| abstract | - Russell Casse is one of the characters in Independence Day. He is a farmer with a reputation for having a few screws loose, along with alcoholism. It is also implied that he may or may not have been abducted by aliens in the past. At the end of the movie, he kamikazes his fighter plane following his fire mechanism jams into the alien ship's laser weapon just as it is about to fire on Area 51, destroying the ship and saving the lives of everyone taking cover inside the base and killing himself. Originally, Russell's sacrificial death was going to happen differently; In the original script for the movie, when Russell attempts to enlist in the aerial battle against the alien ship, he is turned down due to his alcoholism. This then prompts him to secretly steal the biggest, heaviest missile he could find, strap it to his old bi-wing plane, and fly it into the alien ship's weapon. In other words, the movie originally had it so Russell would have been intending to kamikaze himself to stop the aliens right from the start of the battle, rather than it being due to his missile malfunctioning.
|
