Independence Day: Resurgence

Cafe Society
21

I liked the original well enough and a few weeks ago I saw the Bluray for $10, which included a coupon for $7.50 off the ticket price to see the new movie. So, I got a Bluray of a fairly good, if somewhat kitschy, movie and an opportunity to see a probably kinda bad movie for just $6.00. So, I was happy enough with the experience.

I almost did the exact same thing with Jurassic World but opted instead to wait until it came to the $2 second-run discount theater.

I didn’t look at the cast list beforehand and was so surprised to see Charlotte Gainsbourg! I didn’t even recognize her at first- not that she didn’t look like herself, just that I never would have expected that it would have been her in this movie. It’s easily got to be the least artistically credible work she’s ever done- and she seemed like she was having an absolute ball with it! I giggled a bit every time she was on screen (once I realized it was her).
Wiki says

So, they’re actually hoping this can be episode one in a new trilogy based on the 1996 film? That seems like wishful thinking given the quality of this one but, hey, it doesn’t have to be good to get sequels, it just has to make money.

Judd Hirsch aged the best out of the whole original cast. He seriously looked like he filmed his scenes a month after wrapping the original movie.

Wiki says Robert Loggia was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2010! Did he even know he was in this movie? Did his family just cart him to the shoot, put him in wardrobe, then park him on set? I’m actually struggling with the ethics of that whole situation.

If they’re hoping to make this the start of a trilogy, looks like they want a Luke/Han/Leia thing with their young leads. Hemsworth was good, the President’s daughter was o.k., but the actor who played Will Smith’s stepson was barely functional- he has no star-power that I can see. Not sure I have a lot of faith that they’ll become a classic film trio.

22

Not that they probably put this much thought into it but the way I took it was the Africans in that area didn’t allow the rest of the world in because that ship was the only one that was fully intact.

23

Well your in a triage situation with regards to pacifying the remaining aliens and rebuilding, rescuing your population, is Africa the first thing on your mind, or your own country, allies, strategic resource locations.

Obviously they got there in the end.

Declan

24

Which is precisely the reason you’d really, really, want to help them out, whether they wanted the help or not. I would think everyone would be descending on that ship.

But you’re right, not much thought was given to it. They needed a cool character and they needed an intact ship, so that’s the back story they came up with.

25

Robert Loggia had a lot of credits since 2010. He probably enjoyed the process, like Glen Campbell continuing to perform as long as he did.

26

Twenty years ago when the first one came out asshole talk show host Bill Maher had Loggia on his Politically Incorrect panel and, without realizing he was in it, said how he thought ID4 was, “…one of the stupidest movies he’d ever seen”.

27

Much hate against these movies and some of it is unjustified.

Both Independence day movies are action filled popcorn flicks. and yes to a certain extent they have quite a few leaps of logic

They are not as dumb as many people make them out to be.

The concept in the first one of 15 mile wide ships hovering over the major cities is actually a great concept to explore and they actually did a good job of exploring the reaction fairly well in the first one.

As much as the flaws in having a Mac being able to upload a computer virus to an alien ship and computer with different protocols, I thought the concept of a computer virus was brilliant update on the original biological virus victory from the War of the Worlds that it was based on.

If you stretch your imagination, and think that with Brent Spiner and Jeff Goldblum thinking together and with the time that Brent had spent with the alien ship, it is not unreasonable that they may have figured out some of the protocols of the alien ship and were able to devise a crude virus to shut down the shields as they did have some time to practice on the captured ship.

So the virus part did not bug me

With the sequel, there are some great action scenes and the concept of using the captured alien tech to improve earth defenses and having it focused on the Eastern Hemisphere and not mostly the USA was also great.

However, the sequel also seemed to go by very fast with the action sequences. There was no ominous buildup as seen in the first movie when the saucers came in over the cities. When that came in the first movie it foreshadowed doom coming and it was a really good build up to the destruction coming.

Not so much in the sequel where the aliens come in and already too fast the Harvester ship has landed. It looks like a lot was cut out to speed up the movie.

Also the battles almost seemed too much like a video game. Blink and you miss many parts of the battle.

With the first one, you could follow the battles and the combination of CGI and the older practical effects was actually fairly well done.

