Sure but all you nitpickers are missing the easiest point to exploit. They’re aliens. Who knows how they think, how their logic works, or why they do what they do. Maybe the aliens aren’t very creative and simply got started earlier then humans in terms of civilization. Maybe they have a rigid social structure that doesn’t allow for flexibility of thought. Maybe these aliens are the* dumb ones*, sent out to conquer a softball planet and simply get surprised. Maybe they are just redneck dicks and like to blow things up. They were just doing the equivalent of shooting at stop signs. You are anthropomorphizing an intelligent creature from another planet. There isn’t any reason to assume that they think like us at all.
Sure, but there’s no reason either to believe the real reason for the invasion isn’t insane jealousy over our square-dancing skills. Would that make for a good story? Because I find their behaviour in the film to be about as convincing. “Fuckwits from outer space” doesn’t really do it for me.
As I said in the other thread, if you like ID4, that’s fine, and not something anyone needs to apologise for. Some films I like are, objectively, not very good at all.
You’ve hit on a basic problem with sci-fi aliens there. This is why they are normally portrayed as humans with knobbly bits grafted on (so we can relate to them), or completely mysterious. Anything in-between is very difficult for us to imagine. If you read some accounts of first contact between cultures, there is a lot of bafflement over different vales. And other humans have far more in common than any alien species would.
Cat Whisperer’s idea for a poll is a good one. It’s the combination of jingoism and dumbness that really sets me off. It epitomises Hollywood at it’s worst to me.