Stealth doesnt mean invisible to radar, just harder to track and given that experts predict stealth to eventually become obsolete to future radars and tech , a space travelling civilization surely had that figured it out
I believe the rise in I-45 that they were hiding behind is an elevated overpass of the freeway hence the rise in an otherwise flat terrain. Obviously the implication was that the rise provided some shielding but an elevated section is a terrible place to hide during a nuclear blast. You'd be better off hiding on I-10 which is dug into the ground as it approaches downtown hence always being shown in flood photographs as being flooded.
I saw it in theaters in Irvine, CA right next to the El Toro Marine vase, we all laughed too since it was a couple miles from us. What a great summer at the movies.
Alien: After being parked here for weeks, I finally I get to destroy Houston. I waited my whole life for that promotion. Humans: **Destroys Houston** Alien: OH GOD DAMN IT!
Damn it. I love these "hopeless" scenes in movies when we trying to destroy enemies with ours the most powerful weapons and then we see that all this effort was absolutely useless.
The irony is that interstellar travel at near light speed or greater would've meant the spaceships could easily survive a nuclear attack. No scientist would've advised a direct attack without first finding a way to undermine whatever shielding they had. The display of using the nuclear weapons is just because the general public has no idea of the science involved.
@@moteroargentino7944 Wouldn't you expect some protection be needed against the extreme distortions of space time near the event horizon of a wormhole? Remember such a wormhole would be a sphere, you would have to go through the event horizon. Our theoretical physicists have speculated that if a blackhole was large enough such as maybe the super massive blackhole found at the centers of galaxies then maybe the distortions would be gradual enough to get close and perhaps through the event horizon but the gravity well doesn't just end at the event horizon and the distortions still increase as you get closer to the center and if you are to travel via a wormhole, you need to pass through the center of the singularity. If anything, wormhole travel would not just need an energy forcefield but a negative energy forcefield which affects space time itself and that would be pretty good at deflecting any projectiles or energy tossed at it.
@@stevendeamon The presumption of wormholes is from the math of blackholes. A wormhole is a blackholes or rather two that are connected through the singularity. All the math behind wormholes are the math of blackholes. I am most certainly not confusing the two as wormholes are categorically black holes.
I remember reading somewhere, whether it was official or not, it was written in the perspective of the aliens. Their thoughts and reaction with the nuke attack was one of shock. They didn't realise that Earth had weapons like this. The commentary between the aliens resulted in them prepping their fighter defense for a second attack because their shield capability was at less than 10% after the nuke strike.
@@equusamans Well fortunately we know that Nuclear Winter is bullshit. The only serious issue would be the amount of fallout created which always last for about 2 weeks and follows the path of wind. If it gets into rain clouds, it will be rained down somewhere. Fortunately out of the eight nations that have nukes, only two nations have the ability to delivery the weapon with a tactical missile, the other 6 will have to use strategic rockets or traditional bombing which might be riskier.
It's actually cannon in the universe that, once it was confirmed that the aliens' shields were down, China and Russia nuked a dozen or more of the city destroyers. You can't really blame them, as this was perhaps a one shot chance at taking these things out, so might as well hit them with the sledgehammer.
@@nonaurbizniz7440 that and the Chinese-Communist ass kssing. It wasn't just dumb, but it was pretty disgraceful compared to the patriotic overtones of the first movie.
I love the president's reaction when they thought the ship was destroyed. Everyone was rejoicing but he remained calm and thoughtful, perhaps thinking "It's a hit... but at what cost?".
Max Eisenhardt if the aliens didn’t already destroy Houston during the invasion, it’s been destroyed now. And possibly irradiated to uninhabitable levels forever.
I can't remember where I read it, weather it was a form of novelization of the film or what ever, but I vividly remember reading something from the aliens perspective of this scene. That they were wondering why the humans would fire a single projectile from a single vessel, then flee, only to relise the destructive power of the weapon the humans used. According to to what I read the Aliens sheilds were about to fail. If the humans followed up with a second nuke or an airstrike, it could've crippled the ship. I think it was a legit source that was concurrent with the release of the film as I read it back in 1996.
