Independence Day: Resurgence

Cafe Society
41

I got dragged to the movie and saw it for free. Despite this, I am actually angry for having watched it. It may actually be the dumbest movie I’ve ever seen. Not fun dumb, but “I am getting increasingly angry at how dumb this is” dumb.

If you told me that this script was written by a 14 year old as a fan fiction assignment, I would absolutely believe it. The script is incredibly dumb. The dialogue in the first half of the movie goes like this:

“Hi, fiancé. I am your fiancé, remember? We’re going to get married in the future. Also, my dad used to be the president, if you remember. The president during that big war. Do you remember how I used to be a fighter pilot but I had to give it up to take care of my dad, who, if you remember correctly, used to be the president? During the war?”

I’m barely exaggerating. Pretty much all of the catch-up, character-establishing, and expositional dialogue is as insanely stupid as that. This was written by adults. People who are writing professionals.

The way they tried to shoehorn in every random character from the first movie, I think they think they’ve got beloved characters like, say, Star Wars. Like seeing Jeff Goldblum’s dad was going to be as well-received as seeing Han Solo. So they spent so much time bringing us back up with characters no one remembers after 20 years. It felt like gushing fan fiction in that way.

The effects and battles aren’t even that good. Do you remember one scene or shot that they did that was uniquely cool? Something that sticks with you? As a comparison, if you’ve seen Gravity, you’ll remember the scene where the space station gets torn up. Is there anything in this movie you’ll remember? No, it’s pretty much paint-by-numbers boring action scenes. So even if you’re going to say ‘this is a really dumb movie but it has fun action scenes’, it needs good action scenes.

Obviously I could go into a hundred examples where the characters were retarded. “Oh, hey, we just blew up an alien ship on the moon. Turns out that alien ship is a different species than the one we went to war with. A totally new first contact situation, and we blew them up. But no one go investigate - we’ve got a big party planned tomorrow and that’s way more important. Yes, I know our Saturn defense stations were destroyed and we just had a hostile encounter with new alien life, but none of those things are a big enough deal to derail our party plans. Get millions of people including all the US’ leadership into one location out in the open tomorrow, that is our number 1 priority”

When they decided Bill Paxton would be the fighter pilot who the plan lynched on - he actually said at one point “there are so many good reasons it should be me…” and I actually did a double take. What, what’s one good reason? You were a fucking fighter pilot 40 years ago before we fucking re-created our entire fleet of fighters with entirely new technology that flies completely differently. You’ve apparently been a crazy old man for 20 years who everyone ignores and medicates. But yes, you’re totally the obvious guy to send on the crucial mission, not the fucking hot shot top gun fighter pilots we still have.

All the humor fell flat. The only thing that actually made me almost half-smile instead of rage at the movie was only because of the delivery by Goldblum, the line about “we’re going to wait for the dog? Yeah I guess that’s what we’re going to do” - that’s it. Every other bit of humor in the movie felt like something a nerdy, semi-autistic 13 year old would think was funny.

The attempts at emotional scenes were just stupid. “Hey, I know I’m the top fighter pilot in the world, but I’m going to abandon my post during an attack on the planet so I can go hover over my mom’s hospital. Oh, my mom died. Now I really have a motivation to fight these aliens. Because having them attempting to exterminate my species just wasn’t a good motivator.” - when Brent Spiner’s assistant guy died, it was played like this big emotional scene but no one could possibly care about him.

For reference, I thought the first movie was dumb but at least fun, worth a watch. So it’s not that I hate dumb popcorn movies. I can enjoy them. But this isn’t a dumb popcorn movie. This is anti-fun. Humanity is slightly diminished for having had this movie made.

42

" Do you remember one scene or shot that they did that was uniquely cool? Something that sticks with you?"

Hell, yeah! There was this one shot of the alien ship as it covered 1/3 of the northern hemisphere, as much a cataclysmic geological event as anything that has happened in the past 65 million years… with the rest of the planet with perfectly normal weather and coastlines, as if not a damned thing has changed. :wink:

43

Well, it’s only a $305MM worldwide so you might not have to worry about any more sequels.

44

You definitely saw a different movie than I did, because I don’t recall the guy from Twister showing up in this film.

I do recall when the first movie came out, folks kept getting Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton mixed up because they were both starring in big movies at around the same time (in 1996, it would have been Twister for Bill Paxton). I haven’t really seen Pullman get up to anything in a while, though I still see Paxton working.

As for why the former President flying in the mission, a couple of points:

  1. The plan didn’t involve the president being a fighter pilot. He was flying a utility tug. Durable, but unarmed and not nearly as agile.

  2. As for why him, the second film was running with a whole theme about how the current generation grew up in the wake of the first film’s events, with the government (including many of the first film’s characters) making much to do with the great advances made to repair and protect Earth, and the older characters feeling they had failed, if not outright betrayed the next generation by being so overconfident.

So the retiree going on the suicide mission to spare his daughter made perfect thematic sense, if him being involved didn’t make much *practical *sense.

As for “gee whiz!” SFX scenes, I rather liked the first big air battle, with the fighters trying to escort the bombers to attack the mothership, in particular one shot where a bomber gets a wing blown off. It was also refreshing that this time, the humans could at least fight back, even if they were still outnumbered to the point of spending the whole film in a fighting retreat.

