the status of super power or a major nation.

Lastly the film Independence Day which is popular with most people, took $75 million to make and grossed $817 million, making ten times what it cost to make. This seems to follow an interesting pattern films that the critics sometimes pan ends up being successful with the common public such as the Street Fighter film from 1994.

Solomon.