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Independence Day has one of my most favorite hero duos of all time: Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum. Brawn and brains, flyboy and nerd, working together to take out the baddies. It all comes down to one flash of insight on behalf of a drunk Goldblum after being chastised by his father.

Cliché eureka! moments like Goldblum's realization that he can give the mothership a "cold" are great until you realize one thing: if Goldblum hadn't been as smart as he was, the movie would have ended much differently. No one in the film was even close to figuring out how to defeat the aliens. Will Smith was in a distant second place and he had only discovered that they are vulnerable to face punches. The hillbilly who flew his jet fighter into the alien destruct-o-beam doesn't count, because he needed a force-field-free spaceship for his trick to work. If Jeff Goldblum hadn't been a super-genius, humanity would have been annihilated.



Every apocalyptic film seems to trade on the idea that there will be some lone super-genius to figure out the problem. In The Day the Earth Stood Still (both versions), Professor Barnhardt manages to convince Klaatu to give humanity a second look. John Cleese's version of the character had a particularly moving "this is our moment" speech. Though it's eventually the love between a mother and child that triggers Klaatu's mercy, Barnhardt is the one who opens Klaatu to the possibility. Over and over we see the lone super-genius helping to save the world.

Shouldn't we want, oh, I don't know, at least more than one super-genius per global catastrophe? I'd like to think so. And where might we get some more geniuses, you may ask? We make them.

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