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redheadedfemme
Rating: One star, for pointlessness and general stupidity
Welp.
Just got back from seeing Independence Day: Resurgence.
Extremely Short Review: AAUUGH KILL ME NOW
One-sentence review: Do not go see this if you have any affection at all for the original, which was freaking Shakespeare in the Park compared to this bloated, technobabble-stuffed, heartless mess.
Welp.
Just got back from seeing Independence Day: Resurgence.
Extremely Short Review: AAUUGH KILL ME NOW
One-sentence review: Do not go see this if you have any affection at all for the original, which was freaking Shakespeare in the Park compared to this bloated, technobabble-stuffed, heartless mess.
Okay, where do I start? With the fact that Roland Emmerich apparently feels that CGI on steroids, borrowing from all the disaster movies of the past 20 years, including San Andreas and his own 2012, makes up for actual characters and genuine emotions? That he's dragging (almost--Will Smith deserves an Oscar for passing on this one) all the actors from the previous movie into a pretentious, dumbed-down sequel that cheapens whatever goodwill the original inspired in its audience? That as I was watching it, I realized that every scene was designed to manipulate me, with rousing music and silly speeches that were poor retreads of President Whitmore's original, into thinking this was actually a story that made sense? And the "story" beats were off-kilter, stupid and humorless?
Gah. I take a back seat to no one in my love for Jeff Goldblum, but I really wish he, Brent Spiner, and everyone else involved had shown Roland Emmerich their collective middle fingers.
Okay. Short plot: The aliens return with a Harvester Ship the size of the Atlantic Ocean, with the intention of drilling through to the earth's core and fracturing the planet. (By the way, said harvester ship wipes out Europe and the entire [rebuilt] Eastern Seaboard as it comes in and PLANTS ITSELF ON BOTH CONTINENTS LIKE A TEN-LEGGED SPIDER, WHICH WOULD IMMEDIATELY FRACTURE THE PLANET WITH NO DRILLING INVOLVED. Apparently this three-thousand-mile-wide beastie generates its own gravity, which provides a handy-dandy excuse for Mr Emmerich to unroll the 4th Generation CGI! Explosions! Breaking glass! Screaming sacrificial lambs, er, human beings! Sucking up ALL THE BUILDINGS AND CITIES, CARS AND FREEWAYS (and people) INTO THE AIR as it comes in, and, as David Levinson so cutely notes, "What goes up must come down," and guess what? The rebuilt Empire State Building crashes into the ground antenna-first! Accompanied by additonal pithy Levinson commentary: "They always go for the landmarks!")
(By the way, this is given all of FIVE SECONDS' emotional weight in the movie, and ONLY because a now-grown Dylan Hiller, ace-token-black-pilot, sees his mother Jasmine, now a doctor and given all of three lines of dialogue, die before his eyes! It's the ULTIMATE REFRIGERATOR, people.)
(But hey, a three-thousand-mile-wide ship punching through the atmosphere should have destroyed it and killed most life on Earth anyway, setting off, one would think [Neal Stephenson, help me], massive tsunamis and firestorms. [Oh yeah, and the debris from the original Mother Ship is still orbiting the planet! Uh...what happened to our Hard Rain???] But then, we wouldn't have had a pointless billion-dollar grossing movie, now would we??)
But hey, the plucky human race, led by a silver-bearded, PTSD-ridden President Whitmore, fights back!! Only, as his now-grown daughter Patricia so wisely notes, "Dad, we're not going to win this time," and you damn betcha we wouldn't have...HAD IT NOT BEEN for the deus ex machina thrown in from nowhere, in the form of ANOTHER alien race leading a...GALACTIC REBELLION???? This race [biological? AI? it's never made clear], a white sphere that is the apparent love child of the Death Star and Eve from Wall-E, pops out of a wormhole above the Moonbase before the Harvester Ship arrives, holding out its friendly Lucas-ed and Disney-fied hand in comradeship and potential Alien Queen Kickass [Ripley, where are you?], and what do we [and Madame President] do???
