The aliens take out NORAD. Isn't NORAD under a mountain?
Fridge Brilliance: The aliens have a Wave-Motion Gun powerful enough to take out cities in one blast. So a mountain's not much of a problem.
Actually this is sort of handwaved: when it's mentioned that the alien ship has changed course toward them, one of the military personnel tells Jeff Goldblum's ex not to worry since they're well underground. Then she reminds him about the hundreds of refugees on the surface outside the base. Cue Oh, Crap! moment.
The novel explains this: the alien attackers fired on NORAD continuously until the mountain was blown away, then they took out the base inside.
David tells Marty to get his mother out of town. Marty tells her to go to her sister in Atlanta...which is later mentioned as one of the cities taken out in the second wave of attacks, by the destroyer that annihilated Washington, DC.
There's a silver lining in that Atlanta probably would have been evacuated when it became clear that the saucer was heading for the city.
Of course, that's assuming Marty's mother was able to get out of New York at all.
On top of that, going from New York to Atlanta is about a 14 hour drive. The aliens attack every twelve hours like clockwork. Add in that the highways would be clogged by refugees and people fleeing other cities, and it's doubtful she'd get as far as Virginia before hearing that Atlanta was also destroyed.
Patricia Whitmore doesn't actually know her mother is dead. Someone, likely her father, would have to have dropped that on her later.
Just because he didn't say the words, doesn't mean she didn't know. Both Patricia and her father seemed to know exactly what the other meant by "Mommy is sleeping now." But they do still have to deal with her funeral, which is probably just as bad.
Patricia definitely knew. Actress Mae Whitman got the role after asking if her character knew that her mother passed away and, after learning that she knew, but didn't want to say it aloud, she told them she would have acted differently and asked to retry the line.
When you get down to it, the implications of what Whitmore's simple summary of what the alien showed him. He calmly explains that they move from planet to planet, then consume every natural resource and move on. Obviously, he doesn't go deeper on what he must have seen: entire civilizations scorched, one-sided battles, billions of sentient aliens slaughtered, followed by complete exploitation of the invaders' new "home" until there's nothing left, and then they pack up and head for the next target where they do it all over again.
Russel was right that the Aliens have been studying us for years. How else would they have known that DC is the capital of the United States? Or that the Empire State Building is the iconic image of New York City? Or that Los Angeles is considered a landmark in California. They've been there for years possibly decades before deciding it was our turn to be exterminated. Russel probably wasn't the only human that was abducted by the Aliens either.
The first time David called Connie to tell her about the signal and countdown, she dismissed him and hung up, forcing David and Julius waste hours driving DC from New York. Of course, that let the two of them contribute to the ultimate solution, if she had listened they could have evacuated and prepared far earlier. Might have saved six digits of lives. Even though her reaction is fairly reasonable, one wonders how that might have weighed on her afterwards. We see how it weighs on Whitmore, and he didn't even have that.
During the final battle, Whitmore fires a second missile at the approaching saucer, despite a first missile impacting the shields (and the assumption being that the virus didn't work, calling off the counter-strike). David mentioned in his plan that when the virus was uploaded, it had to "filter" down to the ships below before the shields would shut down, thus the effects would not be instantaneous upon upload of the virus.
Even though we don't see the alien's reactions, the final battle provides evidence that the shields getting disabled has thrown them into disarray. The City Destroyer assaulting Area 51 doesn't go by a countdown at all to open up it's cannon port; the moment it is over the base, it begins opening and preparing it's firing sequence, and it deploys attackers to strafe the base and eliminate reinforcements even though it's shields are down and it is defenseless.
The other 34 (the 36th City Destroyer landed in Africa as revealed by the sequel and the 35th was destroyed over Area 51) destroyers all going down one after the other seems a little contrived, until it's revealed that they draw their power from the mothership in orbit. Once that was destroyed, all of the City Destroyers lost power and crashed to the ground (apart from the ones destroyed by exploiting their weakness).
Why was the nuke that Hiller and Levinson carried into the mothership given a 30 second detonation timer? Because any longer would risk the aliens disarming it or disabling it, and the duo needed time to get to a safe distance. The plan was also to launch the nuke when Hiller and Levinson were on their way out of the mothership, but them not being allowed to leave derailed the whole plan. The sequel also revealed the aliens possess tech that can nullify large-scale explosions via small discs (which they used against the cold fusion bombs, which are stated to be orders of magnitude more potent than a nuclear weapon). If they possessed such devices on the mothership, any longer of a detonation time and said devices would have been attached to the missile, rendering it completely useless.
The aliens didn't have these in the first movie(and if they did, there's no way we could have known about them and configured our weapons accordingly. The aliens learned from the mistakes of the first attack and prepared a countermeasure for the second one. We had 20 years to prepare for their return. So did they.
