I always preferred the H.G. Wells version, so I’d film that, in all it’s 19th Century Imperial/Victorian Glory. 
Ohh - NO you did NOT shoot that green shit at me!
I like it for Adam Baldwin (who is not one of the Baldwin Brothers), who has a very small role but one that stood out for me even then. (He plays Major Mitchell, probably most notable for shooting the soda can off the spaceship, and for shooting at the alien who gets loose.) I’ve noticed him in other small roles here and there, but didn’t realize until the first time I rented the Firefly DVDs (having not seen it broadcast) that he was playing Jayne.
Adam Baldwin was my favorite random guy in ID4 too. He just seemed so… I dunno, he seemed to command any room he was standing in, the character had presence. And the part where he capped the alien in the head was freaking awesome. 
He also had a small role in the Season 7 finale of Stargate SG1, playing the commander of SG13, who while exploring an uninhabited planet, was talking about the hardships of being a father.
“Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my family! I also love having a job that sends me hundreds of light years away from them!”
Well, you’ll recall that the ship really wasn’t all that threatened by the missiles, they were just piling on with what they had, presumably hoping to hit something important. I would have concentrated on the hanger bay, myself.
Also, the nuke very easily could have taken out other things that would have caused a chain reaction: Ammunition, fuel, stockpiles of Plotonium (yes, spelled “Plot”) and Explodium, etc., or that could have been a load-bearing alien who the nuke landed next to, in Final Fantasy tradition.
The July 4th rhetoric wasn’t really relevant against the enemy, but towards the audience, in this case, American military personel backed up into a corner in a fight against an enemy that had won every battle up to that point, who now saw a chance to fight back.
Well, as College Station resident, I can say that since the city in question was Houston, if one nuke did nothing to improve the city, 10 wouldn’t help much either (I jest, of course)
Well, the humans had varying degrees of training and experience in air combat, and the aliens presumably had almost no experience fighting against an enemy that could actually hurt them. Plus, the fighter jets were far more heavily armed, with weaponry far better suited to air-to-air combat. Witness, slow moving “Green Shit™” vs. supersonic air-to-air heat-seeking and radar-guided missiles and rapid-firing 20mm Vulcan cannons. Also, the alien Attackers did not seem to be significantly more maneuverable or faster than the fighter planes they were fighting against.
Their entire strategy was based around being Achilles, while not taking into account that their enemy might aim for their heel.
It might be possible that the big bombers were based too far away to be able to take part in the attack, given the small window of oppurtunity, the difficulty in coordinating an attack at that distance with that kind of timing, and the relative obviousness of a wing of heavy bombers winging towards the city ships, especially given the orbital observation capability the aliens presumably had. Also possibel that B-52s were considered to be less sexy than F/A-18s. I’m going with the assumption that while we only saw the battle against the Alien DirecTV Dish that was attacking Area 51, the heavy bombers might have been wailing on other alien ships elsewhere, depending on the geography of the situation.
There was a line somewhere in the movie about somethign like 85% of the US Military having been destroyed in the first couple days of fighting. I imagine that the Navy would have had a relatively difficult time concealing it’s assets (big metal ships floating in the water) from an enemy with the ability to just look down at them from space (compared to small fighter jets and ground vehicles that the other three branches would deal with).
Also, Area 51, being located in Nevada (or just outside of L.A., I’m not sure after having watched this movie :)) would be a bit far inland for US Navy ships to get in on the action much, so again we will assume they are fighting elsewhere, alongside all of those bombers…
Anyhow, I loved the movie, I still like it a lot. It’s basically a modern, high-budget sci-fi B-Movie that has an all-star cast. Even Will Smith said the movie was ripping off every movie ever made (examples he gave, IIRC, were Star Wars and War of the Worlds), and that half the fun was trying to find the zipper in the alien costume.
That said, I much prefer it’s precursor, StarGate, where the US Military has to go FIND the aliens to get in trouble, rather than have them amble on over to us. Does it make any sense at all that the US Military travels halfway accross the galaxy to fight the Egyptian gods? Not really, but it sure does make for a great movie!
I’d suggest you read a greater variety of comicbooks. While this statement might be true for superhero comics there are many other genres outside of that one. FYI, Road to Perdition, Ghost World, and From Hell are all movies based on comics that wouldn’t fit your criteria for “comic book movies”.
This ends our scheduled hijack.
