Discard the script and most of the cast. Get a new director. This time, have the aliens come from Mars, set it in the early 20th century, and have the battles be not quite so hopelessly one-sided. Let humans score a victory here and there, but be unable to stop the invasion. Just when mankind seems well and truly fucked, have the aliens die from Terran microbes that their immune systems can’t resist.
Set the whole thing in someplace besides the US. Morocco, maybe. Jef Goldblum’s character has bought a bar and his ex shows needing help, but she’s got her new husband in tow and he leads the resistance against the aliens. Harvey Firestein is the corrupt chief of Police and Will Smith plays the piano a lot. Oh, and the aliens are Nazis.
I think it’s because there was so much hype before its release. Those trailers of the White House and other landmark buildings blowing up and cars somersaulting down the street… they were badass! (This was in the days before we were desensitized to over-the-top CGI in movies.) And, IIRC, the teaser trailers appeared a long time before the movie came out, so we had a long time to anticipate it. But the movie itself was utterly disappointing.
And it seems to be on about a dozen times on the week of July 4th since its release.
Whether it’s lack of immunity to Earth viruses or lack of a firewall against computer viruses, the solution to an alien invasion will always have to be a deus ex machina. Just looking at Earth history, even a few decades difference in technology levels will result in the low tech civilization getting completely overwhelmed. Forget a civilization with interplanetary space travel. They would be so advanced in terms of material science, information systems, propulsion, weaponry, and anything else you can think of that (to borrow a line from WotW) it would no more be a war than ants wage war against humans.
What would be considered a “good” alien invasion movie? District 9 maybe where the aliens are so weak and disoriented that they can’t utilize their advanced technology. Spielburg’s War of the Worlds was pretty good too, except for a couple of annoying characters and Well’s deus ex machina ending. Battle: Los Angeles was basically Black Hawk Down meets War of the Worlds with crappy aliens and their crappy tech.
The Thing or various incarnations of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Basically the “nasty bug” IS the alien.
Nowadays, the inverted alien invasion premise seems to be in vogue, with humans invading some other fertile planet (Battle for Terra and Avatar are both recent examples that come to mind).
There was a previous thread about the hate for ID4 here.
Here’s what I said at the time, and I stand by it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s fundamentally and irreparably broken.
Not true. You’re forgetting the Justice League. 
Or possibly the Avengers, though I’m not sure I’m willing to admit to having seen that.
I’m thinking about this, and I’m not sure you’re entirely correct. Must consider this further.
I’m tempted to do a poll correlating whether you like the movie “Independence Day,” and your nationality. I suspect that US Americans like the movie a lot more than people who roll their eyes at all the “AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!” in the movie.
But we all know that Macs are centuries ahead of the rest of human technology, so it makes perfect sense that one can hack into and disable the alien system.
I thought it had more to do with the computer virus infecting an alien operating system. That blew my credibility meter out the window right there. I mean seriously. How in the fuck would that work? The writers were fucking morons. I love Star Trek, and I know I’m supposed to suspend my disbelief, but really?
The whole “planet’s in trouble and the USA will unilaterally solve it” was also troublesome.
I dunno about you, but I absolutely loved Team America: World Police.
the USA doesn’t unilaterally solve it. They organize a massive world-wide counteroffensive. All the countries of the world unite together and the invasion ushers in a new era of peace and cooperation
Only since Kenya took over America. Them and their socialist negotiating evil ways…
It always is, but what are you gonna do?
It’s not actually quite as stupid as you think. It’s still kinda stupid, but it wasn’t quite the Deux ex Machina that most people think. It actually is explained in the film, but for some reason everybody forgets. I guess all the whiz-bang stuff is distracting.
When the aliens showed up, the first thing they did was hack in to our satellite communication system to shut us down. Goldblum’s character saw that, and that was where the whole, “It’s a countdown!” thing came from. They hacked in to our systems first. The aliens themselves had provided the computer language to get the different systems to talk to one another. Hell, it was their opening gambit.
So Goldblum just figured out whatever computer language they were using to hack our satellites, and used it against them. He didn’t invent it with his Macintosh laptop - they accidentally gave us the protocols for our systems to tie into theirs.
Does Mars Attacks! get the same amount of hate as ID4? I liked both movies, but Mars Attacks is infinitely better, only because to me they are both comedies and Mars Attacks is funnier.
I’m glad that got taken out then, because “human science is worthless, we need the aliens’ assistance to figure anything out” was one of The Best Boyfriend’s regularly-scheduled speeches and my eyes got tired of rolling to its tune.
CW, I think there isn’t so much of a difference on whether people from different places liked ID4 as on which parts and you need to drill down to why. The White House getting blown up got cheers in many places, but for different reasons.
I liked the movie well enough for the cheese that it was. I think most non-americans are used to American patriotism in Hollywood movies. That speech at the end where 4th of July was declared as the independence day of the entire world was kinda cringeworthy though.
Well, my personal opinion is that the only way to make it palatable is not to make it in the first place.
But I have to point out to all the folks who object to the stupidity of the “stop the aliens with a computer virus” idea that:
a.) although I agree with you,
b.) It IS a clever re-imagining of the “War of the Worlds” concept of the Alien Invaders being killed by an earth virus (or infection, at least) AND
c.) Artrhur C. Clarke, a God among SF writers, who co-gave us 2001 and many great “hard” Sf stories used EXACTLY this same strategy to counter the alien invaders in his novel 3001, one of his endless sequels to “2001”. The difference was that we (Earth) had the help of the disembodied Dave Bowman/HAL combination to help us interface with the alien computer system, so it wasn’t as out-of-the-blue ridiculous as plugging a Mac routine into an alien computer system “blind” and expectuing it to do anything.