Man, do I love Independence Day. Alien attack movies are always fun, but this one is the best because it has more destruction scenes than all the others put together. Will Smith is mouthy as always, Randy Quaid is in rare, redneck form, and there's enough Jeff Goldblum to muck up a lifetime of fly paper ("help me, please help me"). Data McStar-Trek is funny as that freaky Deadhead scientist, and Bill Pullman is the goofy, incorruptible president we all wish we had. And in a film like this, there is no such thing as nuanced portraits of good and evil, so when That One Guy first appears as the Secretary of Defense, he might as well be wearing an eye patch and chortling "bwoo-ha-ha-ha!"

Bad Secretary of Defense.

Secretary of Defense get no din-din.

The movie makes me wonder, though. A friend of mine used to speculate about what aliens would think of the human body if they landed on earth in the middle of a soccer game. "Commander, these strange beings use only their feet to ambulate, and have two extra appendages that hang limp and useless at their sides." But for real, what would they think of us—those hip, young aliens with their rap music and their pierced tentacles? Would they be more impressed with our enduring history of peace and tolerance, or the Styx discography?

And would they truly want to infiltrate us, like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Faculty? (The latter is worth watching because it contains what has to be the greatest line in the history of cinema: "I'm not an alien, I'm just discontent." Sorry, Humphrey. Sorry, Mr. Gable.)

Seems to me that if aliens really did drop by, it would be like in my favorite Arthur C. Clarke book, Childhood's End. We're talking subtlety here. The aliens take their time, not rushing into a messy invasion with lots of heavy casualties. Nope, these aliens understand that the most effective tool of colonization is the hearts-and-minds campaign. They appear. They don't make any sudden moves. They let us get used to them. Their overarching plan of domination is executed in increments of no less than fifty years. See, the key here is that the aliens are smart, and theoretically they will already have some idea of the best way to ingratiate themselves with foreign civilizations. That is, unless they just want to blow the crap out of us for kicks and giggles. Then every nuclear weapon in the world will be fired, every world currency will collapse, the human race will descend into barbarism, and Darkness and Decay and the Red Death will hold illimitable dominion over all.

At least till Randy Quaid comes along and kicks their alien ectoplasm to the moon and back.

(Incidentally, every time I watch Independence Day, I think about another movie that featured both Pullman and Loggia. I'm speaking, of course, about David Lynch's tender paean to the joys of schizophrenia: Lost Highway. This film is all confusion and atmospheric chaos, but you will glean at least one, inalienable truth from it—namely, that Robert Loggia is a seriously scary man.)