fujishig

The only part of the "plot" I actually liked was the reveal that the warlord and his people were battling the aliens for 10 years and actually learned their language and developed a connection with them. Although what was the rest of the unified world doing during that time?

Did the alien queen come to the planet because of the failed invasion, because she was ticked off by the president's first speech, or because that defenseless globe lured her there?

Sooo many cliches. If you can STILL suspend disbelief by the time the bus scene rolls around, I commend you for your childlike heart. I couldn't even listen to the president's speech this time around without rolling my eyes.

I'm pretty sure the best way to defend a base against an armada of alien fighters is to shoot at them with rifles from the ground. We only need two guards protecting the inside of the base as well.

Why do they even need the aliens in the cockpits if the queen can control the ships directly?

So much more: the alien queen's shield having a weakness to a banshee scream. Peeing jokes taken straight out of a Bay movie. 20 seconds to get out of the base but I swear the scene takes a couple of minutes. Shaving off a beard makes an infirm old man strong again.

B5Erik

Well, I went to see this today and I had a blast! Is it, like the first one, just big and a little dumb? Of course - this is Science Fiction bordering on camp, but not quite crossing that line. The cast is clearly having a good time, and the story works as a follow up to the original.

This doesn't bring anything new to the table in terms of Science Fiction or disaster movies, but that's not the point. This is just supposed to be the movie equivalent of going on a roller coaster at Six Flags. Sure, it's pretty much the same as all the others, but it just flies by and has so many twists and turns and dips that it's fun anyway.

There is room for movies like this - movies that are just fun, movies that are just there to help you de-stress, decompress, and forget all the other stuff that makes day to day life harder than it should be.

I give ID4 Resurgence a 4/5. It's fun.

Abob Teff

I may echo some of the previous sentiments but here are my random thoughts ...

This movie had no soul. I LOVE the first one, call it a guilty pleasure if you must. This one just is flat. I have no emotional resonance or vested interest in any of the characters.

Likewise, the mass destruction scene is pure disaster porn -- it has no weight or gravitas like the counterpart scenes in the original. Even when Vivica Fox bites it (and I did like the way they did that and that they were willing to do it) it is cold and hollow due to Usher's "acting."

Speaking of, why couldn't Hiller (Usher) do anything to save her? He literally just stood by and watched. He had a jet which was extremely fast, maneuverable, and could hover. Why didn't he try to swoop in and save her?

The young leads were terrible. Folks here were fawning over Maika Monroe but I thought she came off as an even worse version of a young Shailene Woodley (which I didn't think was possible). She looked and acted as if she were 12 years old (the phone call scene sticks out in my mind). This actress has neither the looks nor the chops for this role. (I'll save some space and say: pretty well applies to the kid who played Hiller and the Chinese pilot, too.)

It was great to see many of the original cast back, but some were pointless and should have been excised from the film (looking at you Judd Hirsch -- your whole story and everything related should be deleted scenes on the Bluray). Really liked Bill Pullman at first, but then his voice and speech got weird during his big "rally call" speech.

Enough bagging on the actors ... Goldblum was great and I always love ogling Sela Ward (who did great).

Really, Independence Day: Resurgence suffers from modern filmmaking "sensibilities." No time is spent developing anything. At the same time, it doesn't bombard your senses enough to make it a fun thrill-ride. It is really just mediocre. Running a little over two hours, I wasn't checking my watch during the show but I also am not sure what they spent the time on. It certainly wasn't character development or world building.

A ball? A ball? I was stoked at the idea of a third species being introduced. Bill Pullman's dream sequence featured something looking like an alligator (obviously not the aliens that attacked us). Then we, being good redneck Americans, shoot down something that is very obviously NOT a ship like the ones that attacked us. (This was probably the best scene in the movie and the only one with any tension.) I was pretty excited at where this was heading! Then the reveal is ... A fucking Happy Fun Ball?! Disappointing.

I would rather see a movie about the M'Butu fighting their war after the war than the movie we got. That was a rich concept that needed more! Likewise, I wanted to see more of the ground conflict in the alien ship. Instead we got VERY bland generic battles, both in the air and on land, that existed only to exist. They didn't tell more of the story or advance the overall plot.

