It's Independence Day in Podunk Iowa.
Or Wisconsin. Or Indiana. I can't remember.
But I do know that this is the hometown of President Sam
Garcette (Tom Everett Scott) and he's coming back home.
Unfortunately Podunk is also ground zero for the Alien
Invasion. Just so you know, the aliens have attacked
Washington D.C., New York City, Los Angeles, Paris, London,
Tokyo, Beijing… and Podunk. How did Podunk draw the
short straw? Regardless, what started out as an
Independence Day Celebration has turned into… wait for it… an
Independence Daysaster! How about that, huh?
SETI, the institute that stands for the Search for
ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, has one thing to do. Keep
a lookout for aliens. That's it. They suck at
this. I mean they find them, but damn, they are already
all up on us. Actually, according Celia the SETI
Scientist (Emily Holmes), they've been here for eons, as their
drills have erupted all over the planet, wrecking stuff and
terraforming the Earth. I could ask how these drills,
planted thousands of years ago, knew where New York, D.C.,
L.A., Tokyo and Paris would be located, but we won't ask
that. Celia is riding around town with Fireman Pete
(Ryan Merriman) who happens to be the President's brother, and
also along for the ride is the President's son Andrew (Keenan
Tracey) and Andrew's sort-of girlfriend Eliza (Andrea Brooks)
who might be blonde and stuff, but she ain't no dumb blonde
because she knows what a phoson is. I think that's what
they called it.
Right now the Earth, particularly the United States of
America, is in a bad spot. The President's helicopter
convoy has crashed and everybody in those helicopters
apparently disintegrated, except the President, since he's the
only survivor. No bodies or nothing. Oddly
enough, the same thing happened to the President's son and the
SUV cavalcade he was riding in, as his Secret Service detail
also disintegrated. Apparently having people lie around
dead would call for an extra day of shooting for these dead
actors, which would've added to the budget. And after
seeing the special effects for 'Independence Daysaster', they
obviously couldn't afford those extra days.
Vice President Brubaker (Garwin Sandford) and
Secretary of Defense General Moore (Michael Kospa) have
assumed the President to be dead and have decided to be
proactive. First thing, send some jets to attack the
alien orbs. Now while I'm no military strategist or
anything, I'm thinking that maybe we should launch a few
surface to air missiles at these things, followed up by a few
drone attacks so we can kind of see what we are up against
before committing our entire air fleet and valuable manpower
against these killer orbs floating above Podunk, but what do I
know? It doesn't work by the way. And instead of
trying to shoot a swarm of orbs out the sky, maybe drop a
missile on those atmosphere transforming drills instead.
Next order of business? Nuke the mother ship. Now
I don't know this for a fact, and maybe Reagan's Star Wars
defense system actually works in a way, but do we have nukes
in our possession that can travel around to the dark side of
the moon and actually hit anything? Is that
possible? Just asking. That doesn't work either.
But don't worry, we actually have a way to stop these
things. Kind of. Remember the Phoson? The
Seti Scientist has a Phoson gun and while we won't get into
the science behind of all of that, just know that it works to
stop these things. The President has resurfaced, and
with the help of the most awesome geeks ever created has
managed to gain control of the nation again. Kind
of. And he's reunited with his son. And he
and his brother have made up. Oddly enough, I didn't
even know they had a problem with each other, but an alien
invasion can cure almost all ills.
What we need is a away to get the Phoson gun on the mother
ship to stop the mother ship from doing whatever it's
doing. And we'll let it go at that because SPOILERS will
follow.
Now, I kind of liked director W.D. Hogan's terribly derivative
'Independence Daysaster' which liberally stole from all kinds
of movies, but I did have a major, irreconcilable problem with
it, this being the death of Celia the SETI scientist.
So, after a drone ship is dropped, a salvage ship shows up to
pick up the pieces and take them back to the mothership.
Our heroes secured one of the power sources from this ship
they dropped, plan being to attach the phoson gun to the power
source, and then remotely activate the phoson gun to take out
the mother ship. All the power source has to be is on
the ground for the salvage ship to take it, but Celia the SETI
scientist chooses to commit suicide by running out into an
open field, clutching this power source which gets her
eviscerated. What was up with that? Unfortunately,
this death has some long repercussions. For one, the
Phoson gun is something she invented and she's the only one
who knows how it works, thus, say there are more enemy ships,
who's gonna make the next phoson gun? Huh?
Anyway, aside from the Secretary of Defense's awful military
strategy and the suicide of Celia and the lousy special
effects, 'Independence Daysaster' wasn't all that awful I
guess. I mean it is awful in the sense that I do like my
Alien Invasion movies to actually have invading aliens in them
as opposed unmanned machines, and I would prefer that the
world's top scientist were able to offer up something by way
of a solution, instead leaving everything to a suicidal SETI
scientist and some high school kids, and it's no fun that a
large portion of the movie consisted of people observing
stuff, be it alien drills coming from the ground, alien drones
descending from the sky or computer monitors displaying
massive lines of ASCII text. And we can also point out
that while we took out the alien mother ship at the end, I
don't think that actually stopped the drills from
metamorphosing our atmosphere which was going to leave us all
dead in three days anyway. But other than that, it
wasn't all that bad. And by 'not all that bad' I mean I
have seen way worse, on this very channel, very often.
