Independence Day: City Destroyer | Ship Breakdown 

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The aliens ships emerging from the clouds to darken entire cities was one of the most awesome alien invasion scenes of all time. Still unmatched today.

I still think the world directly after the first movie would make for a really interesting post-apocalypse scenario that doesn't follow the nuclear- or zombie apocalypse trope. A world destroyed by means that are comparatively benign (after all, "only" the large cities were destroyed), a world that tenuously holds on to the unity it found in the face of destruction, military splinter groups holding the last vestiges of power, huge alien spacecraft wrecks to investigate and plunder, maybe even alien survivors?

It's probably worth mentioning, since it was skipped over. The nuke used on the city destroyer, actually scared the Harvesters, as they didn't believe Humanity, had such powerful weapons, and brought their shields down to 10%.

The Destroyers were created in three different scales: a four-foot version for wide space shots, a twelve-foot "hero" model for the majority of shots, and a massive thirty-five foot section representing one sixth of the ship for closeups.

Thank you President Lone Star. When things really sucked, you turned it around to make it blow.

Fascinating to me that this was initially conceived as a sequel to Stargate the movie, and the aliens coming to Earth following Ra's defeat on Abydos.

' the ships hung in the sky in much the same way bricks don't '

Still one of my favorite alien invasion movie. Its campy and I love it.

Probably one of the most menacing ship in all Sci-Fi.

"We will not go quietly into the night!" still gets me every time.

Its amazing the aliens need such a huge thing to destroy a city while we need only a little thermonuclear bomb!

The thing about their sheer size being too much to overcome with conventional weapons even after the shields went down always seemed a little overblown. Sure, if you were going at them using mostly air-to-air missiles as the US did in their attack you won't make much of a dent, but a few bunker-busters dropped on top of them would make a pretty big hole.

I recall as a kid watching the movie and thinking the main weapon was actually for mining and was just incidentally used as a weapon. Turns out that was true; I just had no idea *what* kind of mining it would be used for. Also, in the expanded lore, the mothership in the first movie was "grown" off the surface of the ones we see in Resurgence and sent ahead of the main one in order to suppress humanity prior to harvesting the planet.

What a way to celebrate the 4th of July with a film that had us face the biggest threat in the history of humanity.

I love that design of those ships. Simple shape, but still detailed enough to make the incredible size tangible. The first movie was really good and imho still it. But the second one... let's avoid that. I refuse to accept that in my personal head canon.

I'm Canadian, so the 4th of July this year is just Tuesday. But ID4 is one of my favourite cinematic traditions. Try to keep all your limbs and eyes this year, my neighbours to the south. (Canadian "u"s used with reckless abandon)

I know they never actually created much lore behind the aliens but yeah this was pretty much a film summary, the only real breakdown being the ship having a 25km width.

A truly magnificent 90s scfi film still stands the test of time this film brings back great memories

Fun fact 1: In reality this ship wouldn't need any weapons. Air pressure under it would be such that it would crush any building Fun Fact 2: The deceleration of the mothership would create so much heat that Earth's surface layer would melt. All humans would be killed by their ship's arrival.

I always thought the human military ( writers) left out ground based missile systems or naval sub launched cruise missiles , and manned anti aircraft weapons. .

Probably the best movie from the 90's in my opinion and the special effects still hold up now (Maybe because practical effects were still a thing back then). I always wished they'd done more with the counter atack once the shields were down, like sending in high flying B-52's to do some old fashioned bombing runs like in world War 2 but hey ho, can't complain.

Loved this movie when it first came out in 96. My parents and I actually went on July 4th to see the film. Good times!

Guilty pleasure or not, I absolutely love this movie. It's by far my favourite "popcorn flick" And if I ever want to switch off my brain and just be entertained, this is the top of the list. A large part of that is the designs of the Alien tech. The vfx guys did such a wonderful job on this movie. The ships look menacing, alien and beautiful all at the same time. And the practical effects and model work mean that ID4 has aged very well. Apparently they didn't get that memo for the forgettable, cgi riddled sequel.

One correction, the ship does have some short range point defense turrets which we see being fired at the welcome wagon helicopters

I literally rented out our base theatre for my unit to watch this film, lol. 👽

As I understand City Destroyer are use as shock troop carrier And the Harvester Queen ship in Resurgence are used to Mine the planet core

I still get goosebumps when I hear that clip of President Whitmore

One of my favorite 90s disaster movies. Thanks for covering it

My favorite movie. Saw it four times in theaters! Its the reason I'm a syfy nerd now!

Independence Day is a fun movie. I haven't seen it in a few years, but the aliens, their ships, and the city destruction are all still quite memorable in my mind. Thank you for the recap episode; it made me want to watch the movie again lol. God be with you out there everybody. ✝️ :)

I was at my apartment in Tempe, AZ the day they arrived. The closest ship near us was in LA. You actually saw the exhaust clouds in the far distance while driving certain sections of interstate 10!