One of my peeves with movies like this is that they only use tech the obvious to us way, not the way a culture that developed it would. To wit…shielded fighters. Why do they dogfight our planes to begin with? If you have a shield, you have an unbreakable ship. Strap the pilot in solid and ram anything that’s in the air. Slow-moving Green Shit™ shouldn’t have been a factor.
I just have to put ID4 somewhere in the same league as Tremors.
Tremors. Now that is a seriously dumb movie. And ulike ID4, even the special effects, such as they are, are totally cheezy. But, I mean, come on. It’s got Reba McEntire blasting a giant worm with an elephant gun. It’s got Kevin Bacon as a redneck, and Michael Gross as a crazed survivalist. It’s got man-eating “sandworms” that look like giant pulpy muppets. What’s not to friggin’ love? It embraces it’s stupidity with the gusto of a sunburned lover of Schlitz as he’s handed an ice cold can. The actors are hamming it up and having a ball, the premise is beyond moronic, and I can’t think of a good reason to care. It would be churlish to heap derision on a film so transparently eager to do nothing but amuse us for an hour or two, and asks nothing of us but that we slide our brains under the couch and just let it happen. There aren’t many films out there so purely focused on fun and escapism.
Okay, let’s say the average comic book–and let’s face it, most comics are superhero comics, i.e. juvenile power fantasies.
I’m aware there are intelligent comics out there, having read both Road to Perdition and *From Hell * as well as Stuck Rubber Baby. I have every issue of Roberta Gregory’s Naughty Bits, still follow Peter Bagge’s work, and still have most of the undergounds I collected back in the 60s and 70s.
I don’t look down on comics as a form. But let’s face it, superheros dominate comics, and most of the superhero stuff is somewhat immature and not very intelligent.
That’s why the term “comic book movie” is at least slightly derogatory.
Which I then immediately MST the barbecue line with…
“I coulda been at a barbeque!”
Drinking this monster eggnog my brother makes with lighter fluid…
The weirdest thing about the movie to me:
Why the heck is it nicknamed “ID4”? If they made three sequels, would the last one really be ID44? Doesn’t “I” stand for “Independence”? Doesn’t “D” stand for “Day”? Do we really need to throw in the day of the month that Independence Day falls on in the US? Why not ID7?
I just popped in here to say that thanks to this thread, I am actually going to have to watch this movie this weekend, and I hate you all for it.
Well, that’s not true. It’s more a love/hate kind of thing, because I crack the hell up every time I hear that one guy in Jeff Goldblum’s office on the phone–“Yes, I like The X-Files, too …”
You, sir or madam, sound like someone who’s never read Astro City.
</hijack>
So who’s holding the gun to your head, and what the Hell did you do to them to make get 'em so pissed at you?
There’s one other absurdity that no one has mentioned. Why do they have to bounce their communications off our satellites? Once you’re in space, in orbit, launching your own, secure, using your own frequencies is not that tough.
BTW, the Death Star exhaust port is not really a plot hole. They found a bug in the Death Star by analyzing the plans. For there not to have been a bug would have been more unbelievable. If Luke had dropped a torpedo down a random hole and blown up the Death Star - well then you’d be in ID4 territory.
There is actually a good book on a similar theme - Manhattan Transfer, by John Stith. It begins with aliens cutting around Manhattan and moving it to a really, really big hangar deck on their really, really big ship. It turns out that
They’re the good guys, and they sliced off Manhattan to preserve it when the really bad guys come.
This and Redshift Rendezvous are quite good books by him.
My favorite Adam Baldwin role is that of the psycho soldier “Animal Mother” in Full Metal Jacket (the 2nd half). What nerve it took to say some of those lines (“Thank god for the sickle cell”), but you kind of like him even while you hate what he’s saying.
I missed ID when it was in theaters (skipped it on purpose because of the bad reviews) and the first time I saw it was on a tiny 5" screen TV that I used to have set up next to my computer to check videotapes. It was also hooked to cable, and I just happened to catch it one day. I thought it was pretty funny though yes, very very dumb, but I enjoyed it even on that tiny screen. I kinda wished I had seen it on the big screen. Maybe if I had gone to see it when it first came out, and paid good money, and had all the hype and hoohah in my head, I might have hated it too. I don’t like it enough or watch it enough to put it in a “guilty pleasure” category, but I’m in the “thought it was dumb but enjoyed it anyway” category.
I also like his Deep Quarry ( PI in space ), Memory Blank (man wakes up having lost a few years of memory, and finds Earth has died in the meantime ), and Reckoning Infinity ( mysterious object arrives from deep space, team goes to investigate, etc ).