Plot: It's been exactly 20 years since the events of the first movie and humanity has used this time to prepare for the possibility of another alien attack. But during the celebration of defeating the aliens, the alien come back with an even bigger and more powerful army. I'd say more, but that's all there really is to know.
I went to see an early screening for this movie with my brother, Johnathan, and honestly we almost had fun. Not in the sense that it was good, but because of how remarkably, unforgivably bad it is. What I thought was going to be a bad yet slightly amusing rehash of the last movie turned out to be such a ginormous mess that it's basically director Roland Emmerich's own personal Transformers: Age of Extinction, but worse. This movie had one or two decent moments in the dialogue, but when you're looking at the movie as a whole, it's a bigger train wreck than what Bay tried to do.
For those of you who didn't read my review for Transformers: Age of Extinction or don't remember, here's my basic thoughts. It had way too many characters and had countless story lines that are good on paper but went nowhere, and as the movie progressed I had little to no idea whatsoever what was happening. Independence Day: Resurgence is basically the same thing but it goes farther. There's so many random stuff shoved into this movie that by the end, you realize that this movie went absolutely nowhere. There's more characters than I can keep track both old and new and all of them added nothing. Some of them may be fighting aliens or figuring out plans, but as Johnathan pointed out when we were walking home from the theater, there were absolutely no consequences. The stakes where high given that the aliens are back and with bigger and more advanced ships, but there is little reaction to the actions that any of the human characters make. One character sacrifices himself with a big bang and admittingly a kind of cool one-liner, and even that didn't really add anything. The funny thing is - again, like Age of Extinction, a lot of these situations that the characters are in are good ideas by themselves. You have pilots who get stuck inside the main alien ship, there's another alien species that wants to help, people are getting telepathic messages from the aliens, and many of these situations would have been interesting on their own had they took the majority of the story. But no, they have to add all of this other crap that's so pointless that I don't even remember what it was. It's really appalling yet funny how the first film had a straight forward story from beginning to end and a simple theme of celebrating the 4th of July, and then we get a sequel that's throwing anything on the wall and trying to make it stick and making no connection to the holiday apart from just one line of dialogue.
Honestly, I'm trying to figure out who among the characters were the most effective to the plot, but I just can't think of anything. Everyone is doing stuff in groups and none of them have anything special about them that's actually helpful for the fight against the aliens. Even Jeff Goldblum's character who in the last film at least had a talent that conveniently helped humanity get the upper hand had absolutely nothing going on for him. So many characters like Goldblum's dad are constantly appearing in this movie with no purpose whatsoever. Like they're only there just so that you have people from the last film or are grown up version of people from the last film. The idea of bringing us grown up versions of characters like Will Smith's stepson or the President's daughter is good, but I barely know a thing about them. The last movie may have had a lot of characters too, but that film knew to take enough time so that you'd remember them in some way. But the development for most of these characters seem to end almost as soon as it started. That's the one thing Age of Extinction did better then this movie; it rushed on so many of its characters, but even Bay had a small group of characters to focus primarily on - that being Cal, his daughter and her boyfriend. They were by no means the right characters to focus on, but it's more than Emmerich did here.
The action also goes completely nowhere. If all you want is random explosions with aliens and humans with sci-fi weapons, you'll get it, but you will have no idea what is happening. A lot of the action is a matter of convenience. Like the alien mother ship as a powerful shield and yet their smaller ships don't, and then the queen alien has her own shield but it's temporarily effective...and that's just the plot holes I remember. By the time we get tot he last 20 minutes of the movie, things were executed so lazily that it stopped being amusing. People are dying, explosions are everywhere, the fate of the world is at stake and in the end none of us cared what was happening.
And that's my review for Independence Day: Resurgence. Some of the plain ideas behind what it happening sounds good on paper if they took more time on them, but what we have instead is a remarkable mess with all concepts of focus and consistency thrown out of the window in terms of story, characters and even action. The last movie was no Die Hard either, but it knew to keep its story simple and to give its main characters an importance to the plot. This movie doesn't even try to make even the original characters stand out for squat. But that's okay, and do you know why? *Bill Putnam voice* Because we're going to move on. We're gonna survive. This year, you shall ignore this movie on your Independence Day! *audience cheers*
Rating: 10%
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