"Shoot 'er down, son! Let's destroy any potential allies before we even know who they are, without any attempt to talk to them!"
Oh, but our plucky Five Twentysomething Heroes rescue the heart of the Love Child Sphere just as the Harvester Ship arrives, and carries it, through many various plot twists and travails, to Area 51 where the creepily unatrophied Dr. Brakish Okun is just waking up after his twenty-year nap. Dr. Okun jumps out of bed as if he had real muscles and dives into the mystery of the Tiny Love Child Sphere! Meanwhile, in a Massive Series of Disjointed, Clumsy Edits, Earth's defenses attempt to destroy the Harvester Ship, set off Cold Fusion Bombs, has a Greedy Salvage-Hunting Captain keep watch on the progress of the alien's core-drilling laser, complete with a hokey COUNTDOWN CLOCK ("you have one hour!...you have four minutes...you have TWO minutes" [with 20 minutes of film remaining]), and oh yeah, the Tiny Love Child Sphere speaks English to Dr Okun and tells him there's a whole GALACTIC REBELLION out there just waiting for a certain yellow android to lead them...and poor PTSD-ridden President Whitmore shaves off his beard, inspires his daughter to cry one tear, and pilots the Cold Fusion Bombs into the heart of the Ten-Story Alien Queen's personal transport and DOESN'T EVEN DESTROY HER, thus making his sacrifice useless except that it motivates Patricia to TAKE TO THE SKIES AND BECOME A PILOT AGAIN, but she doesn't destroy the Ten-Story Alien Queen either! Her boyfriend, one of the original Five Plucky Twentysomethings, swoops out of the sky in their borrowed alien fighters acquired during their escape from the Harvester Ship [where instead of punching an alien out as Will Smith did in the original, said boyfriend demonstrates his coolness by pissing on the Harvester Ship instead] and finally, finally, destroys the Alien Queen in a burst of laser fire and green puke-inducing Ghostbusters-style alien blood!
Oh but Great Ghu, that's not even the end! The Tiny Love Child Sphere talks to Dr. Okun, sagely notes that "Humans are a fascinating species," and offers the world the secrets to INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL, and in the last line of the movie, Dr. Okun pronounces that we can go to the stars, lead the rebellion, and KICK SOME ALIEN ASS!
Thus, of course, setting the stage for an endless money-grubbing franchise that will presumably suck the entire Marvel and Lucas/Disney universes into its bottomless maw.
Gah. I take a back seat to no one in my love for Jeff Goldblum, but I really wish he, Brent Spiner, and everyone else involved had shown Roland Emmerich their collective middle fingers.
Okay. Short plot: The aliens return with a Harvester Ship the size of the Atlantic Ocean, with the intention of drilling through to the earth's core and fracturing the planet. (By the way, said harvester ship wipes out Europe and the entire [rebuilt] Eastern Seaboard as it comes in and PLANTS ITSELF ON BOTH CONTINENTS LIKE A TEN-LEGGED SPIDER, WHICH WOULD IMMEDIATELY FRACTURE THE PLANET WITH NO DRILLING INVOLVED. Apparently this three-thousand-mile-wide beastie generates its own gravity, which provides a handy-dandy excuse for Mr Emmerich to unroll the 4th Generation CGI! Explosions! Breaking glass! Screaming sacrificial lambs, er, human beings! Sucking up ALL THE BUILDINGS AND CITIES, CARS AND FREEWAYS (and people) INTO THE AIR as it comes in, and, as David Levinson so cutely notes, "What goes up must come down," and guess what? The rebuilt Empire State Building crashes into the ground antenna-first! Accompanied by additonal pithy Levinson commentary: "They always go for the landmarks!")