The Roswell crash was a ship belonging to the movie's aliens. It was held in Area 51 since the 50s. Part of the conspiracy theory mythology involving the supposed aliens and alien technology at Area 51 (and possibly mentioned in the movie, it's been a while) is that a lot of modern technology was reverse-engineered from the alien technology in the ship. Put all this together, and it no longer seems quite so unreasonable that David could hack into the alien mothership with his laptop; it was probably reverse-engineered from the alien ship in the first place.
I believe that this was explicitly given as a reason in the novelization.
Lack of security in their computer network is also somewhat understandable — they communicate telepathically, and are "like locusts". Very probably they have some version of a Hive Mind, which would preclude the need for that much security, as no-one would sabotage themselves. They just didn't consider that one of their victims would find a way in and use it against them.
Similarly, this shows that they have been doing Recon on the Human Race and America in particular for some time... this is presumably why they attacked when they did. Remember the comment that 40% of American soldiers are either on shore leave for the holidays or massed in Washington for the 4th of July parade? The Aliens knew that they were both unprepared and there would be a significant portion in DC so they could take a large part of their military leadership in one fell swoop. This is also why they targeted the White House.
It could also serve to explain why Captain Hiller can fly the alien ship. Every sub-sequent fighter-jet which came after the ship crashed was probably based on its technology in some way, shape or form.
Also, the aliens hacked our technology earlier in the movie. David was able to find the hack, so it stands to reason that he could then reverse-engineer the methods in order to hack them back.
Why are the destroyers the size of a city when the actual weapon takes up a few blocks at most? If they made the destroyers smaller they could build more and attack more cities at once. However, having a large surface just above the city being destroyed channels the energy from the central weapon, making the weapon many times more efficient.
It's not only a large surface, it is a large surface protected by a Force Field.
Also, their entire civilization is contained solely in the mothership and those destroyers. A destroyer isn't a military vehicle; it's an entire military base and the surrounding town to boot. They don't just fly the things; that's their home. It makes sense that it would be built for all the size they can afford to give it, as this is where they spend their entire lives.
Not to mention, we hardly see all of the weapon, just the "muzzle" so to speak. There could be dozens of power plants and subsystems for the thing, heat sinks, plus all the space needed to house the crew that works on it, repair facilities, aircraft bays, maintenance for the aircraft, the freaking ENGINES that allow a thing the size of a city to hover indefinitely without running out of fuel or flattening everything below it...
It's also intimidation; said ship is incredibly terrifying, and a giant, city-sized saucer coming to a stop over a major city is guaranteed to send all of it's inhabitants into a panic. Look at New York; mere minutes after a ship arrives over the Empire State Building, the streets of Manhattan are completely choked with cars, people are hastily throwing their belongings out of windows in an attempt to get off the island, the whole place is an absolute madhouse.
Russell hits the wrong button while preparing to fly, almost firing one of his missiles while still on the ground. Later, his final missile, also the last one the Americans have, fails to fire, possibly because he messed up the firing sequence before. Had he not messed up the setting earlier, the missile might have hit like the President's and then boom, goodbye Area 51.
Not really, since he'd merely armed the missile while on the ground. The error with the weapon during the final firefight is specifically shown on-screen as a 'clamp malfunction', which couldn't be induced by simply arming the explosive.
As a historical aside, some older air-to-air missiles could become disabled if armed too early, such as the AIM-4 Falcon, which required the seeker head to be super-cooled with a short-lived supply of liquid nitrogen. When you wanted to use the missile, you had to activate the coolant, wait for the seeker to cool down, and then launch the missile before the seeker warmed up again (at a target you had in your crosshairs at just the right time). In combat, the missiles were notoriously unreliable, scoring 5 hits out of 54 launches, and were replaced with the AIM-9 Sidewinder.
On the Headscratchers page, it's pondered what the Invaders would do if we didn't have satellites for them to hack...but then again, there is the possibility humanity reverse engineered a lot of our tech from the Roswell crash. What if that's their MO? They knew we would have satellites they could hack because our satellites are based on their technology and run on their OS...which comes back to bite them in the whatever-they-have-for-an-ass when man, in turn, uses the same OS to hack their shields. In fact even if we discount the possibility a lot or even most of our modern society is built on pirated Invader technology, what if they just attack societies which have reached a certain level of technology, so they can use their satellites and whatever else they can scavenge. Consider for a moment the plot of the game MDK, which puts forth the idea that the aliens (quite similar in many ways to the Invaders) "harvest" the technological riches of a planet as much as its natural resources. The quote, paraphrased, from the creators is that they see our cities as a resource, so they built these massive mining ships to harvest them. The ID4 aliens could be the exact same way. In fact these two theories are not mutually exclusive.