In short, meh. This was more akin to Battleship than Independence Day. Special effects extravaganzas are no longer breath taking events. Independence Day: Resurgence isn't a failure, but it fails to deliver on almost every level. Where the original succeeds beyond its special effects with campy fun and character-driven storylines, ID4:2 suffers from TMPP (too many pretty people) and rings a very hollow imitation. I do give the filmmakers applause for not echoing the original too much, as many "sequel/relaunches" are apt to do these days. This sets up another film (or films) which excites me at the potential, but the execution needs to be done much better than this.

asianxcore

Even though it was a setup for a possible third film, I really liked the idea of the only survivor of an entire civilization (that was wiped out by the aliens) training refugees from other planets destroyed by the Harvester Queen and Co.

Didn't think the film was as bad as I was hearing and didn't think it was great either. That last 30 or so minutes was pretty fun though, especially with that Harvester Queen running about causing all sorts of havoc.

Enjoyed Goldblum in this as well.

windom

Who decided that it would be a good idea to film most of this movie through some kind of blue filter?

So I take it that Dr. Okun is gay, right? Was his partner in the original movie or just introduced here?

My kids and I just watched the original before seeing this one. My son brought up how they didn't have any smoking in the new one. They should have had David share cigars with Hiller's stepson in honor of his father. I'm not even sure if those characters interacted at all.

iggystar

Yup. Emmerich stated that a gay couple would play a major part in the movie. It was just introduced here that I recall.

DRG

Not sure I get the extreme hate for this movie. Dumb? Sure, but not any dumber than the original. Maybe my expectations were lower because of the RT score, but this was in the very least enjoyable -- unlike some recent soulless CGIfests where a lot of shit happens but I can't wait for it to be over. I'd definitely see a third one, if it somehow gets made.

I call total bullshit on this. Sure, this wasn't perfect by any means but compared to Bay's Transformers sequels it's a frickin' masterpiece.

Maz Kanata

She died? Either I dozed off or was so disinterested that it didn't even register.

fujishig

You seriously missed this? There's a whole scen where he rushed down to her work just in time to see her die saving a baby and mother, while he's helpless to stop it despite being in a hovering ship and having much more implausible things happen during the movie. He then mourns for a scene or two and is back to normal, just like everyone else in the movie.

I did like that she went from stripper to nurse/Doctor.

EddieMoney

In the upcoming third film, "Indeependass Day: Resplurgence," she will combine the two careers.

rexinnih

Oh Hell Yes!

Shannon Nutt

Finally got around to seeing this today. It's bad, guys. Not a "poorly-made" bad in terms of visuals and such, but "bad" in a Michael Bay "I couldn't care less about what's happening on screen right now" and "god, what a waste of money" kind of way.

The movie isn't so bad in the first half hour, where we're catching up with all the returning characters. But there's not a single new character that is remotely interesting (nor are they given anything interesting to do), so things quickly go downhill fast. The fact that the movie essentially is a big long trailer for a third film that probably isn't going to happen is an additional letdown (the only other movie I can think of that ended like Resurgence does is Back to the Future, Part II - but in that case, Part III was wrapping up and due for release six months later).

It made sense that humans would use the alien technology to advance our own sciences, but that choice made the movie that much more hard to relate to as an audience member. Human society presented here was almost as alien as the aliens themselves.

I was also a bit miffed that no mention is ever made of what happened to David Levinson's ex-wife, who it looked he was almost certainly back together with at the end of the first film.

The movie also kills off a fan favorite for what looks to be a really noble movie-ending reason...only to find out a few minutes later that the sacrifice was essentially meaningless. I wanted to throw a rock through the screen when that happened.

Those are small points though - the movie is just a big, loud mess with a silly plot that is a mishmash of Aliens, Stargate, and a few other much better movies.

Roland Emmerich has made a lot of silly distaster movies, but this is easily the one with the least amount of humanity sprinkled throughout and the least amount of fun.

I gave it 2 out of 5 stars, or a D+/C- grade.

Abob Teff

Vivica Fox -- am I the only person who thought she was a hospital administrator, not a doctor or a nurse?

Shannon pointed out something that I didn't key in on, but I did hear in a podcast ... The world presented here is not relatable to us. It's a world that has not experienced global terrorism, social media (or cell phones and the Internet), or dueling Bush/Clinton presidencies. I didn't pick up on it because I just thought the characters were bland and unrelatable.

fujishig

As soon as they had that shot of the futuristic flying cars shuttling people around me then cut to the moon base, they lost all relatibility to me. The reason that's kinda important is because I felt a lot of what made the first film was the scenes of our landmarks and people being annihilated. It's telling that the most interesting part of the backstory was the one part of Earth where there was no peace, and an African warlord was fighting a ground war with the aliens for eight years.

