Independence Day - War of the world similarities

[Sticks]

I dug out an old video of Independence Day, which has some dodgy physics (http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/independ.html), (In the adverts prior on the tape it had an advert for a Independance Day computer game compatible on windows 95!!! but I digress)

While watching it, it seemed like a re-working of the first film War of the Worlds, (Not the Tom Cruise mangling). In that you have an airforce that does not seem to work out at first. There is a nuke which does not work, but ultimately the alien's are dealt with by a virus (natural in WOTW but a computer virus in ID) I realise in the book it was microbes.

Did anyone else seem any similarities between WOTW and ID?

[01101001]

Wikipedia: The War of the Worlds (1953 film) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1953_film)#Fictional_influe nces)

Fictional influences

Independence Day (1996), directed by Roland Emmerich. The aliens (not from Mars) use Earth satellites for their communication system. They were defeated by the plucky heroes installing a computer virus onto one of the motherships, a "clever" update of the microbes that wipe out the Martians in The War of the Worlds. The film also features an attempt to use the atomic bomb (even to the point of again being deployed by a "Flying Wing" built by the Northrop company--this time a B-2 Spirit); that fails as well, and in the ruins of what was once Houston, a downed streetlight is made to look like the gooseneck of the original war machines.

[jrkeller]

Let's see.

There's the impenetrable shields.
Military cannot do anything in the beginning.
The love story between main characters.
The story occurs primarily in the Western US.
Main cities attacked.
Both have groups of people praying when the end is near and then almost miraculously the aliens are destroyed.

[Van Rijn]

When I saw it is I said "This is War of the Worlds with a computer virus instead of a biological agent." Absolutely it is the same theme.

[Nowhere Man]

About the only difference is that the humans in ID took an active part in getting the virus into the aliens, while in WotW it just happens.

Fred

[LucasVB]

Yeah, this is what I like about WotW. Humans are completely powerless, but we're ultimately saved by microbes. It has a nice and clever twist of the concept of "power" in there...

ID4 just wipes that out and makes us the heroes once again. But basically, I agree it's the same story.

In the ruins of what was once Houston, a downed streetlight is made to look like the gooseneck of the original war machines.
Hah, so it was intentional. I always wondered...

[Van Rijn]

Let's see.

There's the impenetrable shields.


When I saw the B2 attack I thought "They're even using the flying wing!"

For years after I saw the George Pal "War of the Worlds" I wondered what the heck that plane was. At the time flying wings were impractical, and it was a long time before I learned anything about that plane (which was undoubtedly used because it looked good).

[jrkeller]

There are also some minor bits lifted from the movie Earth vs. The Flying Saucers. I can't remember which parts, but I do remember watching ID, and thinking this part is just like Earth vs. The Flying Saucers

[Inferno]

Pfftt, finding what films ID4 ripped off is far too easy. Try finding something in ID4 that is not lifted from another source. Now that's a challenge!

[Sticks]

Pfftt, finding what films ID4 ripped off is far too easy. Try finding something in ID4 that is not lifted from another source. Now that's a challenge!


The non-smoker becomes a smoker?

[Gillianren]

Seen it.

[Donnie B.]

"I picked a bad week to quit sniffin' glue."

You know, the odd thing is that I sometimes have a hard time remembering which scenes were in ID4 and which were in Mars Attacks.

(Note to self: ID4 is the one with Adam Baldwin in it. Too bad he wasn't cast as the President; he would have been way more convincing than Bill Pullman.)

[Sticks]

"I picked a bad week to quit sniffin' glue."


That was from Airplane that quote, and yes I did spot that one. :dance:

[Demigrog]

You are all missing the obvious difference between WotW and ID4: WotW was a pretty good movie...

On the plus side, ID4 could have been worse. Watch the deleted scenes on the DVD if you don't believe me.

Oh, and ID4 did spawn a couple of interesting books, including Silent Zone, about Dr. Oken and Area 51. The CT believers out there might even consider it non-fiction. :)

[greenfeather]

I just thought it completely improbable that our computer discs (yes, they probably did use floppies, although I can't remember) would even fit into their slots.

And would our viruses even work in an alien computer? I mean, the code is in an alien language, right??

My take on these kind of movies is "please spare us the mawkish patriotism!" Did anyone see Deep Impact? Don't even get me started on what was wrong with that movie!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

[Donnie B.]

* gets greenfeather started *

[Essan]

Independance Day is one of my favourite films ......

Of course the biggest difference between it and WotW is that it's not set in SE England....

