With work on Independence Day 2 underway, writer/producer Dean Devlin explains one key moment from Independence Day 1...
This article contains a well-known spoiler for Independence Day, that we've hinted at in the headline.
Ah, director Roland Emmerich and writer/producer Dean Devlin's Independence Day. An hour of excellent build-up, and then another hour. We still like the film, but it still has, well, one or two problems.
And the most maligned part of the 1996 blockbuster? The moment when the aliens are defeated after Jeff Goldblum's character uploads a computer virus. The world wide web as we know it was in its infancy in 1996, but those who were online still managed to make clear that they were pissing themselves laughing.
Dean Devlin was the man behind the Independence Day screenplay, and thus the man that came up with the 'computer virus' plot device. So, Mr Devlin: explain away. "Okay: what Jeff Goldblum's character discovered was that the programming structure of the alien ship was a binary code", Devlin wrote in a Reddit AMA. "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."
We're going to stop and think about that. We've thought about it. Nothing changes.
Independence Day 2 goes into production next year, for release in 2016. Hopefully, the aliens will have upgraded their binary codes accordingly.
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