Independence Day: Resurgence

Cafe Society
1

Twice the explosions and half the cheesy charm of the original.

I mean, that’s pretty much it. The movie hit its marks, they had their throwbacks (but no Boomer shout-outs (or even a replacement dog in a similarly silly situation) WTF?!?), and it ended on time.

But, God, what a mess. Really, the best thing about this movie was the sheer joy it took at brazenly ignoring basic science, logic, tactics, psychology, motivations, emotions, causality and probability, so when a planet-destroying event skids to the stop at somebody’s feet, you don’t even blink.

In conclusion (because, really, how much is there to write about this?), while the original was big goofy fun, this one was just big and goofy.

2

There was a dog in brief peril due to its stupidity: the ugly little dog that wouldn’t get onto the bus until its owner pulled it on despite the rather looming threat. :slight_smile:

I saw this as a double-feature with the first movie, and I was shocked how few people were attending the first showing of a summer blockbuster. :confused: Yes, the first movie started at 5pm on a Thursday, but there weren’t that many more people for the 8pm showing of Resurgence.

I thought it was fun (and yes, goofy and BIG!), but not “see it a second time” fun. :slight_smile:

Random (spoilered) thoughts:

[spoiler]*Warlord and the nerd-turned-warrior were both cheesy, but the latter didn’t come with a whiff of racial baggage WTF. :smack:

*Vivica Fox’s character dying by split-seconds while Judd Hirsch’s character survived his boat landing ashore was bogus, not just because it was preposterous but narratively: why not let Fox’s character be rescued and then never show her again? Young Capt. Hillier doesn’t have enough motivation without his mother being dead?! :dubious:

*What city WAS Hirsch’s character supposed to be boating in? Couldn’t be East Coast, where the alien ship landed, and still reach Area 51 before the end of the movie. :rolleyes:

*Dr. Okun in a coma since the first movie? :rolleyes:, just :rolleyes:

*The sidekick pilot in this movie was less annoying than the sidekick pilot from the first movie played by Harry Connick, Jr.

*So what would the Apple-Sphere :slight_smile: species have done for us if we hadn’t destroyed their ship on arrival? IIRC, their plan was evacuate now, train & equip later, which the humans would consider defeatist. But I doubt they had enough weapons with them to make a difference in the human plan, so basically serving as alien-bait was the best they could do.

*The movie-makers clearly don’t intend to wait 20 years for the next sequel, having practically advertised one in the last couple of minutes of the movie.[/spoiler]

3

Lots of positive shout-outs to China, this should do well in that market.

I called them the Death Star species as they appeared to have a trench in the middle.

I liked how the aliens drilled a mile-wide shaft down to within a few feet of the mantle… and there were no repercussions or anything. It was like all you need is a wafer-thin sheath of rock over the mantle and it will remain contained, which, apparently, explains all of our volcanoes.

So the Queen’s strategy is to place herself in increasing levels of danger? “Let’s go to Earth, where they’ve just killed billions of us… Now, let’s fly down to the hostile planet… Now, let’s leave my big ship and go join the fighting in one of my city-wide ships… Now, let’s leave my crashed ship and run right into the most heavily-defended fortifications on the planet.”

Really, given the strategy, it should have been called Independence Day: Alien Suicide Mission.

4

OP, you may not have intended it, but you’ve made the movie more attractive to me.

Glad to hear that the sequel has aliens dumber than the humans.

5

Huh, you answered the one question I had about the movie.

So Dr. Okun was in a coma for twenty-something years? He should have been a non-functional blob when he woke up. I was wondering how they’d keep Brent Spiner in the sequel. He looked pretty dead to me after his big scene in the original.

6

I liked it, but yeah, very short on solid science or intelligence. My main complaint isn’t even that though, I don’t expect that sort of thing from Roland Emmerich movies. What I was actually disappointed about was that it all seemed kinda rushed. It really needed a little more time

I did like that a sequel is coming, assuming it makes enough money. My theater was packed tonight, so hopefully we’ll be seeing another one, and not in 20 years.

