Entertainment
Deleted Scene Fixes The Worst Thing About The Best ‘90s Blockbuster
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
As a society, we’ve been able to agree on only a handful of things over the years. One of them is that summer blockbusters are going to have plot holes and other weird inconsistencies. That’s just the price of the game, really: when a movie’s main selling point is cool explosions and cheesy one-liners, we can forgive it for having some dodging plotting. That doesn’t keep us from joking about the bad writing, of course. Case in point? Independence Day fans have spent decades dunking on the plot point about Jeff Goldblum’s tech geek hacking advanced alien technology using a mid-90s Apple PowerBook.
The idea is wonderfully absurd on the face of it. Like, the aliens have technology advanced enough to help them conquer the stars and travel faster-than-light across the galaxy. How the heck were they beaten by an IT nerd whose people had only recently invented the internet? As it turns out, though, this plot point isn’t as stupid as everyone thought. That’s because one of the deleted scenes in Independence Day revealed something crucial: namely, that all of Earth’s modern technology was derived from an alien spaceship that was captured back in the ‘90s!
WelcomeToEarth.exe
In Independence Day, all the superpowers of the world are attacked by alien invaders who don’t hesitate to blow up power centers like the White House. In the film’s climactic final battle, America helps lead a two-pronged counterattack against these extraterrestrial enemies. Jeff Goldblum’s brilliant tech whips up a virus on his trusty Apple PowerBook. Once Will Smith’s hotshot pilot gets them close enough, they upload the virus into the alien mothership’s operating system. This lowers the shields on the ships attacking the Earth, allowing humanity to fight back and ultimately recapture their world from these nasty space invaders.
Even in the ‘90s, the idea of whipping up an anti-alien computer virus seemed laughable. The technology of the two races should be much different, and the aliens’ tech is presumably much more advanced than our own. However, a deleted scene on the 20th Anniversary DVD of Independence Day revealed that all of Earth’s modern computer technology was derived from the alien ship that crash-landed at Roswell and had been studied at Area 51. In this universe, that’s where we got our silicone-based microchips and binary programming language. Therefore, Goldblum whipping up a computer virus is much more believable because he’s using (more or less) the same technology and programming as the aliens.
Hack The World(s)
Obviously, this plot point is still a little iffy. Having similar technology is one thing, but the aliens should still be too advanced to make this possible. Like, this is the programming equivalent of taking down the most advanced computer security systems in the world using only your Atari 2600. However, the deleted scene still adds some welcome context, and it’s like I was saying at the beginning: blockbusters aren’t always going to make a lot of sense. Plus, “the internet came from aliens” is still more believable than Transformers: The Dark Side Of The Moon, which claimed that Buzz Aldrin secretly went to the moon to check out a robot’s UFO.
At any rate, you’ve now got some Independence Day trivia as bright and shiny as any firework. Next time you show the family this movie and your kid points out how dumb the virus plotline is, you can just tell them about the deleted scene. Will this impress your child? Of course not: he’s just going to roll his eyes and look down at his phone, but there’s nothing we can really do about that yet. PowerBooks might be able to hack alien motherships, but no force on Earth or in space can help you hack into the mind of a surly teenager!