Just awesome! It still beats many of the current rubbish space movies Hollywood makes right now.

A must watch movie if you love Sci Fi. Great story, brilliant SFX, well acted, fast moving, some action. What more do I need to say. Will we watch it again in the future, absolutely even though we have watched it three times already.

Scientists living in the United States intercept a strange alien "transmission" from outer space that turns out to be a count down. I do not know why the aliens would send any type of "message" that the humans could receive. At zero, the invading aliens propel a laser pulse from positioned destroyer ships that demolishes various major cities on earth including DC, where the President originally is. The idea, I imagine, is to reduce morale and make it easier to kill them all! To prevent their annihilation, while at Area 51, one American scientists proposes a plan to the President who arrived by Air Force One with him to give the alien computer system a virus. This virus will bring down all of the alien shields so that the united human counter-offensive can use some of their own weapons, i.e., a nuclear missile. The Americans discovered previously they were not able to penetrate past them; after the first strike the President ordered the military to launch a nuclear bomb from a grounded armored vehicle that had a visual of one of the destroyers in sight. The missile was not able to pass its shield. The scientist and a soldier commandeer a captured enemy jet stored there, at Area 51, and successfully upload the virus into the mother ship by flying the jet into the mother ship's docking bay and connecting to their computer system. With their shields down, each and every of the invader's ships is taken down. All the humans had to do was remove their shields.

When it comes to sci-fi alien invasion stories, older generations think of HG Wells' War of the Worlds, which spawned a classic radio broadcast and two movie versions, both of which were successful. Then came Invasion of the Flying Saucers, and then Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Star Wars would soon put the genre to rest. In the mid 90s, the directors of the surprise hit Stargate came up with an idea to make a big budget alien invasion movie set on our favorite holiday in this country...Independence Day. The movie would soon break records and gross around $800 million worldwide and sell even more on VHS, laserdisc, and then DVD and bluray and digital HD and pay TV, and the rest is history. Watching it today vs 21 years ago is kinda outdated but this movie is much better than the box office failure that was Resurgence and the movie that Centropolis made two years after ID4, a rehash of Godzilla that wasn't as good as the original one or even the 2014 reboot. The visual effects in the movie as well as the sound mix are pretty good, the casting is great, and the acting is classy.