The CGI in part 2 was impressive certainly but it just didn’t feel as real as the battles in the first one.

That being said, even though they are both semi-mindless movies with lots of action, I certainly enjoyed both of them and would rather see them than say “Finding Dory”

28

I thought that backstory was a great idea. In the first movie, the 15 mile ships were killed of too easily. I would think that once the aliens had lost a few ships, they would have figured out why they were losing their ships and adapt to that.

However, having lost the mother ship, the communications between the ships may have been lost and without the Queen coordinating it, it is feasible that the Earth’s defenses may have knocked out the rest of the ships but the one in Africa may have been the sole survivor. Damaged but still semi-functional.

Now that I think about it, that single ship (even if damaged) would have still been able to overwhelm the Earth’s defences although it might have taken them some time .

A 15 mile wide ship (even with no shields) would be a difficult thing to beat. It would easily outweigh the entire world’s armed forces (ships, planes and vehicles). Even a nuclear blast on it would not destroy it, although several large hydrogen bombs would probably do the trick, (ie Tsar Bomba)

29

One more thing, you got to love 81 year old Judd Hirsch saving the day in an old school bus after the kids flying the super high tech ships failed to stop them

30

But here’s the thing, for a “popcorn movie”, this was pretty light on the action.

31

It may have been the only ship that landed intact instead of crashing, but it wasn’t fully functional. For whatever reasons it’s crew had just enough autonomy that they didn’t go catatonic when the queen on the mothership died, but they couldn’t actually operate the ship and were reduced to guerrilla warfare with the locals.

32

While it’s not part of the story, I’ve always gotten the impression that rather than being individually intelligent, the aliens are kinda like the Borg, in that they combine organic and mechanical technology, but that they do it rather instinctively. And that even collectively, they aren’t all that bright. They certainly don’t act too bright in any case. But I figure if ants and bees can build complex structures, then maybe the logical evolution of such species is what we see in Independence Day: the ability to integrate other worlds’ technology into their own, but without much conscious thought or planning behind it. It’s obviously not hard science, but it is an interesting way to explore what the evolution of such communal species would be like if they were the dominant life form on their planet.

33

It’s the Rule of BOOM variation of the Rule of Cool.

34

Regarding the city ship in Africa: The world powers had a lot on their plates, to include rebuilding their cities and dealing with millions of refugees. Getting into a two-pronged war with a group of aliens and the local humans probably wasn’t high on anyone’s list of shit they wanted to deal with. Recall that at the end of the movie, the Americans had to literally scratch together a fighting force with whatever people they could find to put in cockpits. I doubt any other nation’s fighting forces were doing much better.

And it’s not like we’ve never seen leaders put off unpalatable tasks because they’d be politically or morally inconvenient (the whole “one world united” narrative gets problematic if you proceed to get into a war with one of the other human nations).

As for the state of technology, the humans reverse engineered a lot of that alien technology, this isn’t 2016 Prime, it’s 2016 With Imported Alien Phlebotinum. I thought it was fun how many of the designs we saw were basically real world aircraft designs with sci-fi bits added on, like all of the hovercoptors. Also of note were the twin-tail B-1 Lancers with the sci-fi engines. One thing that was a bit goofy was a flightline shot where the aircraft were clearly just real-world designs with the sci-fi engines (which, given the Air Force’s real-life habit of constantly updating heavy aircraft designs from the 1950s and 1960s, really isn’t all that unreasonable).

The only thing technology-wise that really bugged me was the giant projector screens in Washington, D.C., which resembled nothing so much as giant scaled-up flat-screen TVs. I would have expected something a lot thinner and sleeker.

Overall plot-wise, this movie was basically what the old movie was, a love letter to cheesy sci-fi action films. It even had the humans fighting a giant alien monster trying to smash the place. There were a few more subtle notes throughout the film, like an ongoing theme of the older generation afraid that they might have failed the younger generation.

My biggest complaints scripting-wise were, as mentioned above, that the school bus didn’t get used to headbutt the Queen, that Captain Kirk’s uncle* didn’t shout “GET AWAY FROM HER, YOU BITCH!” a la Aliens upon his entry into the fight after his fiance gets shot down, and finally that Vivica A. Fox was evidently included in this film just so they could kill her off at the first opportunity for emotional torque.