@@Bacopa68 ICBMs and for that matter cruise missiles, require satellites to guide and track. The movie explained that most of Earth's satellite network is out so it is logical for the USAF to launch nukes via planes.
@@leonedralev3776 In 1993 there were no US ballistic missiles that required help from satellites. And there still aren't any today. And speaking of planes, there are plenty of planes that could have simply loft bombed nukes onto the ships. US stockpiles are lower than they were in the 1990's, but even now the US maintains many nuclear weapons in Germany and Turkey capable of being fitted onto an F-16. And in the early nineties we still had laydown bombs stationed in Europe. If it took five or six nukes in a few minutes, these ships could have easily been taken out.
I remember my dad renting this movie from Blockbuster back in the day, ordering pizza and having all of us watch it without any of us kids knowing what it was about. Absolutely blew us away. The whole movie is the perfect balance of action, terror, and humor.
Lmao, U killed me,🤣😂probably confused the F and scared the shit out of the Aliens. They were thinking this people are willing to sacripised themselves, WT Hell did we get ourselves into lol.
The way the IFV driver says "Target remains....I repeat, target remains" after this scene only expanded the despair horizon in this movie. At this point humanity was effectively out of options.
Well with the corpses at Area 51 bio weapons could have been developed, given that you had idea what there biochemistry is and how it works. But yeah realisticly speaking besides using the Zar Bomb there was not much else to be done
they are people saying that there is a book that tell the story in the perspective of the aliens. the ship's energy shields were reduced to 10% thanks to the nuclear bomb. we just needed one more nuclear bomb to destroy the alien ship😐
@@ivanelias3916 But at what cost? Talk about a Pyrrhic victory. We beat the aliens and obliterate countless cities while nuking hundreds of millions of people.
I love that even when the rest of the war room thinks the nuke strike was successful, the General reserves judgement. Likely because he knows that, even if it worked, it would require nuking the rest of the planet to defeat the aliens...and thus...ourselves. Thank you, this has been my Independence Day TED talk.
After the first alien attack the secretary of defense tells the President he talked with the joint chiefs of staff and the military was immediately asking the president to authorize a nuclear counter-attack against them but President Wittmore quickly dismissed the idea of using American weapons over the US itself
@@badendhappy2903 Saw its launch but I don't feel the Raider can top up the beautiful design of the B-2. B-21 seems like an inexpensive alternative to B-2.
The bomber could have fired from much further away if the president hadnt took so long to say "deploy." He waited until the last second, by which time the bomber was so close it's likely it was wiped out by the blast.
manuel ramirez IKR?! Just have the B-2’s escorted by a few fighters while the guys on the mother ship upload the virus. Fire a test missile to make sure the shields are down and then nuke’em. Of course that wouldn’t have been nearly as dramatic.
Luke Petersen the second movie should’ve been about how 3rd world countries managed to take down the ships.. since most of them don’t have much of an Air Force
@@lameroad1569 thats why this movie is sooo good, i remember seeing the first time as a kid thinking the nukes will win, but once i saw those were useless i was like how on earth are they going to win?
That bomb should have been detonated beneath the ship, not at the side or on the topside. A large fraction of the bombs energy was wastefully radiated away into the atmosphere. A bomb exploded beneath would have transferred much more energy onto the alien ship, plus the energy that would have been reflected from the Earths surface. A bit like a banger exploding in your open palm would only cause superficial burns but the same banger exploded with your fingers wrapped round it would cause the loss of your hand.
Of course why would an interstellar spaceship hover so close to the ground is questionable as well. There would be no reason for them to get closer than say geostationary orbit. Indeed, I would expect attacking aliens to still be out in the Oort cloud diverting comets at the Earth.
Since the fighter planes could not penetrate the alien shield that extended to the ground ,which it did according to canon in "The War of the Worlds", the cruise missile likewise would have been stopped by the shield.