Well, that and the fact that despite world peace, we still shoot first and ask questions later (in this case way later, like after the celebration is over because that's more important).

DWilson

The last two posts bring up a good point. This is a much different film than the first one, -the first built upon the "Disaster Film" format set in the "Everyday" world we live in and with characters we are familiar with thrown into turmoil (and for me it still plays that way). The sequel is more of a Sci-Fi film with a futuristic world where you cannot readily identify with what is going on. It was smart to build on what happened, -a lot of sequels don't, -but they lost a key component to what was attractive about the original. The African warlord's story threw me, frankly, -I thought the aliens were all gone at the end of the first film; this felt like something that was pulled out of nowhere.

Shannon Nutt

Not only that, but the backstory there (a ground war against surviving aliens) sounds like a better movie than the one we were treated to. Of course, that film would have needed to have been made back in 2000 and not now.

A day after seeing the movie, I'm more MAD now than anything...I almost skipped it in the theater because of all the bad reviews, but I like the first one so much, I thought I'd enjoy this one more than most (after all, there's a lot of people who HATE that first movie). Now I wish I hadn't seen this at all, because it's tainted the first movie for me as well (now knowing what happens to some of these characters). I'm trying to think of another sequel that tainted the original for me this much. About the closest thing I can relate to it is how Alien 3 made me feel about Aliens (which, of course, was also a sequel...but that's a good comparison).

fujishig

Highlander 2 absolutely tainted the series, so much that they just ignored it.

It's true that the African warlord part was out of place, because they say the entire world was at peace and that the aliens couldn't function without their leader (hence all the comatose prisoners) Apparently it's explained in some novel that the warlord (the previous one)was delusional and wouldn't let anyone outside help him fit off the invading aliens, who were an anomaly of sorts. Plus Goldblum's ex died in a car crash or something. But at least that storyline seemed a bit better than we got (plus the warlord we got was a big teddy bear with cool machetes)

islandclaws

I had to see this for myself last night.

This combined the worst of Michael Bay's action with the worst of, well, Emmerich's films, too.

I've had paper cuts that were deeper than this bland turd. It is everything the first film wasn't, amplified by a thousand.

E Unit

So..........did you like it?

islandclaws

Oh, right.

I LOVED it!

Jk. This is a terrible, irredeemable film. Not even the mighty Goldblum, the only guy having any fun here, could save it.

Why So Blu?

Oomph. This was a pretty awful film. Fox's character was a cameo and she had like zero line. My friend mentioned that the main chick was a poor man's Leighton Meister and that the Madam POTUS was still sexy played by Sela Ward.

Duuuuull.

mattysemo247

I actually disliked this movie more than Ghostbusters. Congrats ID!

Shannon Nutt

Yep, me too. I didn't get out to many movies this year, but barring a end of the year dud, this was the worst movie I've seen in 2016.

dex14

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Supermallet

This movie felt like Starship Troopers but without the satire. The new characters had no personality, were given none by the script, and Emmerich seemed to direct everyone to read their lines as flatly as possible. I'm also not understanding the praise for Sela Ward, who seemed at no point to understand the gravity of the situation the world was in. When the first ship showed up, she basically just said "SHOOT!" and then later when the world is being destroyed she was oddly calm.

If you told me all the live action scenes were shot in one weekend and the rest of the movie work was CGI, I would believe you. This had no heart, no soul. They even ripped off their second alien design from Marvin the Robot in Hitchhiker's Guide.

I think the scene where Pullman volunteers for the mission exemplifies what's wrong with the movie. His daughter volunteers, and he stops her and volunteers instead. She objects and he says, "There are so many reasons I'm the right choice for this mission" and then he doesn't tell us what any of those reasons are. It's beyond lazy screenwriting, it's practically catatonic. As a result his sacrifice has no weight (a problem further compounded by the fact that the queen survives the attack). Similarly, at the end, despite losing friends and family and watching about a third of the planet torn to shreds, everyone's just like "When can we leave to get to space??" with these stupid grins on their faces like they have something to celebrate.

The original ID4 was big stupid fun. This was just big and stupid.