It is also possible that the aliens just co-opted the communications systems to save themselves some time in setting up. For all we know, a lack of said satellites might've just delayed the final attack by hours. Hard to say, really.
Another possibility: if a planet's population has reached a technological level to be a sufficient threat to the invasion, then that population has most likely also taken its first steps into space exploration, including satellite technology (indeed, satellite technology may be a basic requirement for a civilization to even be capable of defending itself). Therefore, if Planet A is capable of defending itself, then it has satellites to exploit. If it has no satellites, then the planet's civilization is weaker, and thus less coordination is required.
Similar to the above, some detractors of the film call out the ridiculousness of David's Mac laptop being able to hack into the alien mothership. This seems to disregard the fact that Area 51 has had example of one of the alien craft for decades to study, and no doubt did the same thing David ended up doing during his demonstration of the deflector shields: Hook it up to one of their own computers and try to analyze or control its systems. The entire reason David is able to hack the mothership in the climax is because the Area 51 scientists already had, and he was just using their research to devise and upload the virus.
In addition, the fact that it's a Mac is, from a real-world standpoint, entirely irrelevant. As any embedded-systems developer could tell you, the build machine and target often have incompatible machine languages, and the Area 51 team would likely have had constructed several generations of network adapters and the software stack needed to access the alien computers.
Moreover, the aliens would have had to modify their computets to interface with ours or they wouldn't be able to hack the sattelites.
The logical conclusion is that the Mac was in fact based on repurposed alien tech.
There's actually some plausibility to the viral attack, assuming David had the time to analyze the aliens' software and communications protocols, especially if he worked with the Area 51 scientists who had been studying the alien computers. If he studied their systems and discovered a zero-day exploit based on their communications protocols, he could have launched an attack that the aliens wouldn't have been able to counter because they wouldn't have known about the vulnerability to begin with. Antiviral software only works when the people writing it know about the vulnerability in the first place.
David had identified the alien signal in multiple sources that was apparently being used to transfer instructions between alien systems. Obviously he couldn't read it, but he was able to identify that it was a binary code (he had a line about that). Binary is the simplest programming language, it essentially just determines whether a circuit is open or closed. Almost any conceivable computer would operate on this parameter, though, again, David would not know what the code would do when operating on the alien's system. Now, the hardest part was done for him (by the aliens, actually). In order to hijack our satellites, they had made communication between systems possible (the modem we see later). David also has an opportunity (in the special edition) to work on the crashed fighter with his laptop for about a day to interface (fast, yes, but he's smart, and the scientists had done some work with the thing). So, finally, to the virus itself. A lot of people say he wouldn't be able to write a complicated virus to disable the shields, because he'd have no idea what his code is doing. And they'd be right. But he doesn't have to write a complex virus. He just has to scramble their signal. And that means that his virus essentially just drops randomized junk code into theirs. (Or possibly deleting it entirely) (Which also explains the way the alien systems start crashing... randomly, with flickers and pulses). I've actually used a similar method to kill some viruses on computers in the past. Unable to delete the file itself, I've taken the executable files, which were filled with incomprehensible compiled jibberish... and just erased all the code. I don't care what it did before, because now it does nothing. The same thing happens here: the alien source code is junked up or deleted, and they have to rebuild it from scratch or try to run their ships entirely manually with no good communication.
We might also consider the notion that the alien computers are extremely simple. We keep thinking the aliens are just like us, but if you consider how simple the computers we got to the moon are compared to modern microprocessors, there's no need to require the alien computers be super-advanced or powerful. They could very easily be flying between star systems with the alien equivalent of a Commodore 64. David's virus could also be as simple as exploiting bugs in the software that are obvious to humans but would never be considered by aliens with a completely different mentality. Everyone who's worked in software QA knows that when you have a text-entry field, you need to be ready for the user to input ANYTHING AT ALL. The aliens, with their hive mind, might never have encountered this problem. To them if the field says "input a number between 0 and 99" then every single hive-linked alien knows not to put in anything else, and it's never occurred to them that someone might not do that. David's virus could have been as simple as changing the shield power from "99" to "tacocat" and watching the whole system crash because it had no idea what to do with that.
This also can explain why the shields didn't instantly go down on the destroyers; if they're drawing power from the mothership and are also receiving shield data, said data is likely on a refresh of a few minutes or more. So when the first missile fired impacted the shields during the counteroffensive, the destroyer's most recent data transmission from the mothership was something akin to "SHIELD STATUS:NOMINAL". When the virus starting wreaking havoc in the systems on board, the telemetry sent to the destroyers below instead changed to "DISABLE SHIELDS".