I like how Huston was leveled by one of our own weapons rather than an alien death laser, the sheer devastation of the nuke vs the alien ship floating there unscathed afterwards gives you a sense of hopelessness
When they were on air force one the secretary of defense informs the president that after talking with the Joint Chiefs they military was already asking the president to authorize a nuclear counter attack
@@brummyuk2151 i highly doubt it i know its all fiction but if an alien race actually came to earth (like actually traveled light years to get here) we wouldnt stand a chance in hell a nuke would be like throwing a rock at a tank to an alien race that had to travel probably faster than light speed and dodging black holes and sht we would just get wiped out
one of my most favourite film ever. This is the best and only film of alien invasion that i could truly feel and enjoyed the flow of terror from the very beginning until the end. Didn't found any of similar breathtaking film recently.
@@corkystorky yeah agree. The sequel was horrible. i guess they rushed it too far, far less detailed and absurd leap technology concept which is clearly not their expertise, no terror at all. soo sad.
corkystorky it was indeed rushed because they had a whole other script involving Will smith, only he dropped out in the middle of production, so the writers had no other choise then to rush it.
I was more pissed off that it literally wasn't even close to Houston on any of the footage, even the freeway signs were wrong... we don't have those here
The novelization does a great job of describing this scene. Instead of just seeing some ground turbulence, it shows the mushroom cloud climbing into the air above Houston.
I have a lot of issues with alien “immunity” from nuclear weapons. I understand it is a huge plot device. But I just can’t open my mind to anything constructed that could take on a even a small tactical nuke as shown. The energy is just..... insane.
There was a lot of dumb in this movie but the things they did right, they did so well that the bad didn't really matter. It's still a fun movie 25 years later
@@SoldierOfFate I think supplemental material makes it clear the Russians and Chinese used nukes on the alien craft in their territory and used their spare craft to assist other countries
Well also no one else other than Russia has the ability to attack with nukes like we do. Russia is the only other nation who can launch a tactical nuke on a tactical missile with direct results. Everyone else has to rely on strategic rockets or traditional bombing to deliver. Russia certainly has more nukes than the US so it wouldn't be strange if they started using them at any given chance. China for example doesn't even have 100 nukes, they might be more willing to wait because it's more precious to hold onto them.
I never get bored with this scene. Lets put the strategical and tactical realism aside (like using ICBMs), it is a one prety good scene. Nuclear missiles are ultimate weapons of humanity, theoretically with no yield limit. Using them is a last hope act, with nothing more powerfull in arsenal of Earth. Imagine those expectations in hearts of president, general, and all people involved, one day after three major U.S. cities with millions being destroyed in single attack and best jets massacred in a desperate counter-attack. Watching those B2 is terrific, watching nuclear missile being launched and impacted even more. The shock after making none damage to Destroyer is hard to imagine - most powerfull weapon is completely useless. And I can imagine aliens easily tracked those stealth bombers, but they found it useless to send a squadrons of Attackers to intercept, being overriden by self-confidence and shield-reliance. Brutally strong scene.
When I saw this scene for the first time, I didn't think that the atomic bombs were useless, but that the film was unrealistic. A nuclear bomb should have dusted the alien ship. The energy requirement to absorb this energy with shields or at least dissipate it would simply be far too high.
@@OpenGL4ever Another person commented in a different thread that in one of the books, written from the aliens point of view, the nuke knocked down the shields to 10% so a second nuke would have taken them out.
@@majordbag2many overestimate the destructive capabilities of nuclear weapons. The basis of the destructive potential of nuclear bombs is a shock wave due to strong air currents. The plasma ball is destructive at the moment of explosion, but it has a small radius and a short lifetime. From the point of view of physics, the explosion of a nuclear bomb is an artificial star that existed for the shortest possible time. A civilization capable of interstellar flights had to master the technologies of protection from supernovae, the gravitational influence of planets, electromagnetic waves of stars and collisions with asteroids. I strongly doubt that a huge spacecraft that managed to enter the Earth's atmosphere at high speed and at the same time experienced enormous loads will not be able to withstand some kind of nuclear bomb. In fact, in this film, humanity did not have a single chance, except for a viral attack and sabotage. That, against an over-developed alien race is impossible and ineffective. Even today, there are fingerprint, eye, and even genetic passwords. The film is beautiful, but unrealistic. Humanity would accept the fate of the indigenous peoples of America.
