Independence Day: Resurgence

This movie has an amazing cast. Boy did I miss seeing Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Sela Ward, and so on! It begun okay. The script could have been better Kinda lost some interest towards the end. If you like the genre, like myself, it is worth watching. It has its classical lines, funny moments, the excitement (not the best but there). Just don't expect a masterpiece.

I don't like fireworks. Never did. I didn't want to waste my time watching them, so instead I decided to go and see "Independence Day: Resurgence." I've never regretted a decision more in my life.

Wow. You ever sit in a class room, and while the teacher is talking you just kind of zone out, and then about ten minutes later you jump back to reality and realize you're supposed to be paying attention? This happened to me multiple times during this movie. There were points where I actually forgot I was watching a film, and I'm not joking.

The tag line is "We had twenty years to prepare. So did they." But did they? Because after watching this movie I really couldn't tell. In fact, the aliens seemed weaker. Sure, they had a few force fields, a few clever bait and switches, but is that really all they came up with after twenty years? No wonder no one in the movie seemed afraid of them. People actually seemed pretty calm, even though the aliens wiped out London and China immediately after entering the Earth's atmosphere, just by flying over them. But that doesn't seem to bother anyone. The Earth is going to end in a few minutes? Didn't seem to matter to anybody in this film, because no one showed any emotion, and anger, any sadness, any grief, any hysteria, or any fear relating to this, and because of this, there was no sense of tension or fear for the viewer either. And this throws the tone off, also. I understand that these movies are supposed to be guilty pleasure fun, but at least have the tone be a little darker and a little more serious. This film was so lighthearted that it was actually off-putting.

This movie never really felt like it got started either. I mean, you get your giant CGI explosion fest when the alien ship first enters the Earth's atmosphere, with cities literally being torn out of the ground, but then the action never gets any bigger or better than that. My jaw literally dropped while watching the destruction during this scene, and I was ready for the action to intensify and grow. But it didn't. It got slower. They put the climax in the first 45 minutes of the movie, and then just spend the rest of the running time focusing on the falling action.

The action was also incoherent, with a million things happening on the screen at one time. It was hard to follow and looked very generic, and while it wasn't necessarily boring, it wasn't exciting in the slightest. And the CGI wasn't even that good either; there were points where watching this movie was like watching gameplay of an off-brand science fiction video game that was released in the middle of winter to appeal to the parents of small children who have no idea that the game they're buying is a cheap knockoff of a triple A title.

And speaking of CGI, the universe that was built in the film didn't seem believable at all. I didn't see an improved and more protected Earth that used futuristic alien technology to their advantage. I saw a paint bucket of CGI vomit thrown on the screen, with Roland Emmerich stuffing it down our throats while saying "Believe it! This is reality!"

I should've watched the fireworks instead.

Twenty years ago, director Roland Emmerich put on screen an alien-invasion disaster feature with moments so iconic & jaw-dropping that viewers n critics alike were left dazzled by the sheer scale & size of its ambition. Independence Day was a watershed event for its genre and its influence on both disaster films & blockbuster filmmaking cannot be downplayed.

Independence Day was in every way a self-contained film. It never needed a sequel and its legacy was well-preserved for years to come. That was until Emmerich decided to put a dent on it, which is exactly what he does with Independence Day: Resurgence. A strong contender for the absolute worst film of 2016, this sequel is as needless & cringeworthy as movies can get.

Set 20 years after the events of the first film, Independence Day: Resurgence presents Earth to be a much more peaceful & united place than ever before. There's higher transparency in international cooperation and the defence system has benefited greatly by reverse-engineering the technology of the ruined alien spacecrafts. But when the aliens return with an even deadlier threat, mankind is put to test again.

Co-written & directed by Roland Emmerich, Independence Day: Resurgence is a facepalm-inducing garbage from start to finish. Everything that made its predecessor an instant classic is discarded in this sequel. What the writers have done with returning characters is downright embarrassing, while the new additions are even worse. There is neither any sense of logic in what transpires on screen nor any uniformity in its plot progression.

All of Roland Emmerich's trademarks make its way into the final print, be it the utter disregard for science or logic, suffocating levels of visual effects, corny characters, nonsensical set of events, and unprecedented demonstration of global catastrophe. The CGI excess is really overpowering in every sense of the word, and with all the stupidity that takes place over the course of its runtime, there is nothing redeemable about this sequel.

Coming to the performances, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Judd Hirsch, Brent Spiner & Vivica A. Fox reprise their respective characters while the new additions include Liam Hemsworth, Jessie Usher, Maika Monroe, Charlotte Gainsbourg & a few more unknowns, and the terrible work they put up on screen is only an extension of their awfully-written characters. In fact, the only one to really admire here is Will Smith, who decided to not return this time.

On an overall scale, Independence Day: Resurgence proves that Roland Emmerich is never so bad at filmmaking that he can't get any worse. Undeniably amongst the worst blockbusters to surface on silver screen, it is a horribly directed, shoddily scripted & poorly performed picture made even worse by its wooden characters, terrible dialogues & lame attempts at humour and sort of makes you wish that the aliens had won the last time. In a sentence, Independence Day: Resurgence is an insult to human intelligence.

Not as bad as many say but yea set your sights low! I loved the original. This one was missing some of the great acting but I still liked the action and Sci Fi. Goldblum is hard to dislike in any movie. He helps save this from a total bomb. I bought a cheap copy on Ebay and will keep it avail for a double feature come 4th each year.

They made the first film again, with a few more and bigger bangs, unoriginal boring aliens you've seen the like of so many times before and an even more cheesy script than the first movie. Most of the cast just went through the motions, many of the younger ones ought to be seeking other forms of employment. The CGI was epic in scale but not in originality,the story hackneyed and clichéd. OK it's not a film to be taken with any sort of seriousness, but this was just poor.

On the opening afternoon there were just 5 of us in a 200 seat theatre - but it was a dull day and I guess most people were out voting in the EU referendum (or working!), but maybe the mediocre press reviews had an effect.

They shouldn't bother to resurrect the aliens unless they can bring something a bit more original to the screen. I wish I'd have joined the rest of the family in the screen next door for The Jungle Book rehash, which they said was very good.