Of all the cities in America, Las Vegas could very well have been spared. According to the maps at the end, Area 51 is not too far from Vegas. The aliens were able to quickly redeploy a ship, as the main page points out, after picking up a sudden spike in communications from a previously-silent patch of desert. This means the destroyer was likely on its way to drop the Hammer on Vegas, or on its way from.
And to add onto this, it could very well have been the same ship that nuked LA. Payback is a bitch, ain't it?
It isn't. The destroyer that destroyed LA headed to Denver, then to Phoenix. The one that attacked Area 51 was heading to destroy it having just wiped out Vancouver.
According to the War of 1996 website, it looks like the LA ship did head for Area 51.
Alas, Las Vegas did not survive - the city was smashed when a City Destroyer crashed into it. It is actually left untouched in its destroyed state (as opposed to other cities like Washington or London) as a monument of the war.
A Hilarious in Hindsight version: some of Earth technology is implied to be reverse-engineered from the alien ship, and we see the main controller in the mothership using a touchscreen-based interface to control the human-flown ship. Eleven years after this movie, the iPhone is released and touchscreens start to become one of the primary methods of computer interface.
Although touchscreens had been around for some time before the movie was made. The oldest examples dating back to the 1960s. Which would actually line up fairly well with the movie's timeline.
The aliens in general are stupid. This is why they've had to go to the locust model - they can't find technological solutions to their research needs. This is also why the one in Area 51 attacked Whitmore instead of trying to deceive them. Finally, this is why they were prepared for atomic bombs - when they scouted us in the 1950s, we had those - but not a computer system attack: they couldn't believe our technology would advance that quickly. The only reason their technology is more advanced is that they've had a long head start.
When taken in combination with the events of Resurgence, it seems pretty clear that the aliens' Fatal Flaw is arrogance. They are so accustomed to having overwhelming technological superiority that they forego some basic precautions and fundamental tactics because they can (typically) just steamroll anyone they come up against anyways. Once the humans figured out how to counter some of their advantages (using a computer virus to disable their shields), the aliens suddenly find their fortunes reversed without time for them to adapt.
In the "release me" scene, Whitmore is effectively trying to negotiate an end to the war...by talking to a low-ranking pilot. However, he learned earlier that the aliens are likely telepathic and was banking on the idea that he was actually talking to the entire race as a whole.
In a telepathic society everyone may be well-versed in their plans and savvy enough to know that negotiating is something they simply don't do. His mission briefing before the war started included instructions on what to do if live humans were encountered.
And the second movie confirmed that the aliens are a hive mind, so it didn't matter which alien he spoke to. He was basically talking to their queen the entire time.
In the lead up to the final battle, Constance has to remind Mitchell of the hundreds of civilians on the surface of Area 51. Of course she does: this is the first time ANY civilians have been let onto the base and Mitchell, in charge of the most secret underground facility in the country, of course wouldn't immediately remember that he's got a whole town's worth of non-combatants sitting on the base's surface to deal with.
Further, Mitchell is under quite a bit of stress given the circumstances of the last few days. He might be suffering from information overload in addition to trying to help coordinate the base's defense. Beyond all that, getting the civilians under cover is such an obvious thing to do he may have assumed someone else would have taken care of it.
On the mainpage, it is mentioned that MACAS El Toro being U.S. Marine Air base, U.S. Navy F-14s' and Air Force F-16s' are wildly out of place there. It's possible that this was a joint operation involving all branches of the military, with Black Knight squadron fueled, armed, and ready to go being part of the first wave of attack against the Los Angeles city destroyer. The Navy and Air Force aircraft had likely just been reassigned from bases far from Los Angeles, even coming in from outside of California, and were being refueled and armed, with the plan likely being that the Air Force and Navy would relieve Black Knight squadron in the second wave of the attack, and then Black Knight squadron would join in the third wave once they rearmed and refueled. Unfortunately, the Invaders' protective shields led to Black Knight squadron being systematically shot down, and once the Invaders figured out where they had come from, put an end to the joint operation attackbefore it could fully get off the ground.
The rest of the film, particularly the scene in the Middle East, plays this trope straight.
Having F-18s able to outmaneuver alien attacker ships is not all that far-fetched. Human planes have been designed with one set of atmosphere and gravity in mind and tailored to give the best performance under those conditions. The alien ships were not designed for Earth conditions and aren't very streamlined.
The Achilles' Heel of the city destroyers explains why they went through the trouble of a mass coordinated attack all at once despite their tech edge: if they fired without that, humanity might have had time to try and stop the others from firing, as it's likely the shield can't actually cover the gun while its firing. If the aliens were aware of it, it makes sense they'd attack how they did.
based on their communications protocols, he could have launched an attack that the aliens wouldn't have been able to counter because they wouldn't have known about the vulnerability to begin with. Antiviral software only works when the people writing it know about the vulnerability in the first place.