@@OpenGL4everNot so sure about that. You don't need to absorb or dissipate it, if you can move it away. They could be shielding their ships with the same type of magnetic field that they're using for confinement in a pure fusion reactor. Their weapon seems to be some sort of plasma that explosively disperses. In order to do the level of destruction it does, that's gotta be well into the hundreds of terajoules range. If you can contain that level of energy in a weapons system, then you're capable of enveloping your ship in a field that can shrug off a 750 kiloton nuclear explosion. What I'm basically saying is that they're linking their offensive and defense systems into the same thing: a massive confinement field capable of constraining nearly a petajoule of energy. The ship is a huge magnetic donut that contains a fusion reaction and prevents a fusion reaction from entering.
@@AlxnickWell, that's a nice fan fiction. We don't even know what kind of field is that. However, these kinds of alien "invasions" are quite cheap. Such an advance species doesn't even have to interact with us directly in the process of an invasion. Take a look at The Dark Forest. The aliens from that book sent a single 1 x 3 meters object. :)
This was so crippling it's so primal it's like the prehistoric people trying to kill the Bear with their best spears and the Bear's skin is impenetrable and now it can kill them all
The amazing part was nobody in 96 had any idea that the finale would be a mission to deactivate the shield allowing for a massive attack to destroy all of the the bad guys.
Can't blame them for losing all hope after this scene. The most powerful weapon in humanity's arsenal............ didn't even scratch the alien vessel.
@@hollywoodmkx Yeah, it knocked their shield strength down to 10%, could you imagine if the US had used a LGM-118 Peacekeeper ICBM armed with 11 W87-0 warheads (each 300kt) would have easily annihilated that alien ship.
And the observation crew at the bottom. The EMP from the nuke should have fried all their electronics thus rending their vehicle in-operable which would lead them to travel outside and be exposed to radiation..
Apparently there’s a novelization of this film and in it the humans didn’t realize that nuke strike disabled the shield. So in that iteration, a second strike would’ve killed the alien ship. If you think about it it’s surprising no other country tried salvoing nukes at a single target.
Funny thing about this scene, when you realize their ships could probably reach light speed or close to light speed....even running into a spec of dust at that speed would create an insane release of energy, 100000 100 megaton warheads or more...a single warhead would be like shooting an M-1 Abrams with a BB gun. Their shields would be so strong it would be beyond any human comprehension. This is a fun movie but if this really happened humanity would be toast in about 5 minutes
They should have dressed up the nuke like a pizza delivery man and rang the doorbell and took off. When the aliens open the shield to get their pizza….BOOM!
😳. F**k me! I never thought of that! Uhhh - hey wait! One of the bomb pilots could be a ventriloquist! He could throw his voice when the aliens come out & say “vegetarians rock!” If the aliens say “No they don’t!” Then we give them the pepperoni pizza & BOOM!” If the aliens say “damn right! Vegetarians Rock!” …. The the ventriloquist bomber say” WHAT’S THAT OVER THERE!!!!! When the aliens look away somebody jumps in and picks off all the pepperoni & repaces it with tomatoes! World saved.
That kind of reminds me of the War of the Worlds scene where the aliens opened up the hatch and took Tom Cruise’s grenade belt which then exploded inside
Actually, that was the plan - Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum both thought delivering a pizza but said "let's pretend we are delivering a virus" when in actual fact they uploaded a pizza menu and all the aliens were squabbling over the 2-4-1 deal and who wanted stuffed crust that they lost their shit and both Jeff and Will bounced leaving a nuke behind with a pizza oven.