(btw I don't recall a flying wing in the original ;) Although there was an ironclad warship - the Thunder Child - which attemped to ram the Martians off the Essex marshes, and which was destroyed in its final attack)

[Jim]

ID4 has a lot of flaws; still, it's a fun movie if you don't take it too seriously.

(Besides, who says alien computers don't run on Windows? Bill Gates is everywhere!)

[Van Rijn]

(btw I don't recall a flying wing in the original ;) Although there was an ironclad warship - the Thunder Child - which attemped to ram the Martians off the Essex marshes, and which was destroyed in its final attack)

Well, no, but as previously noted, the flying wing was in the George Pal "War of the Worlds."

[redshifter]

I just thought it completely improbable that our computer discs (yes, they probably did use floppies, although I can't remember) would even fit into their slots.

And would our viruses even work in an alien computer? I mean, the code is in an alien language, right??

My take on these kind of movies is "please spare us the mawkish patriotism!" Did anyone see Deep Impact? Don't even get me started on what was wrong with that movie!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Heck, how do we know an alien computer is even based on 1's and 0's?

[davidlpf]

one thing about independence day they do not attack any canadian cities.

[Van Rijn]

one thing about independence day they do not attack any canadian cities.

Aha! A Canadian-Alien conspiracy! I knew it!

Actually, I think it was it was pretty clear the attacks were worldwide, starting with major cities. I doubt Canada was left out.

[davidlpf]

If you watch the movie there was no mention of toronto or montreal or vancouver or any other canadian city, there two reactions to this of how americentric things are or were are just to nice to attack.

[Van Rijn]

There were clearly a lot more cities being destroyed than were mentioned. There were several indications it was a worldwide attack, and they were moving from population center to population center.

[davidlpf]

Ok I will let it go but when it comes to movies in general canadians are usually not mentioned but this is just my national pride.

[01101001]

If you watch the movie there was no mention of toronto or montreal or vancouver or any other canadian city, there two reactions to this of how americentric things are or were are just to nice to attack.

Well, remake it and call it "Dominion Day".

[Lianachan]

If you watch the movie there was no mention of toronto or montreal or vancouver or any other canadian city, there two reactions to this of how americentric things are or were are just to nice to attack.

Also the Royal Air Force crew who are just sitting about useless until word comes through and an officer declares "I say, tally-ho, what, what! The Yanks have bally well figured something out!".

(I paraphrase, but only very slightly - it's still hugely Americacentric. Hey, that's another similarity with War Of The Worlds!)

[Demigrog]

Also the Royal Air Force crew who are just sitting about useless until word comes through and an officer declares "I say, tally-ho, what, what! The Yanks have bally well figured something out!".

(I paraphrase, but only very slightly - it's still hugely Americacentric. Hey, that's another similarity with War Of The Worlds!)

Heh, there is a novelization of ID4 from the perspective of those RAF officers. Rather interesting book, actually; not all of the aliens died in their ships' crashes...

[Alasdhair]

Also the Royal Air Force crew who are just sitting about useless until word comes through and an officer declares "I say, tally-ho, what, what! The Yanks have bally well figured something out!".

(I paraphrase, but only very slightly - it's still hugely Americacentric. Hey, that's another similarity with War Of The Worlds!)

Flying F-16s yet

[greenfeather]

* gets greenfeather started *

OK you got me started about why I hate Deep Impact. It's not the science, it's the bad writing. For starters that damn patriotic president was a retread from Independence Day, right? It's enough we have to listen to windbag, flag-waving presidents in Real Life.

Then there were those endless, mawkish arguments between people who were chosen to enter The Ark, and those who were Left Behind. "You go ahead, we'll stay behind." "No, I won't go without you!" "Yes you will!" "No I won't!" And this scene was repeated about 10 times (while the military evacuation convoys patiently waited.)

The screen time devoted to this crap should have been used to portray what ordinary people were doing to prepare for the comets. Were they building shelters? (I remember Fallout Shelters, folks). Anyone come up with an energy source for 2 years of darkness? Any sort of interesting social ramifications (besides the obvious looting & fundamentalism). Oh, by the way, for the chosen elite who would be living in the Ark for 2 years after the comets hit... they were supposed to be living on Ensure!! Hope they took some ex-lax with them! (Hey, actually I like Ensure. When I worked at the nursing home, I used to drink what the patients left. Tastes like milkshake!)

Of course the biggest disappointment of all is that the Big One didn't hit the Earth, but was harmlessly busted up by a nuke (which we didn't even get to see) and instead of a world-destroying comet, the sky was filled with *fireworks*. Hahaha!!! If the fragments of the comet were close enough to see as fireworks, you'd think they wouldn't be so harmless, in fact they'd ignite in the atmosphere and produce a worldwide firestorm. Or not?

