Corrected entry: When the alien is brought into the containment lab of Area 51, we see all sorts of high-tech monitors set up and doctors running around checking everything works and everything is prepped and ready for the alien. So why is it, after all this work, they forget to administer some form of anaesthetic to the alien knowing that not only is it merely unconscious from a punch to the head but it has a nasty temperament towards mankind?
lionhead
25th Jun 2002
Independence Day (1996)
24th Sep 2022
Independence Day (1996)
Other mistake: When David asks Major Mitchell if he can shoot the soda can, Major Mitchell has to ask a nearby sergeant for his sidearm, despite already having one on him when he shot the alien earlier.
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Suggested correction: He probably shot his own gun empty or nearly empty, so he removed the magazine. They fired at least 10 shots at the alien, and he planted another 3 in it up close.
25th Nov 2003
Independence Day (1996)
Corrected entry: How come the aliens keep attacking major cities on July 3rd? After the first attacks people flee the major cities and surely the aliens must have realised that reaction would come. So why blow up abandoned cities?
Correction: They want to destroy the infrastructure, thus making the cities impossible to live in. This action will eventually kill a lot of people (lack of water and food, spreading of diseases breakdown of healthcare and law enforcement etc).
Correction: Abandoned cities were being blown up because every major city contains what we call natural resources. Our gas, our oil, our source of power. When Whitmore saw their plan in his head he discovered that "after they've consumed every natural resource they move on" the aliens will not leave any city in the world untouched until they have taken everything from us.
Firstly our resources are not in our cities, especially not the center. Oil and Gas are produced and stored outside the cities, for obvious safety reasons. Secondly if they want our natural resources, they wouldn't be blowing them up. Thirdly, I doubt they are after our oil, considering what technology they use, I'm pretty sure they were after the water and oxygen for their spacefaring civilization.
Correction: The aliens don't know if the cities are abandoned or not. They just know that most people live in cities.
27th Aug 2001
Independence Day (1996)
Corrected entry: When Russell Casse says that he was taken by aliens years before, everyone reacts with tired groans. We know there are aliens, so why not believe him? He makes specific claims that can be easily verified simply by looking at what is going on in the world and he provides detailed information that could only be gained through personal experience. Given the desperate situation humanity is in they would definitely want to talk to him to see what they can find out about the attacking aliens. (01:43:55)
Correction: He makes specific claims that can be easily verified simply by looking at what is going on in the world. Given the desperate situation humanity is in they would definitely want to talk to him to see what they can find out about the attacking aliens. What have they got to lose?
He is just one of thousands, tens of thousands of people that claim to have been abducted and all have different stories, evidence, information and 99% of it is probably useless. So it will be a huge waste of time to start to believe all these people and interrogate them.
Correction: Russell looks like any number of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens, these people are tired of that. Some may also have seen him drunk on TV and thought he was out of his mind. No mistake.
8th Jun 2020
Independence Day (1996)
Factual error: Aliens are using TV satellites for their secret attack signal, making the TV picture quality poor. David shows the president how they do it by bypassing the curvature of the earth. However TV satellites don't work that way. They are "hanging" pretty much above their broadcasting area totally reflecting and spreading the signal back straight downward to earth. Turning the parabolic mirrors of the satellites to a different elevation would result in no TV signal on earth, not just a degraded one.
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Suggested correction: Satellites do both. They both send the signals back down to earth but they also send signals to each other in order for the signal to cross the globe. And in those signals the aliens have hidden their own signal, and that distorts all satellite signals, causing TV's to receive a distorted signal.
Very few satellites directly talk to other satellites. Geosynchronous communication satellites don't. The antennas used for transmitting the TV signal are directional, but while directional antennas send most of their energy in one (or a few) direction, they still leak at least some energy to all directions, so it could still theoretically be used as described. The real mistake though is the aliens have advanced technology, so could easily have deployed a couple satellites of their own to perform this function, so why the need to use ones from Earth? Worst case just send a couple small ships up to act as relays.
It probably saves them time to use the satellites already in orbit. They are on a tight schedule and don't want to waste time and resources deploying their own satellites. Plus it's a small possibility for them that humans can take out their satellites, so hiding it in their own seems perfect.
They could be using the human satellites to disrupt communications or make communicating across the globe difficult to hinder any possible pre-emptive strike by Earth's armies acting in unison while the harvesters position themselves for the first wave of attack.
