The “America Yea!” thing is just the kind of thing we’d be blasting another country for doing. Say North Korea made a movie where aliens attack and somehow the North Koreans have to come to the rescue, and they praise the world with some stirring speech celebrating the date the North Koreans liberated themselves from the capitalist world or whatever. We’d totally be, well, not watching that movie anyway, but still making fun of that point.
Think if the Soviets had made a movie like this, and used as their triumph of humanity over the aliens a stirring call to the October Revolution.
Think if the NAZI’s had made this movie*, and used as their speech a heartwarming inspiration of the 'stached man and his Aryan dreams.
Its gonna be the “Its a Wonderful Life” of July 4th! Pretty soon people will be talking about independence, fireworks, grills, and that Will Smith movie as part of the holiday
I think its not so much as we needed alien science to help us, but that since modern computers were descended from alien technology, the coincidental similarities just happened to allow us affect them
No. The worst was when the English officer hiding out in North Africa is told, “The Americans have a plan” and he responds with “It’s about time!” Like the whole world was sitting around waiting for the Americans to figure everything out and save the day. Wouldn’t it have been great if some guy in Latvia figured out a way to defeat the aliens?
“Sir, the Latvians have a plan!” “Well, it’s about time! Where the hell is Latvia?”
I’ve seen at least one theory that the “It’s about time!” is less “Thank goodness, it’s the Yanks!” and more “Oh, the Americans finally decided to show up late again.”
They actually covered that. The SecDef knew it was real, and said it was “need to know”, and apparently it was decided a long time ago that the President didn’t need to be in the loop.
Which makes some sense - the military decided the civilians couldn’t handle the truth. Of course, why the SecDef would be let in on it is best not thought about it. Which is true about most of the movie - thinking just ruins a fun action flick.
Yeah but people like The Bestest Boyfriend read it as “we can’t invent anything ourselves”. Met too many of those. See: people who think the moon landing was a hoax. I’m reasonably sure that Kubrick never intended his movie to be taken that way, but it was.
The part that always bugged me was why we didn’t just use another nuke after we took down their shields. Would have been a lot easier that hoping we had enough aircraft.
If Buckaroo Banzai lacks meaning, what’s the watermelon for?
This is one of those movies that I have flipped on over the years. I rolled my eyes at the mac fix in the theater but enjoyed the movie. Then read up on things like science and didn’t like the movie. In fact, I think after The Core, ID4 was heavily used in the book, Insultingly Bad Movie Physics book, such as how they described the tiny ships, they could have just driven them over cities to flatten them and when they fall, they cause more damage than a nuclear blast and in a bigger area!
However, at the end of the day, I think I liked it enough in my first viewing of it, that I can watch it for the popcorn flick it is, roll my eyes at the science, and have fun watching it.
Put Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl “Schwartzenegro” Weathers, and Jesse “The Body” “The Mind” Ventura in it. Working title: Predatory Aliens Who Want To Terminate Us Wholesale. Bastardize a Dick story for some of the plot, throw in a Ridley Scott scene or two …
Uhhh… whoosh? The movie is almost a comedy. It is an excuse to have the Whitehorse blow up. I haven’t watched it in years but I looked forward to it when it first came out and enjoyed it thoroughly. It is unashamedly stupid. What it needed was some Shatneresque monologues delivered with better ham and it would have been monumental.
This movie was Mars Attacks with tongue in cheek and budget not wasted quite as much on big names.
And that bit’s just as silly, as they have absolutely no reason to do so. The aliens could have achieved exactly the same results, a coordinated attack, by equipping their saucers with egg-timers.
The saucers don’t need energy weapons to cause havoc. All they need to do is fly over a city at 300MPH, and let the shock-wave do the work. Instead, they park very carefully like an old lady reversing into a tricky spot, then unleash a feeble ray which destroys buildings one at a time.