At any rate, I would have liked to see a REAL deep impact, and what would Earthlings do for 2 years after a Big One hit, and would anyone survive, and what would they find afterwards.

Well, there was ONE good comet scene when the Small One landed in the ocean and tsunami'd New York. Then young Elijah Wood and his girlfriend outrace the tsunami in their motor scooter, (can you really do that??)) driving right up the Appalachians and ending up about 2 feet beyond the wave crest. Elijah Wood has already perfected his wide-eyed, open-mouthed persona which will make him the perfect Frodo later. And the President gives a flag-waving "we will recover" speech.

For god's sake! Who has made a REAL comet movie? Actually, Disney's "Dinosaur" did a fairly good representation of a killer comet! Even though this was animation, it was way more realistic than Deep Impact. (Although Disney failed to portray the worldwide ecological collapse and extinction that followed that particular Big One. But hey, it's a kids' movie.)

I liked War of the Worlds way more than Independence Day, but that might be because WoW is almost an iconic folktale and the tripods can't fail to inspire terror because they are practically imbedded in our collective unconscious. The flying whatever's in Independence Day don't come close...in fact they come across as copies of Star Wars.

One comment about WoW... because it was set in present times, the impotence of the military is a jarring note. Should have set it at least in the 40's before they had Nukes, smart bombs etc.

[TrAI]

I just thought it completely improbable that our computer discs (yes, they probably did use floppies, although I can't remember) would even fit into their slots.

And would our viruses even work in an alien computer? I mean, the code is in an alien language, right??
...


Heck, how do we know an alien computer is even based on 1's and 0's?

Well, I do not remember much about the hardware they used for the virus, its quite a while since I saw the movie. Though I seem to remember they used human computer(A Mac laptop, was it not?) interfaced to the fighter to infect the alien computer system, the laptop probably did have a disk drive for the virus to be loaded from.

It is not a problem that the target system use a different "language", you just instruct the development machine on how to translate the data from human readable form to a form that will be executable on the target system. This is done all the time, programming of micro controllers, initial development of programs and operating systems for new computers, development of games for video game systems and so on...

As for the 1's and 0's, that is not much of a problem either. The thing is that though the human system may store data in a binary format, the data may represent non-binary values. In fact, there are systems that do not represent the data as two levels like this, for example gigabit ethernet over TP cable , I am not going to go in depth, but the important point is that the data is sent as four separate five level signals, one signal on each of the four pairs in the cable, so for a short while, it is represented in another format. You just use the appropriate hardware to translate it.

The real problem with the story in the movie is how they figured out the alien system enough to make a virus for it in the first place, after all, they did say something to the effect that it was only with the approach of the mother ship that and the activation of the fighter that they had been able to make headway. However, this may have been an overstatement, it is possible that they had some understanding of some of the subsystems already, and just lacked the knowledge of how to activate the ship and observe how it all worked together. Or maybe the ship just came with a service manual, in case of emergencies, it would be prudent to have something like that.

I guess we can assume the aliens use a modular approach to computer design, the systems in the mother ship is the same as in the smaller craft, only with more nodes, so it would have the same strengths and weaknesses as the fighter computer.

Does this sound strange? Well, imagine you are making a large spaceship, you might develop specific hardware systems for the ship, with large central computers and dedicated systems, or you could network a large number of standardized computers, and use the same platform on all of them, you may assign specific tasks to some of the machines, other tasks may be distributed on basis of available resources. You could use the same systems in your smaller craft too, just fewer of them.

This means that should one machine fail, you could replace it with another, the system would probably be cheaper, more flexible, you would have redundancy, and it would be easier for the engineering staff to handle. And for a hive like species like the aliens in the movie, this approach might seem obvious(distributed tasks, redundancy, many units working together and so on, very hive like, is it not?)

Ah, but they would have anti virus, firewalls and intrusion defense systems, you might say. Well, those things are useless in this instance. The humans hijacked or piggybacked an authorized connection, so they got past the firewall, intrusion detection systems only work against recognized attack forms or unusual trends in the data transfers, and anti virus only works on known viruses or programs that behave as viruses, the human virus was rather specific in its target, it was not trying to erase data or use up resources, such a virus could be hosted on a computer system for a long while without being found. Also, being a hive like people, they may have had little experience with computer attacks originating inside their lair, as they would probably be more used to fighting other hives or species.