7

NOOOO! You shoulda warned us about spoilers!

Not really. Wife is planning to see it regardless.

8

Geez, it’s been twenty years! The original was always such a source of fierce division with me. I could never understand how any adult could like such a ridiculously awful film. Nor could I understand how Emmerich continued to make so many more equally terrible films (Stargate, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, White House Down, 10,000 BC). And all bad in the same way. Non-existent, laughable science, illogical beyond belief plots, terrible acting etc. Michael Bay must have studied under him… :smiley:

9

I love me some mindless summer blockbuster fun, but this movie looks too fucking shitty even for that. Not going to waste my time.

10

Saw it. Won’t see it again, just never grabbed me. Can’t really recommend it, but won’t actively discourage people from going to see it.

11

Basically, it goes like this: “You know, I’m not really sure that’s possib… oh wow, that explosion was awesome! Dang, that’s a stupid thing for that character to… whoa, that skyscraper is falling from the sky!”

12

Well, it wasn’t aggressively, insultingly shitty like the Transformers movies and I actually appreciated the World-building in the beginning where they had some thought in what the world might be like 20 years after the first movie but the story was cheezy and dumb in a boring way, not a fun way. I don’t regret seeing it but I don’t think I will ever think of it again.It was just kind of there.

13

From what I saw in the trailer, it will look good.
From what I read, it has a rotten story.
All in all, about what I expected. I’m sure that a certain bunch of the " oh boy, an explosion crowd" will think it’s a great movie and when it comes out in red box, I will get it to see how much it sucks.
It will make money and that’s all that’s expected of it. It’s not like they tried to make a good movie.

14

How in the hell were they able to capture all of those aliens in order to set up the Guantanamo-like prison at Area 51? Where did the surviving aliens come from? I thought that once Randy Quaid blew up the ship (and somehow every other civilization in the world did the same thing) all of the aliens were killed?

I also thought it unlikely that this world would be more advanced that real life. We didn’t make that much progress in the last 20 years, and we did not have to rebuild almost every city.

But, I agree with some of the others. It was fun watching the update from most of the old cast, and I will probably watch part 3, but this isn’t going to be something I watch again.

15

I was genuinely expecting (and was vaguely disappointed by the lack of) a scene near the end where the alien queen collapses and the coup de grâce is delivered by the school bus.

Queen falls to the ground. David Levinson must put the school bus into reverse and back away quickly to avoid being crushed

Julius Levinson: Is she dead, already?

David Levinson: [looks up, sees the alien fighters are still circling around the fallen queen They’re still moving. [he looks at the queen and his eyes widen] So is she! [he slams the bus into forward gear and hits the gas]

Julius Levinson: [almost falling from the acceleration] David, what are you doing?! [the children on the bus start to scream]

David: Just like a bug on a windshield, Dad! [the bus rams the queen in the head, cracking open her skull and thickly painting the bus in slime and gore. Multiple shots of alien soldiers collapsing worldwide]
I mean, seriously, it wouldn’t have been nearly the dumbest thing in the movie.

And the good-alien sphere was either a Pokemon ball or the head of Marvin the android from the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie.

16

That’s easy. I don’t know about the science, but the ship looked intact enough on the ground at the end of Independence Day that there would have been some survivors. Plus one of them landed and was merely deactivated when the mother ship was destroyed, so some prisoners could have come from there.

17

Once the queen died, blowed up real good, the drones on the ground went catatonic, so it probably was a matter of herding them somewhat. Africa being farther away from Nevada, would have been less of a mental shock, so they lasted ten years.

Declan

18

That’s a little thing they casually mentioned that bugged me, how those warlords fought the aliens for ten years. Am I to assume that the world’s powers left some African tribes to fight hundreds of thousands of aliens by themselves?

19

I don’t think there were any world powers left after the events of the first movie.

20

The US had a lot more than just some guys with machetes.