Independence Day (1996) - 84 corrections

Directed by Roland Emmerich, starring Bill Pullman, Brent Spiner, Jeff Goldblum, Judd Hirsch, Randy Quaid, Vivica A. Fox, Will Smith (add more)

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. As such, any aggressive/abusive corrections (and I get quite a few) written as if they're comments I've made myself will be ignored. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click the edit icon under an entry, then choose "correct entry". Some entries have "duplicated entry" after them - these are entries which were already listed on the main page, but were submitted again. I occasionally leave these online for a while, just in case they were moved in error, so don't worry about pointing them out to me.

Mistakes

Trivia

Pictures

Quotes

Easter Eggs

Corrections

Questions

Submit
Entry In the scene near the end of the movie when Russell Cates is flying the jet fighter, he says 'Tell my children I love them very much', then proceeds to fly his jet up into the UFO to blow it up. The problem is, in every scene previous to this when the UFO fired its laser beam, it destroyed everything it hit. Why didn't it destroy the jet when it entered the beam? [The beam hadn't been fired yet. If you watch closely you'll notice that every time a ship fires that particular weapon there's a sort of "two-phase" beam. The first phase sends down an apparently harmless beam of light, while the second phase seems to charge the beam with whatever destructive energy the aliens utilize. Russell flies into the beam during its first phase. By the time the beam is charged, Russell is inside the craft. When the beam blows up his jet, it causes the chain reaction that destroys the ship.]
Corrected by Phixius Time
Entry This movie has the highest body count in film history. Six major characters die, plus billions that are killed when the cities are blown up. Add to that the pilots who are killed in the aerial attacks, all the people who die when the military bases are blown up, not to mention an entire alien race, and the movie's final body count is somewhere in the trillions. [Purely speculative and not entirely accurate. Galaxies and universes have been destroyed (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Neverending Story) in other films.]
Corrected by JC Fernandez Time
Entry Early in the film, after the arrival of the alien spacecraft, President Whitmore indicates that, "We may need to upgrade to Defcon 3" in light of the worsening situation. The Defcon scale is lowered in response to a more threatening situation, and would therefore require a "downgrade to Defcon 3." [This is a matter of semantics. While it is true that the numerical sequence does count down, the President is referring that we need to "upgrade" our defense status. In other words, go to a high state of readiness. In any case, it's a character decision.]
Corrected by wizard_of_gore Time
Entry When David and Steven break the Earth's atmosphere, there is no sign of the mother ship despite heading straight towards it in the next shot. [After the shot when you see all the stars and no mothership, and you get an outside shot of the little ship, you can see they turn to the left.]
Corrected by Dragon Time
Entry In the scene where Jimmy and Steve are being chased by 2 alien spacecraft, Jimmy says he is going to "try something", after which he makes a drastic high speed left turn away from Steve's plane. The G forces are so great, Jimmy can't breathe so he takes off his oxygen mask. Steve immediately yells, "Put your mask back on!", but how would he have known he removed his mask if he had already banked away from him and he couldn't actually see him? [Because the heavy "gasping for air" type breaths Jimmy was taking sounds very different if he does not have his mask on as opposed to still wearing it, as it is not muffled like breathing or speaking with it on tends to be.]
Corrected by Jazetopher Time
Entry When we see the alien spacecraft stop above the Empire State Building, it looks like the very top of the building is not far from the bottom of the ship. How can this be? The WTC buildings were about 1,000 feet high, so to clear those buildings, the bottom of the ship should have been much higher above the ESB. The same thing with the ship over the White House - in order to clear the Washington Monument, it would have had to be higher than it was shown above the White House. [For one thing, the ships aren't necessarily completely flat on the underbelly; and for another, a race with that kind of technology would have equipped their craft with vertical maneuverability as well as lateral. Simply put: they flew over and/or around the taller structures. Keep in mind that the entire approach is not shown of any one craft.]
Corrected by Phixius Time
Entry After Will Smith has ejected out of his plane and is walking towards the alien plane shouting "Who's the man?", he is wearing gloves. But when he punches the alien, he is bare-handed. [The distance between Smith's landing position and the space ship is about 100 meters, then he stars walking towards the ship, shortly before the scene is cut, he is about 40-50 meters away from his parachute, in the new shot he is standing right next to the spaceship, that gives him 50 meters and about 20 seconds to take his gloves off and throw them away, and as he just has wrecked a 60 million dollar aircraft he sure doesn't care about bringing home the gloves!]
Time
Entry When Captain Steven "Steve" Hiller and David Levinson are getting ready to fly out on the alien ship, the camera shows Hiller the launchpad for the missile that they are to use on the mothership. Hiller says, "It's just like the AMRAAM launch pad on a stealth." AMRAAM stands for Advanced Medium Range Air to Air Missile. Both the F-117 "Stealth Fighter" and the B-2 "Stealth Bomber" only carry air to ground weapons. Neither stealth is equipped to carry AMRAAMs, and therefore wouldn't have AMRAAM launchpads. [This is a movie where aliens attack earth, and where they have a spaceship in Area 51. Not every project from the army is public, so it's perfectly feasible that they could have a new stealth aircraft with AMRAAM launchpads on it.]