Love, LOVE, LOVE, the first movie, hated the sequel. Should have taken cues from the ID4 books Silent Zone and War in The Desert. They go around the galaxies (they are intergalactic, not interstellar) harvesting life, taking lifeforms that have genetic benefits, and turning those favored lifeforms from a conquered world into bio-mechanical gene-spliced tech. For those of you who have not read Silent Zone or War in The Desert; I suggest you do so. They're written by the same Author, Stephen Molstad and his insight gives a unique perspective you cannot get from the first movie. He heavily hints at the little guys hailing from another galaxy.

"Welcome to Earth!" *Throws a hook.*

This was one of my favorite movies as a kid. My best friend in High School got pissed at me for putting the speech at the end in the Yearbook at my Senior's Message rather than leaving a message talking about how great my friends were, and how much I would miss them.

Fun fact. Roland Emerich has been trying to make this movie a second time since 1996

1st movie: Big ships. Gives you a city-destroying laser just to say hello. 2nd movie: It's so big that it will rip the atmosphere off the planet just to say hello.

When I get home I'm gonna rewatch ID4

The most epic and scary alien ship from my childhood

Gotta say love the use of Sins of a Solar empire soundtrack

I've got this movie recorded on my DVR and can't wait to watch it. Again.

Still such a great speech 🎉🎉 Happy 4th of July to those that celebrate it 🎇🎇🎇 "Good morning. In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. "Mankind." That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom... Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution... but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night!" We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!"-President Whitmore

I think I requested it one time, thank you for covering it. I'm surprised you did considering outside of what is in the movie there isn't much about them. It's one of the best Saucer Spaceship design, I also like the spaceship in The Thing (2011) who share a similar design but can only be seen fully in concept art.

The amerikans attack on the Area 51 ship was futile. I have no idea what they expected to do with their A2A missiles. Those have small warheads, and were never intended for the use to which we see in the film. That attack would be like have 100 men with carbines firing at a WW2 battleship. Even unshield they werent doing any damage to speak of. Of course, they got lucky, b/c, Hollywood blockbuster. They had the right idea earlier in the movie. Nuclear cruise missiles certainly would have worked (at that point), but at a major cost of course...

I saw this on 4 July 1996 in Houston. Everyone stood up and cheered when Houston was nuked in an attempt to destroy the craft. The special effects department must have had a guy from Houston on it because the film used a model of the 59 Split, the most hated freeway interchange at that time and even today. Everyone loved the seeing that concrete melt and collapse in the explosion. BTW, the air launched missile in the scene was based on the SRAM, which had been withdrawn from service a few years before 1996.

Just watched the movie with my kids for the holiday and it was their first time seeing it... they enjoyed it as much as I did on my first watch.

Fun fact the city ships could have destroyed a city because of the immense downward pressure of such a large object.

man this is a universe i would love to see them expand

It's Independence time!

Thanks for the content.

I'd just like to point out that the nuclear strike was not, in fact, ineffective. According to the novel the nuke fired severely depleted their shields down to only 10%. A second strike would've finished it off.

If they only kept up their subscription to Norton Antivirus....

A ship that can hover a city is epic. Childhoods end is also epic.

omg I love this channel. I have a question for you: Let's presume you have a small device the size of a basket ball that can continuously emit 1x10^25 volts of electricity, at whatever amperage you want, at will. The power is just always available without the need for batteries or capacitors -- let's say it's zero point energy, or some matter/anti matter generator from some sci fi tech. What could one do with this much power? Laser potential? Electrolasers? Charged particle gun? Not even considering other aspects, like transportation or EMF manipulation, shields. Using so much power, what could one do to generate shields? Especially if we included a gravity wave generator, allowing a gravity bubble as protection ( for more please check out: "Zero Point The Story of Mark McCandlish and the Fluxliner" ) Oh also, the casing of the device has near perfect heat dispersement, so that isn't an issue. Side project of mine to recreate a "theoretically scientifically possible" Dalek Thanks!!

I was happy to relive some of Independence Day, but genuinely shocked to be reminded of the existence of Independence Day 2.

Even Spacedock could not dig up sufficient information on these mysterious alien ships.

Bonus points for using the term "cyclopian". 😉😎🤘

Watched it with a fellow nerd in theater when it originally released! Fun movie.

1:44 is wrong. We know that they had at least in the "hangar frontal area" gun emplacements. And given the size and what we saw in ID2 we know perfectly well that they basicaly did not need to use all their capability's untill the shields collapsed. And by then the airbattle was so dense that they did not utilize their AA becuase hitting their own would have ben a posibility. It could also have ben, in the one battle we saw, that the ground to air emplacements (that also fired and unleashed hell) did in fact target those things as soon as they unboxed (as nearly halve the battle was waged on its underside). Given we humans know how to AA, its safe to asume that even the 20 - 40 mm guns shreded those gun emplacements if present or used (like the gatlins on the planes do with the alien fighters quiet effectivly)

Really giving us the highschool special with this spaceship breakdown.

celebrate Independence Day ❤❤❤

Man what a great movie. It's a shame they never made a sequel........ (Stares with violent intent)

I think these aliens are a mining team because their way in waging war is so inefficient that I think they're improvising with those equipment and their arrogance in thinking that primitives can't kill them just cost them. 🤣🍺

The city destroyer used wormholes as the means of ftl travel

It's fortunate that the aliens used MacOS and didn't think that any viruses would affect them, otherwise the one 500kt nuke wouldn't have totally vaporized the mother ship that is 1000 times larger than the blast radius of said nuke.