I'm pretty sure that nukes would be very effective against city destroyers if used correctly. Conventional missiles were ineffective against shielding that protected alien fighters but were strong enough to knock them off course with direct hits. Nuke blast would probably have a somewhat smaller size ratio to the city destroyer than conventional missile blasts had to the alien fighter, but if you pound the destroyer with several nukes at once, maybe it would be possible to knock it off course too. For example, hitting with nukes from above and along the same side of the ship's circumference could "overburden" it from one side, flipping it. And being flipped at this altitude would crash it into the earth, probably destroying it, or at least making this particular day the worst the crew had in their entire lives. There is so much room to slide/fall to your doom in a city-sized vessel. ^^
If Remember Correctly The Aliens Almost Got Fucked,It Takes 2 Nukes to Take Down One city Destroyer,That Cia Guy is a Bitch But He Was right Another nuke Would Have Killed it
The only thing protecting the alien ships was the powerful shields. The nukes wouldn’t even be able to penetrate it. They would just end up nuking themselves trying to destroy the destroyer ships. When the shields were disabled, they were able to bring them down. But that was without the shields. So there’s no doubt the nuked would of worked but only without their shields. So no it wouldn’t of been effective. It’s technology far more advanced than human capabilities. They were only able to figure out how to get through it. A simple computer virus.
They put in the sequel that a multi sided 'drone' attack was sufficient to knock out capital ship shields with almost trivial ease... so I'd expect the City Destroyers to go down if they were hit with a sufficiently large nuke. If the Destroyers were truely invulnerable, they wouldn't have ever bothered launching their fighter ships in defence. The movie calls the small ships 'Attackers' but we only see them used to defend against enemy fighter threats.
Movie Mistakes: 1:36 Plane turns left, but next shot of it on radar shows it turning right 2:38 Wipes eyeball and suddenly we get visual confirmation (This wouldn't change the scope hes using)
@@corkystorky I saw two replies by you but didn't read them, sorry Me and 49 people dont care what you have to say. If your family and lack of friends leaves you feeling lonely, i suggest you go visit a church and make some new friends to help with your insecurities while you troll videos late at night, Good luck :)
@@MerchantIvoryfilms Did you even understand what he or she said? the plane was going left but on the radar it was going right (Maybe the reason why it is going right on the radar was because the mapping was from ground and not on the sky or space Please don't start a conflict Please forgive me about my grammar
@@MerchantIvoryfilms Please don't start a conflict by teasing or making someone annoyed by saying something like "Who are you again? No one" please have a normal conversation and respect people
That only works on digital systems like the ones we use in earth, Aliens as stated in the movie use technology that differs vastly from our own, hence why the Area 51 scientists were unable to do tests with the Alien Craft they had ; something along these lines "we were unable to run any tests since we could not replicate their power source" ,it could be assumed that their tech is immune or highly resistant to EMP like analog systems used by humans.
@@Optimusprime240 While the virus thing ita a stretch to say the least, David could only do so cause the aliens left a way to convert the languaje from their computers and sytems to ours; the "hidden signal " on the satelites that connected their systems to relay the signal for the countdown to Earth's satelites and once David figures that out he started analyzing that "code" , in a deleted scene you can see that the Area 51 scientists couldnt understand the OS of the craft they had and David pointing out their communications worked in the same way, like i said its by no means a perfect explanation but at least they tried there.
If that were the case, they would never had survived interstellar travel at speeds close to or higher than the speed of light as the sparse amount of electrons and protons scattered through interstellar space would be like an intense wall of radiation and even a grain of sand would impact with greater energy than nuclear weapons.
0:37 Was always weird for me to go to U of H down 45 and reach that spot. Obviously they used a model here since they didn't close down that highway at the time of filming (that I'm aware of) but still nice to see that someone was paying some good attention to make it look like the right spot.
imagine detonating a nuke beneath the mothership. since its shields can repel the force of a nuke it would reflect so much of the energy of the blast into the ground. like a nuclear echo
These scene would have been chilling if there the aliens called them and a voice was broadcasted in the room, saying: "Impressive weapon. Most impressive." The aliens are not putting them down ... but that makes it more chilling because nukes are all we have, The power of the god unleashed on the enemy, and it didn't work.
Crysis during the mission Reckoning kicks this up a notch. The nuke looked like it initially worked...and then it ended as the equivalent of kicking a Hornet's nest.