Time
Entry In the final fight scene, Bill Pullman's fighter is given the code name "Eagle 5". This is a nod to another Bill Pullman movie, "Spaceballs", where he captained a Winnebago named Eagle 5. [In the final battle, the President is Eagle 1, not Eagle 5.]
Time
Entry Will Smith's mustache is out of limits for military standards. The standard is that a mustache shall not extend lower than the top of the upper lip or past a vertical line drawn upward from the corner of the mouth. He's good on the first part, but out of regs on the second. [Maybe he grew it out during his "leave-time" from being at the base. Doesn't take long for a thin mustache like that to grow(couple days), and I am sure they would not have taken the time to make him shave under the circumstances.]
Corrected by Jazetopher Time
Entry That alien suit is rather odd: it needs to be cut open with a razor sharp knife, then the alien is covered in a fleshy mass, however the suit is so weak an alien gets knocked out when it gets punched. [There doesn't appear to be any sort of movie mistake here, just an opinion.]
Corrected by Tailkinker Time
Entry When the president's entourage fire their guns at the alien, wires are visible pulling the alien backwards by its shoulders. [These "wires" are actually part of the electronic equipment the scientists hooked up to him for the dissection/investigation. If you look close, they are attached to him already when he first starts killing everyone in the room.]
Corrected by Jazetopher Time
Entry When Will Smith flies the FA18 and is being chased by the alien space craft, just as the FA18 comes into the shot when he flies over the edge of a canyon there is no shadow on the ground, but then suddenly the shadow appears within the same shot - it doesn't gradually appear like the FA18 does. [I just watched this frame by frame and there is absolutely nothing wrong with the shadow of the plane. It appears gradually but just very quickly since the plane is flying very fast.]
Time
Entry In the scene where David shows everyone how he can penetrate the fortress, he specifically says the only way to disable the shields in all the ships is to detonate a bomb in the mothership (he says it quickly towards the end of his little speech so pay attention) - But the shields go down way before they detonate the bomb, the shields go down as soon as they upload the virus. [David clearly says during his demonstration and I quote: "If we plant a virus into that mother ship it’s gonna filter down into all the corresponding ships below." Then a few sentences later he says: "We then upload the virus, set off some kind of explosion which'll disable it."(It being the mother ship, not the shield.) So the primary purpose of the bomb was to destroy the mother ship (it couldn't be attacked by fighters since it wasn't in our atmosphere). The shields on the other ships would already be down when this happened.]
Time
Entry When Cpt Hiller (Smith) gets in the F18 for the first attack, just under the canopy it reads "CPT Jimmy Wilder" with "Raven" below that. But Smith's character is "Steven Hiller." Connick's character is "Jimmy Wilder." Hiller is flying the wrong plane. [Watch the scene again. Will Smith gets in the plane with 'Cpt Steven Hiller' below the canopy. Connick gets in the one marked 'Cpt Jimmy Wilder "Raven"']
Time
Entry When the spaceship is first coming into hover position over D.C., it passes over the Washington Monument. While the shadow hits the ground and monument separately, it incorrectly hits the ground first. Since the light source comes from the left and the spaceship is moving right, it should hit the higher monument first, with the ground shadow trailing. The opposite is true in the movie. [If the ship is moving from left to right and the light source is to the left, the shadow would cover the ground first and then move up the monument. If the ship was moving right to left, the monument would be shadowed first. This shot was not filmed with CG, but with a truck and actual sunlight.]
Corrected by Jason Sieberg Time
Entry In the scene where Will Smith's character has approached Area 51 with the alien, he identifies himself as an officer of the Marine Corps; yet he is a fighter pilot. [The Marine Corps has a large air support force, and the pilots are commisioned officers.]
Time
Entry At the end Steven and David are flying out of the mothership and they barely make it out. Hence the spaceships that are following them blow up because they hit the wall. Thats the problem, it's in space. In order to have fire you must have oxygen. In space there is no oxygen. Therefore there could not have been a fire when the ships crashed. [The ships themselves have enough oxygen to sustain a fire.]
Time
Entry More than one character refers to the Roswell crash as occurring in the 1950s, but the actual date was 1947. [Two characters make this error, and both are excusable human mistakes. Judd Hirsch's character makes the first mention and he is clearly having difficulty remembering exact details. The second time is the Secretary of Defense who is more concerned about the ludicrous nature of the plan being suggested than giving an accurate history.]
Time
Entry When Will's wife arrives at his destroyed airbase she stands at a fence outside the military area. She is filmed from inside but you can read a sign "Restricted Area" fixed to the fence. So the restricted area must be the whole world for the soldiers inside the airbase :) [From looking at the state of the sign and the fence to which it was attached, it had clearly been displaced by the alien attack.]
Time

1 2 3 4 5 • Next page

You may also like: I Am Legend | Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull | Ghostbusters | Titanic | Iron Man

Click here to send this page to a friend...

Submit this page to:

StumbleUpon Slashdot Facebook Delicious reddit