Remember That Time the 'Independence Day' Producer Explained the Infamously Inept Hacking Scene?

Gwynne Watkins
·Writer, Yahoo Entertainment
image

Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum in ‘Independence Day’ (Everett Collection)

We originally posted a version of this story in December of 2014. Now that the sequel Independence Day: Resurgence is hitting theaters, we thought we’d update to remind readers of one of the original movie’s most hilariously hokey plot points.

The Independence Day sequel Independence Day: Resurgence is about to hit theaters. So we wanted to revisit the time ID4 writer and producer Dean Devlin tried to clear up some confusion about the first film’s infamously goofy computer-virus scene. Fans of the 1996 sci-fi blockbuster will recall that Jeff Goldblum, playing MIT-trained computer expert David Levinson, thwarts an entire alien invasion by uploading a virus from his Mac PowerBook to infect their spaceships. (You can see the bit here in a compilation of terrible hacking scenes.) During his Reddit AMA in 2014, Devlin was asked a question that countless Independence Day viewers have pondered over the years: How was a human computer virus able to infect the aliens ships?

Sure enough, the screenwriter had an explanation. “Okay: what Jeff Goldblum’s character discovered was that the programming structure of the alien ship was a binary code,” Devlin replied. “And as any beginning programmer can tell you, binary code is a series of ones and zeroes. What Goldblum’s character did was turn the ones into zeroes and the zeroes into ones, effectively reversing the code that was sent.”

Well, that explains that. Just one thing: How did Goldblum’s 1995 laptop, with its 8MB hard drive, have enough memory to transmit a virus to an entire fleet of spaceships? Also, since this was years before high-speed Wi-Fi, how did he connect his computer to the alien ships in the first place? And wouldn’t the aliens have some kind of firewall to protect themselves from primitive human computer viruses? Okay, actually, Devlin’s explanation doesn’t really clear anything up. But he says it with such conviction that we have to give him props. (There’s also a deleted scene that made the whole hacking scheme seem a little more plausible.) We can’t wait to see what David Levinson uses to hack the aliens this time around. An iPod Shuffle, perhaps?

Watch a trailer for ‘Resurgence:’