K-SCORE: 7
Director: Roland Emmerich
Screenplay: 5 people! 5 G-D People! Nicolas Wright, James A. Woods, Dean Devlin, James Vanderbilt, Roland Emmerich - never heard of any of ‘em
Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Liam Hemsworth, William Fichter, Maika Monroe, Travis Tope, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Judd Hirsch
Spoiler Level: Major
“Hollywood laziness and incompetence”
Independence Day: Resurgence borders on not a real movie. The script, acting, writing, directing, editing, and even the special effects are so bad that they all wonderfully exemplify Hollywood laziness and incompetence. They’re spitting in the face of moviegoers with this product. It’s another Fast Phenomenon and another example of a film that makes an argument for everyone that worked on it immediately being required to retire. Would I miss Jeff Goldblum… maybe a little, but sacrifices have to be made after the damage a movie like this afflicts. Would I miss Liam Hemsworth and Bill Pullman? No, I would not.
Following the events of the first film, Earth has rebuilt all their major cities exactly the way they were before except now they’ve integrated alien levitation technology into their own technology. They also have a lunar base great for showcasing their really expensive space navy and housing their (mostly rogue) fighter pilots. Despite two decades of advancement, Earth develops no plan for dealing with another alien invasion from the pissed off race of galactic conquerors, and once again cities across the planet are ravaged to complete annihilation within minutes of the giant alien frisbee appearing on Earth’s sensors. The female president is killed by a single alien groundtrooper inside the world’s most secure bunker and all other members of the line of succession are presumed dead. Successful countermeasures to this incursion rely on dubious tactical choices from the alien menace, sacrificing war hero former presidents with chronic headaches, pilots that pee on small sections of the mothership, and using a brilliant AI sphere that arrived days earlier as bait. The pathetic state of Earth’s preparedness for the inevitable resurgence of the alien menace that killed billions the first time (and the second time) is an apt metaphor for the pathetic ill-preparedness of Hollywood to create a decent sequel to a movie that was inexplicably popular in 1996 despite its obvious unwatchability.
“They don’t tell the story with complete scenes.”
When I recap the plot like I did in the previous paragraph, the film almost comes across as better than it actually is. I write in complete sentences. They don’t tell the story with complete scenes. There aren’t complete characters. Edits come quicker than laser fire. The cuts are ruthless and swift, a poorly shaded ploy to get you to not question anything you just saw by moving on to the next absurd thing. Take the scene where the president dies, for example. There’s a single shot fired before an assumed big fight, but they cut away before you actually see how that plays out. Then they swear in the new president, William Fichter, and again cut away before he actually takes his oath. It’s like that for everything. Goldblum’s character is investigating a sphere on the moon, starts to explain something, cut away to a giant alien ship appearing. Someone starts to assess the size of the ship and where it’s headed, I listen up, ready for the stupid exposition and it cuts away before we really get it.
Some pandering to Chinese audiences...
