Welcome To Earth
ID4 is a sci-fi film that pulls together elements of action, drama, suspense, romance, even comedy, too. There are several big name actors that put together excellent performances, and several subplots involving these actors that help develop them while managing to never interfere with the steady and suspenseful pace of the film. The resulting movie experience is very fun; if you can forgive some of the ‘convenient’ occurrences–like Jeff Goldblum using a PowerMac to help defeat the alien defenses and Bill Paxton, the President being able to fly an FA-18 Hornet with superb skill–you’re in for quite a treat.
Let me take a step back now and explain the movie plot a bit more to those who might not be familiar. The story isn’t really all that original, but the way it’s told is what makes the difference. Basically, aliens invade Earth with dozens of massive ships ominously looming over major cities around the world. When attempts to communicate fail, a small attack is attempted on the ships, which only results in revealing the awesome defensive technology the aliens have. The aliens then initiate a full blown attack on the cities they are over and completely destroy them, resulting in a worldwide exodus from big cities while the alien ships move closer to their next targets. The humans are forced to quickly pull together and come up with a plan to save their existence and destroy the invading force. That is the film in a nutshell, and were it as vanilla as that it wouldn’t be as entertaining as it is. With great performances from Will Smith, Randy Quaid, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Paxton, and others, along with small subplots that develop these characters and their relationships, the overall plot does very well for itself.
Presentation and Features
ID4 looks very good on Blu-ray; great even. I didn’t expect such a good looking film for something this old, and after having watched a couple of older Fox movies on Blu-ray recently. Granted, this movie is about twelve years old compared to the twenty-plus year old Commando and Predator films I just reviewed, but it looks surprisingly good. With the exception of a few darker scenes that show some grain, the rest of the film looks quite good to say the least. ID4 also sounds as good as it looks with its DTS-HD 5.1 track. Explosions are huge, dialogue is clear — it’s a total package that’ll move you.
I was pleased with the extras included on this Blu-ray release, but we aware that the number of the features does not always equate to the quality of the features. First, there are two audio commentary tracks, one from the director and one from the visual effects supervisor. Secondly, and my favorite feature although like most it’s only really useful one time, is the trivia track; with this feature enabled, small pop-ups will appear throughout the film giving insight to how certain scenes were created, miscellaneous backstage stories about certain scenes, as well as information on certain things brought up in the film, like SETI. Trivia tracks are a really fun way to get an automatic second viewing of the film, and the writer or writers behind the trivia track did a fine job. The people behind the Java based ‘Alien Scavenger Hunt’ didn’t do as good of a job; this feature, when enabled, puts a mini-game on top of the movie. You’re quite literally using your remote to click on objects in the film as the movie plays, but there are only about a dozen such objects from what I have read; given the length of the film, that averages to one object every twelve minutes, which seems a bit too few to really get anything out of the experience. Other features included are even less useful, like the Bookmark feature that allows you to save points on the disc you enjoy and view them again later. Keyword Search is kind of a silly scene select feature whereby you can enter in a keyword and the program will find parts of the disc that relate to your search, allowing you to skip to them. Lastly, there is D-Box support.