(By the way, this is given all of FIVE SECONDS' emotional weight in the movie, and ONLY because a now-grown Dylan Hiller, ace-token-black-pilot, sees his mother Jasmine, now a doctor and given all of three lines of dialogue, die before his eyes! It's the ULTIMATE REFRIGERATOR, people.)
(But hey, a three-thousand-mile-wide ship punching through the atmosphere should have destroyed it and killed most life on Earth anyway, setting off, one would think [Neal Stephenson, help me], massive tsunamis and firestorms. [Oh yeah, and the debris from the original Mother Ship is still orbiting the planet! Uh...what happened to our Hard Rain???] But then, we wouldn't have had a pointless billion-dollar grossing movie, now would we??)
But hey, the plucky human race, led by a silver-bearded, PTSD-ridden President Whitmore, fights back!! Only, as his now-grown daughter Patricia so wisely notes, "Dad, we're not going to win this time," and you damn betcha we wouldn't have...HAD IT NOT BEEN for the deus ex machina thrown in from nowhere, in the form of ANOTHER alien race leading a...GALACTIC REBELLION???? This race [biological? AI? it's never made clear], a white sphere that is the apparent love child of the Death Star and Eve from Wall-E, pops out of a wormhole above the Moonbase before the Harvester Ship arrives, holding out its friendly Lucas-ed and Disney-fied hand in comradeship and potential Alien Queen Kickass [Ripley, where are you?], and what do we [and Madame President] do???
"Shoot 'er down, son! Let's destroy any potential allies before we even know who they are, without any attempt to talk to them!"
Oh, but our plucky Five Twentysomething Heroes rescue the heart of the Love Child Sphere just as the Harvester Ship arrives, and carries it, through many various plot twists and travails, to Area 51 where the creepily unatrophied Dr. Brakish Okun is just waking up after his twenty-year nap. Dr. Okun jumps out of bed as if he had real muscles and dives into the mystery of the Tiny Love Child Sphere! Meanwhile, in a Massive Series of Disjointed, Clumsy Edits, Earth's defenses attempt to destroy the Harvester Ship, set off Cold Fusion Bombs, has a Greedy Salvage-Hunting Captain keep watch on the progress of the alien's core-drilling laser, complete with a hokey COUNTDOWN CLOCK ("you have one hour!...you have four minutes...you have TWO minutes" [with 20 minutes of film remaining]), and oh yeah, the Tiny Love Child Sphere speaks English to Dr Okun and tells him there's a whole GALACTIC REBELLION out there just waiting for a certain yellow android to lead them...and poor PTSD-ridden President Whitmore shaves off his beard, inspires his daughter to cry one tear, and pilots the Cold Fusion Bombs into the heart of the Ten-Story Alien Queen's personal transport and DOESN'T EVEN DESTROY HER, thus making his sacrifice useless except that it motivates Patricia to TAKE TO THE SKIES AND BECOME A PILOT AGAIN, but she doesn't destroy the Ten-Story Alien Queen either! Her boyfriend, one of the original Five Plucky Twentysomethings, swoops out of the sky in their borrowed alien fighters acquired during their escape from the Harvester Ship [where instead of punching an alien out as Will Smith did in the original, said boyfriend demonstrates his coolness by pissing on the Harvester Ship instead] and finally, finally, destroys the Alien Queen in a burst of laser fire and green puke-inducing Ghostbusters-style alien blood!
Oh but Great Ghu, that's not even the end! The Tiny Love Child Sphere talks to Dr. Okun, sagely notes that "Humans are a fascinating species," and offers the world the secrets to INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL, and in the last line of the movie, Dr. Okun pronounces that we can go to the stars, lead the rebellion, and KICK SOME ALIEN ASS!
Thus, of course, setting the stage for an endless money-grubbing franchise that will presumably suck the entire Marvel and Lucas/Disney universes into its bottomless maw.
*headdesk*headdesk*headdesk*
Unless you're really fond of flushing your money down the toilet, folks, I wouldn't waste my time.