SUPER subtle timing, guys! 🤣 Happy 4th of July, 'Murica!

Independence Day Videao I also would have accepted a breakdown on the ectoplasm-animated Statue of Liberty seen in Ghostbusters 2.

I lov how movies so American like Independence day seemed so normal as a kid

One of my favourite ships in sci-fi.

When an advanced alien civilization forgot to invest in IT

I wrote an article for my website that quickly devolved into trashing the Aliens from this movie for being shit at war and so dependent on their tech that they did not know what to do when they could not hide behind it.

Perfect for the 4th of July

Still one of my favorite movies.

i love this movie !

According to the official novelisation, their goal was 'food(us), water, air then sun' - they arrive, devastate the locals, establish a beach head to process the planets core, and by the time it's all over there are now two capital ships. Moving their way across the galaxy like locusts.

No mention of how the ship's hull is designed to contain and direct the shockwave generated by the primary weapon, which is called "The Hammer"? Oh well. Happy Independence Day.

There was a point where I'd seen that movie so many times that I could quote it verbatim. Not exactly proud of it, but it was a time when I couldn't afford cable and we only owned a few DVDs. LOL

I feel an advanced alien civilization would have vastly superior computers than our 90's computers did, would have been better if the virus failed and the aliens trolled them. All the fighters and city destroyers' shields being powered remotely by a much larger command ship has it's advantages, but disrupting that transmission could be a weakness, would have made a better and more realistic movie in my opinion.

This ship is still epic 20+ years on.

Trying to fight a ship with 25 km diameter with amraam and sidewinder missiles , no wonder they didn't made much damage. Well its not the only plot hole of the movie.

Those city destroyers design make them look like cities in the sky..

This feels like it would have been a nice promo for the sequel movie.

Thank you for the solid chronological description. The only thing I might add is that the alien technology seemed to function, at least partially, on Broadcast Energy or networked power transmission of some type. The first movie suggested that was why the derelict Roswell craft “woke up” when mothership was close. By the second movie humans seemingly replicated or reverse engineered the hover technology as you stated as evidenced in the film though I don’t think they ever discuss the power source(s) for all this fantastic tech.

Nice video. Dare I even attempt to re-watch the second film even with some former Soviet-liquid motivation?

Love a brit covering Independence Day on the American holiday

Thought we were gonna get an actual ship breakdown

"We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Except you, Randy Quaid, you're totally gonna die!"

Awesome

Still one of the greatest alien invasion movies of all time. The sequel sucked, but it still gave us some interesting insights into how the Harvesters’ civilization works, which was much appreciated. Would’ve loved to see that decade-long ground battle in Africa. Shame we were just told about that rather than shown it. I’m sure their ground combat tactics are quite unique and required unique counters from the humans.

I think the smoke and fire was a sheath of plasma, which EM radiation has trouble penetrating, one of the reasons you lose radio contact with spacecraft during re-entry. It could either be a form of stealth, or maybe it's the ship dumping energy during re-entry. The russians have experimented with using plasma as a form of active stealth, basically generating it at the leading edge and having it flow over the wing. Dunno if it worked for them or not.

Also worth noting this movie was a bit of a rip off of the 1983 TV movie (and later series) V. The ships were very similar (albeit much larger than the V ships) and it opens with them over major cites with a countdown, except in V the countdown lead to a shuttle arriving with a "We come in peace" messenger and an infiltration plot rather than a violent invasion theme.

Nice drop on the 4th of July 👌

I always thought that the best "pseudoscience" answer for the "main gun" on those ships is that they were somehow an "antimatter conversion beam." That would explain the devastation they cause, in that the beam converts the matter it touched into anti-matter, which combusts against adjacent matter, and propagates outward to a point, making continuous explosions. It's the only way I can think of that a beam like that would have such an impact spread, rather than just piercing the target and destroying things immediately in contact with it.

It does look good.

Whem i was a kid, that was my favorite movie

It's hard for me to hear that speech at the beginning and not think "we're not just doing this for money... We're going it for a shitload of money!"

Could we get a Ship Breakdown of the California class please? :) maybe once Season 4 finally airs as a celebration maybe?

niceeee the breakdown of this ship video could take a few hours i guess!

0:20 Instant like for Sins of a Solar Empire music ;) (well actually not instant)

No point defense? A single vulnerable super weapon? The Tarkin doctrine strikes again