27th Jun 2009
Independence Day (1996)
Corrected entry: The humans are shown attacking the alien destroyers with AMRAAM air-to air missiles, which are shown both times to do virtually no damage to it. AMRAAMs are designed for fast moving air-to air targets, like the alien fighters. Yet, the humans do not see a need to fit their fighters with more powerful weapons, such as bunker busters, cluster bombs, nuclear bunker busters or tactical nukes, that would easily cripple or outright destroy the alien saucer. Instead, they resort to firing countless AMRAAMs at a 15-mile wide destroyer, which amount to pinpricks and cause needless deaths.
Correction: The AMRAAMs do not do "virtually no damage". They do absolutely no damage. The humans don't upgrade their munitions because there's no point to it.
Missile hitting the armor leave sparks flying, and glowing hot metal. I'm not sure if you would call that missiles doing absolutely no damage.
Still, that sounds like throwing pebbles at an elephant. They can hurt him but cannot kill him.
Actually the missiles do damage the alien ship. Just not serious damage.
The point is they didn't know how much damage they would do. The first time they tried they hit a shield and no damage was done. They had hoped they would do damage. Next to "bunker busters" and any other type of armor piercing warheads (which I doubt can be fitted onto air-to-air missiles) they had little choice in weapons types. Nukes won't work if you are dogfighting alien fighters close to the target, you'd destroy all your own planes, next to that you'd again destroy whatever city you were flying above just like Houston.
Correction: I believe you are making the assumption that after the Aliens attacked the Military bases, as stated in the film before the city attacks (In a report by General Grey), that there are still a large supply of "bunker busters, cluster bombs, nuclear bunker busters or tactical nukes" available for the planes to have them fitted before the final attack.
Next to that, they probably have the AA missiles loaded primarily to fight the fighters coming at them, not to damage the big ship directly. What else they had planned is never stated though. Perhaps they had hoped killing the mother-ship would make the destroyers retreat and they were simply delaying its attack.
16th Feb 2017
Independence Day (1996)
Corrected entry: When Steve crashes his F18 head first into the canyon wall, the nose itself is intact within the fireball into which the alien fighter flies.
Correction: It broke off instead of shattering. It's plausible. It's not exactly intact either.
30th Nov 2016
Independence Day (1996)
Corrected entry: There's no way the people at SETI, NASA, or anyone pointing a telescope at the moon wouldn't have spotted the mother ship long before it reached the moon. If asteroids only a few miles wide can be spotted millions of miles away from the Earth then space ship 1/4 the size of the moon are visible long before July 2.
Correction: Asteroids that are approaching or getting close to Earth have been doing that for millions of years and we spotted them over many years and many scans of a lot of space. A single relatively tiny spaceship popping up somewhere is not something we can see immediately unless it gets really close and we pick up a signal or echo.
16th Oct 2016
Independence Day (1996)
Corrected entry: After Russell Casse has crashed his plane into the alien's laser weapon and destroyed the ship, General William Grey gives the order to inform all countries to aim for the laser weapon to bring down all the alien spacecraft (which works). The problem here is the Americans were simply lucky that the ship had opened up the hatch and were planning to destroy Area 51, which left it vulnerable to being destroyed. All the other countries would have to fly around in circles and wait for the hatch to open which could have taken days, since they couldn't penetrate the outer armour. In short, it's highly unlikely they would have all fallen at once.
Correction: Its highly unlikely, but not impossible. Nobody says they were all taken out at once anyway. It was a globally coordinated attack and most if not all of the ships were attacked at the same time. Though it would probably take some time for them to open up their primary weapon, they could all be destroyed that way since they were still destroying cities.
Not necessarily. They could've still been using the signal to coordinate with the other alien ships like they did when they mounted the first attack.
9th Sep 2016
Independence Day (1996)
Corrected entry: The New York ship comes to a stop just above the tip of the Empire State building. Since the World Trade Center towers were several hundred feet taller, this means the ship should have collided with them and knocked them over, as they're only a few miles away, and the ship is easily larger than that. But after the city destruction, we see the twin towers still intact, if severely damaged.
Correction: The ship is higher than you think. The part that has the primary weapon is lower than the rest of the ship so that's why it appears to be lower, but it hangs higher above the rest of the city, including the twin towers. Besides, the roof of the twin towers are actually lower than the tip of the Empire state building at 417 meters, meaning that only the antenna of the WTC1 would have snapped off if the ship had been hanging that low.
Correction: Maybe they gave it the anaesthetic, and it didn't work.
Making up Deus ex Machina corrections for mistakes does not invalidate them. The technicians and scientists made no effort to restrain a potentially hostile and dangerous alien, and that belongs under "Stupidity."
There is nothing "deus ex machina" about the correction. The entry asks why they didn't use an anaesthetic, and the correction addresses that issue. There is no talk about restraints, which is a different issue (can restrain the suit but what about the alien within?).
lionhead