This two hour film features more scenes with more characters in more locations than any other I can think of. We’ve got scenes on the lunar base, scenes on the moon’s surface, scenes in DC memorials, scenes in the White House, scenes in Africa, scenes climbing up the surface of a downed ship, scenes in the desert, scenes in a car driving through a wrecked street, scenes on a boat, scenes in human made fighter planes, scenes in alien made fighter planes, scenes in alien ships in space while flying, scenes in alien ships while on the ground, scenes in hospital rooms, scenes on hospital roofs, scenes in cafeterias, scenes in locker rooms, scenes in bedrooms where two characters are video chatting, scenes in a school bus, scenes at an outpost, scenes in control rooms, scenes in a worldwide leadership video conference, scenes where a madman writes alien languages on walls, scenes in a human-built alien prison, scenes in London where everything is being slowly pulled upward, scenes of east coast cities crumbling, scenes aboard some kind of Atlantic freighter where the crew was searching for gold, and scenes where again dramatic speeches are given in large aircraft hangars. I didn’t go back and check. That’s just what popped into my head. All these scenes have way too many characters populating them. There are four new fighter pilots replacing Will Smith. Jeff Goldblum is in the film and has an assistant, an African Warlord, some army escorts, his father, and a co-researcher and former lover following him around. The film features two different presidents, both complete with huge entourages. There are no fewer than three generals / admirals. They brought back Bill Pullman. They brought back that weird white-haired scientist from Area-51 and have him wake up from a coma. He has a buddy who has been taking care of him for two decades. There’s a car full and later a school bus full of kids that serve no function. There’s a ship of opportunistic Atlantic seamen that has at least eight guys on it. There’s Will Smith’s wife, stripper actually turned doctor, who saves a new mother and her baby before the maw of hell opens up beneath her. The little girl that played the president’s daughter in the first one has grown up and is now a politician, fighter pilot herself, and the girlfriend of the Hemsworth that they cast, and disgustingly they didn’t cast Egg! That actress stayed in films and became more famous than the girl they did cast; she’s just not as thin. Did they even ask Bland if she wanted the role? Come on!
So how do you put all that together into a story? Teleportation and telepathy. The characters move between locations like London, New Mexico, and the moon as if the distances between them are completely irrelevant. More than that, they communicate with magic, updating each other on the invasion circumstances in scenes we see and presumably ones we don’t. With normal speaking voices fighter pilots will talk to mission control centers and that ridiculous Atlantic ship. But no one has a plan. The only things they ever need updates on are “How big is it?” and “How much time do we have?” The only exception is one plucky comic relief pilot guy who, like the rest of his pals, hijacks an alien craft and flies it out of a mothership. They’re all talking to each other just by speaking into their cockpits, but he’s given a walkie talkie. Was it underneath the chair? Is he not actually in that scene? He’s just a crazy kid playing alien invasion at home and he built a really cool replica of a fighter plane from another planet?
The ship is sometimes as large as a shopping mall, other times as large as a few city blocks, and other times the size of the moon. Various shots give us a verticality to the alien ship that could be estimated at a couple hundred meters. If the thing is a disk with the diameter that is the distance between New York and France, then a few hundred meters from bottom to top makes the thing tissue paper thin. It’s drilling a hole in the ocean to get to our molten core and it penetrates the entire upper mantle of the Earth, but this appears to have no effect on any geologic scale, yet presumably once it reaches the core, everything will die. It’s a rather severe conflict that no one seems to be taking seriously.
“the script was tacked on last, a malformation birthed by five people”
The plot of the first film was simplistic and stupid. This one sticks with that tradition and just ups the ante on the number of cliches that it inserts. Disaster porn destruction of cities, sky beams that represent cataclysms, alien motherships with hive mind mentalities that can be defeated with a single strike at the queen, a single weakness that a one-man fighter can exploit, governments that shoot first when encountering new life forms, scientists that forgo humanity for the sake of research, AI robots that learn English in seconds, call people primitive, and speak in a high-pitched female voice, daring rogue fighters with personal conflicts with their old best friends / copilots, and an alien design that is a clear rip off of the aliens from Aliens. If you flatten the faces of those aliens, you get the Independence Day creatures. Independence Day: Resurgence offers nothing original, nothing interesting, nothing we haven’t seen before countless times, and it does so in a story so poorly told and so broken that it’s literally difficult to follow. I’m inclined to believe yet again that the script was tacked on last, a malformation birthed by five people that are far more interested in promoting their own careers and doing favors for publicists than they are in crafting a functional narrative.
This film is a heaping hunk of wasted time and money, another nail in Hollywood’s coffin hammered into place by the cowards that try to continue their money-making by dishing up the same exact products we’ve been getting for decades only bigger, fatter, stupider, with more explosions, and more forced celebrities than ever. Did anyone who made this movie care about it? The only thing that impressed me about Independence Day: Resurgence was their ability to make a film that much worse than the patriotic disaster trash from the 90s.