And I rather liked seeing David’s dad Julius in this film. He aged a lot better than his son did. He also didn’t really bring anything to the film until he ran into the orphans. Everything before the boat could have been cut out and it wouldn’t have hurt his part of the film.

45

I can’t believe it only cost $165MM to make! You’ve got air-to-air combat between the futuristic fleet and the more-futuristic fleet, you’ve got rayguns and aliens and huge explosions and ships at sea capsizing and buildings levitating skyward and the whole thing cost less than the TARZAN movie it’s up against?

Well, okay; maybe jungle effects are hard. (After all, this thing apparently cost less to slap together than THE JUNGLE BOOK did.) And, likewise, while this also cost less to make than either the latest X-MEN flick or ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, you could note that they had plenty of special-effects shots – but, still, y’know?

I of course wouldn’t expect it to cost as much as CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR or BATMAN V SUPERMAN did this year – but it also cost less than WINTER SOLDIER and MAN OF STEEL had years earlier; and even SUPERMAN RETURNS, years before that; they couldn’t make GREEN LANTERN on this budget, is what I’m saying. And it cost less to make than any of the most recent Bond flicks, because, I dunno, car chases? Which also explains why it cost less to make than FURIOUS 7, one supposes.

They couldn’t make that LONE RANGER flop for so low a budget; they couldn’t make JACK THE GIANT SLAYER on that low a budget. BATTLESHIP and JOHN CARTER put a huge dent in Taylor Kitsch’s career, and neither got made on that paltry a budget; George Clooney’s star power couldn’t save TOMORROWLAND, just like Keanu Reeves couldn’t save 47 RONIN, and neither of those cost that little; and Andrew Garfield is out after heading up two tries as Spider-Man, and those likewise didn’t come this cheap because that’s a ridiculously small budget for this kind of thing.

TERMINATOR 3 got made on a bigger budget, and that was thirteen years ago!

WILD WILD WEST got made on a bigger budget even longer ago, and that was awful!

How much more will this picture make? I don’t know; hazard a guess, if you’d like. How did they make it for so little? I have no idea, but I’m all ears.

46

It didn’t strike me as especially high budget when watching it - all the effects looked like a high end animated film, more or less. They didn’t have the feel of mixing real things with CGI the way that a lot of those other movies did.

No doubt they used their budget efficiently, but it wasn’t miraculous.

Nowadays we can essentially get realistic-looking almost entirely animated films in terms of the action scenes, and that’s more or less what this is. And I don’t think our brains are as impressed by them. The first ID movie stood out for years as an effects extravaganza, this one is already almost forgotten.

47

Well, sure. At that, I didn’t really get into the long list of animated films that cost more to make than this movie did – INSIDE OUT, say; or THE GOOD DINOSAUR; or BRAVE, or TANGLED, or that Jim Carrey version of CHRISTMAS CAROL back when; or FINDING DORY, in theaters now; or MONSTERS VS ALIENS, years ago; or WALL-E, or UP, and so on, and so on; animation can be expensive.

(That said, there’s also a lot of live-action stuff I didn’t mention that cost more to make than this movie did: OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL, and EVAN ALMIGHTY, and SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN, and dozens of others; the point is, they made this movie for so little money that a sequel could make sense even if the box-office returns would be kind of anemic for a film with a bigger budget.)

48

I agree about the budget. There were several scenes where the green screen seemed amateurish. One that sticks out in my memory was where the group was approaching the Alien ship in Africa. You could see where the physical set was small and fake and the the rest was added in. It looked like a school play for a second.

49

Bumping because I was just now posting in another thread that it’s now at $372MM, which – given its budget and the fact that it soon opens in Italy – actually seems pretty solid, especially compared to the would-be franchise stepping stones of late: TARZAN, GHOSTBUSTERS, the latest ALICE, the latest NINJA TURTLES; Hollywood routinely puts out stuff like that, and they all seem to be falling short of this.

(Will it outperform the latest STAR TREK flick?)

50

Star Trek Beyond so far has pulled in just shy of $128 Million, vs a budget of 185 million, a couple of weekends out of the starting gate.

51

Well, again, Resurgence has already grossed more than 2.25x its budget.

So I guess the question is, will Beyond eventually pull in $418 million?

52

As it happens I saw this film in China, about a week before I left (it was my one and only Chinese movie theater experience in five years).

Some of the editing was poor in the Chinese version (I’m assuming this is exclusive to the Chinese version). There was a random shot of “Moon Milk” (which is apparently a local brand), and a poorly inserted audio “thank you for using QQ”, among a couple of others. As with most movies, it was English soundtrack with Chinese subtitles.

53

Bumping to give the running tally: Star Trek Beyond is now at $335M on its $185M budget, while Independence Day: Resurgence is at $388M on its $165M budget.

So if Trek grosses another $50M, it still won’t have grossed as much as Resurgence has; and, given the difference in their budgets, it’d have to gross another $50M to pass $435M to be as good a return on investment as Resurgence has been.

(Which is to say: Trek still isn’t yet at 1.85x, but Resurgence is past 2.35x.)

54

As someone who loves big budget action movies and is willing to tolerate a high dose of crap, I really do hope we get to see more Independence Day.

But there’s an important distinction between Independence Day and Star Trek: movies that make money but are critically panned often mean no sequel because studios get spooked. That’s why we’re not getting a Terminator Genisys sequel anytime soon.