10 More Deleted Movie Scenes That Explain Confusing Moments

It doesn't matter how good or popular a movie is, if there is a plot hole, or at least a perceived plot hole, in the story, there is a risk of it overshadowing everything. Take, for example, Roland Emmerich's Independence Day.

The film is beloved certainly, but there is always the looming question of how exactly Jeff Goldblum's David Levinson was able to infect the invading alien tech with a computer virus. Particularly, when considering that much of the problem in facing the extra-terrestrials was that their technology was way too advanced for anyone on Earth to crack or reverse engineer.

Yet, all it took was his dad telling him not to catch a cold, and he figured out how to beam a virus up to the mothership and disable it long enough for an attack to destroy it. Audiences wondered for years exactly how this was possible, and it wasn't until writer/producer Dean Devlin addressed the subject years later that some answers were given.

In spite of the aliens being described as much more technologically advanced than humans, the programming structure used was based around binary code, something that was relatively simple for David to decipher, similarly to how he figured out the countdown with their signals at the beginning of the film. 

There is a deleted scene - at the 5:59 mark above - that shows David studying the tech a little further, and discovering how the communications worked. This context would have been very useful later on.