Honestly. They could have replaced her with any random red shirt doctor in that scene and it would have probably had more emotional impact having the doc die saving a mother and her newborn, if only because the audience wouldn’t be annoyed at the blatant attempt to make things more dramatic for one of the main characters. That whole quick scene was just sort of clumsily done, to be honest.

Overall, it was cheesy, it was silly, I enjoyed it. I really hope I don’t have to wait until 2036 to see the next one.

  • So yeah, our rebellious hero was played by Liam Hemsworth, whose brother, Chris Hemsworth, is of course most famous for playing George Kirk in the 2009 Star Trek reboot. I hear he’s moved on to doing some superhero films.

EDIT: Also, someone up above listed a bunch of forgettable action films that Roland Emmerich did after Independence Day. I just want to nitpick and point out that Stargate came out two years before Independence Day, wasn’t much of an “everything explodes” action flick, at least not on nearly the scale of ID4, and did end up turning into a surprisingly huge sci-fi franchise for how recent it is.

35

My boss paid for the whole organization to go see it, I wouldn’t have gone otherwise. It was a cheesy summer blow-em-up movie, but even for that it was noticeably awful from a plot standpoint. Way too many coincidences for me to dismiss, the way random people could just show up in important places and not get shot or arrested, geography and science stupidity, the actions of the alien queen make no sense, the US President has two modes (cheerleader and attack!), the timeline of the action is ridiculously compressed, I could go on for a while.

The special effects were OK but we’ve seen it all before. The humor was a bit forced, the actors had no chemistry, killing Vivica Fox was gratuitous. I laughed a few times (the windshield wipers on the bus, some of Dr Okum’s lines, the nerdy sidekick with the warlord) but it wasn’t worth the 2 hours.

36

It was the most “meh” I have ever had for a film. It just was nearly 2 hours of pedictable explosions and fighting, sans the fun of the first movie.
The first movie had Will Smith in his prime, and his light-hearted take on the whole thing made it fun, especially his interactions with the serious Goldblum. His monlouage to the Alien in the desert was worth its weight in gold.

Where the hell was Will Smith in this one?

And where was Mrs Levinson/President’s aide? She would have been 7084 times better the Frenchie love interest who had zero chemistry with Jeff Goldblum.

37

Here was my overall impression. This was the sort of sequel hastily written once the studio saw the opening weekend numbers, not a sequel that took 20 years to make.

38

Well, with most of the cast 20 years older than* when the shot the last one; so they could either go with a Next Generation type thing or try to shoehorn the original cast in. They tried both and it sucked.

  • To take an example, Ross Bagely who played Will Smith’s step son in the first film, is now as old as Smith was at the time of the first film.
39

Supposedly they wanted to do a sequel a long time ago, but scriptwriting was just too challenging. Writing a sequel to that movie that would actually be good was probably an impossible task. The first movie did not have enough character development to make us want to revisit these characters again, and the emotional impact of the first movie just couldn’t be repeated in the second. Plus we know what the aliens have. What made the first movie special was the fact that they really did a great job of slowly revealing what the aliens had. The only really cool thing about this movie was that in theory it was a fair fight this time and we got to see some cool battles. But even there they dropped the ball, because they acted as if we were just as overmatched as in the first movie without really making it FEEL like we were overmatched. We could take down their shields, we had big guns like they did, and it’s not like their tactics are brilliant. Yet we lose one battle and supposedly all is lost. In the first one it was more believable because you know that what happened in California to that air base was repeated all over the world.

40

The one thing that really irritated me in this: Umbutu, the warlord character, made a point of saying a couple of times that you had to take them out from behind.

  1. Why didn’t he tell someone other than nerdy dude this so it could be passed along? Sure, eventually the pilots figure out that they can damage the queen more from behind, but it doesn’t seem like that should be the first time they’re learning that.

  2. when they (Umbutu and nerdy dude) were fighting the ones breaking into the isolation room, how come this didn’t come in to play after such a point was made of it earlier? Yes, they had the guns, but it just seemed like a lost opportunity there.
    So, I made a comment to someone that it was one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a long time. And I didn’t go in expecting it to be good, mind - I’d seen the reviews. I just wanted decent explosions. Those took way too long to come and there were far too few of them.