In the novelization, the aliens honestly didn't see this coming. The explosion nearly drained the shields of this city ship - if they'd fired a follow-up shot, they'd have destroyed it.
I love the psychological warfare by the aliens.. They literally allow the humans to detonate their most powerful weapon and witness how useless it is against the aliens lol
Perhaps it was a visual tribute, but the twisted lamp post in the foreground of the night vision shot after the attack resembles the Martian heat ray weapon from 1953's The War of the Worlds.
"Captain! the human aircraft are turning back" "I guess they can't tell that attack killed our shields" "Lucky for us, there is no way we could have survived a second missile" Seriously, after they used the nuke they should have fired a conventional cruise missile and watched the result. For all we know the nuke might have completely overwhelmed the shield leaving the ship intact, but vulnerable.
Unlikely, if there was any risk the bombers would have been shot down, the aliens had no way of knowing Humans would give up after 1 nuke, specially after all the air capable armies on the world already tried spamming conventional missiles at them and failed
While it makes sense that there would be some limit to how much damage the shields can take, the humans had their conventional forces scattered. The only reason they were able to launch this strike was because the aliens hadn't destroyed Kansas City and Whiteman AFB. Plus, even if the humans managed to get one regular missile to test the shields and confirm they were down, the aliens would have adjusted their tactics to begin targeting nuclear installations.
@@JustPippaNY It makes sense that they could be overloaded with a single attack, but I don't think they'd weaken over time. I always imagine shields as being a bit like a magnet, it doesn't wear out from pushing other magnets around, but with a strong enough push you can make south pole touch another south pole.
The only thing that would make sense in an alien invasion is that they destroy earth immediately with no casualty. I also feel that if anyone ever has saw a UFO it's because the UFO ALLOWED it self to be seen. An alien race probably combined with A.I. super intelligence would have a million ways at it's disposal to exterminate us within moments. There wouldn't be a resistance, military showdown nor a goofy speech from the president.. simply normality replaced with silence in an instant.
It would also make sense that a ship of that size with a super laser weapon floating indefinitely in the air probably has a power source that is greater than all of earth's power generation combined. Makes sense a nuke would just bounce off the shield.
I’ve always thought that using an air-launched cruise missile was completely unnecessary in this attack. Who’s to say the alien sensors weren’t tracking these B-2s all the time? Aircraft are the most vulnerable of the Nuclear Triad. The aliens never attacked any of the ICBM silos or the ballistic missile subs at-sea either. Their missiles could have been easily re-tasked to hit the enemy over US soil all at once, even as a “test” over how good the enemy shielding could be.
@@omnia9348 ALCMs are slow-ass missiles with heat plumes you can see from miles away if you're an alien starship with advanced sensors. The thinking is, if they won't bother to dodge an ALCM with a medium-yield warhead, then they probably won't dodge a few ICBMs with high-yield warheads. So why not just use ICBMs? And no, ICBMs do not require satellite-guidance. They're not JDAMs. They work on internal guidance that is fail-proof come hell or high water. Their warheads have smaller heat and radar signatures than winged ALCMs from a plane. Unlike cruise missiles they come at you at Mach 3, and one Minuteman can be re-fitted to carry multiple warheads, aka MIRVs. Right now they have single warheads per missile because of our arms limitation treaties with Russia. I'd like to see a City Destroyer ship stand-up to five MIRVs and see how their shields hold. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-HWZXinRwCaE.html
This particular force was a scout force that was there for two objectives: assess enemy defenses and raze population centers in preparation for the main invasion force. Also, they didn't know about humanity possessed nuke silos or ballistic submarines as they were never employed against them. In the novel, the aliens were actually shocked when the US chucked a B2 with a nuclear payload at them.
They drop Wide Putin and Wotka. Alien1 : Did you hier that? Alien2 :Yes..wait a moment.. sounds like... Alien1 : WIDE PUTIN?? SH.I:T*“&3%_ -connection lost- -fatal error:wide putin code- -universe-server restart- -galaxy-server restart- -earth-server restart- -russia- loged in -alien- loged out
