The thing is, though, you don't really form any sort of attachment with Quaid's kids either. And you can't really form any sort of emotional connection with people you can't really see. If Quaid's character makes the ultimate sacrifice without really having someone to go back to, then it sort of dulls the impact because, again, he's not doing it for anybody except the faceless masses still left alive. They're there, mostly Quaid's character's kids, to give Quaid something to want to sacrifice himself over.
I honestly have no reason why Randy Quaid and his kids were even in this movie since, essentially, they're practically useless. And, of course, it's not that I expected a movie about fighting aliens to have any real character depth, but the one-dimensionality (if the latter is even a word, if not then I just made it up) of these characters is quite something to behold. They're just there to pad the length and, even then, it's not like they're in the movie that movie.
Having watched this now, however, I can say that Randy Quaid's character, and his kids (as an extension) are completely forgettable and unimportant. This might be due to the fact that, once again, I was eight-years-old when I first watched this. For someone so important, his character rarely made any sort of significant impact to me and my memory of this movie. Which is intriguing, since Quaid's character really is one of the heroes of the fight against the alien threat. Honestly, without being allowed to go online and verify it, if I was asked on a quiz 'Was Randy Quaid in Independence Day?' I would have answered no. But, outside of that, there is very little that I truly remember about this movie. And, of course, I remember parts of Bill Pullman's climactic speech. I remember Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum flying the alien ship to the mothership and installing some sort of virus. I remember the jump scare with Okun in Area 51. Not that it's a truly bad movie, at least not offensively so, but the thing is that I remember very little about the content of the movie. With that said, however, even with the relatively average rating I gave it, this movie is, at the same time, better and worse than it had any right to be. That's not to say that I couldn't find some enjoyment out of it as someone who's 30, but I knew that I wasn't going to see the second coming, like some people tend to do when they're nostalgic about certain movies or the experiences they had with it. This was a product of its time and my enjoyment was also a product of its time. I never looked at this movie with rose-colored glasses. But I wanted to go back to a timeframe where things were much simpler for me, not as stressful. However, when I say I was nostalgic for this movie didn't mean that I was expecting it to blow my mind like it probably did when I was eight. Now, of course, as someone who was eight years old at the time of this movie's release, my tastes were, say, a little less discerning than they are now, theoretically speaking.
Anyway, one of the things I remember most about this movie, other than that one jump scare, isn't even something about the movie itself, it's the fact that I made my mom (or aunt) take me to see this movie in theaters a second time. I was eight years old in 1996 and, quite frankly, this was probably the type of movie that spoke to me as a child. Here's the thing, Independence Day came out in 1996. Admittedly speaking, however, the reason I did choose to watch this last night wasn't to contrast Extraterrestre with this, though it does make for an interesting contrast, it was simply because I was feeling slightly nostalgic and I wanted to watch a movie from my youth. But Independence Day, for one reason or another, is still somewhat fondly remembered to this day. Well, really, perhaps that last point is a bit of an exaggeration. So, now that I think about it, as I didn't really notice at the time, it turns out that after watching an alien invasion movie (Extraterrestre) without the aliens and barely any invasion as it is, I decided to watch the most alien invasion-y movie ever made.