So I watched Independence Day Resurgence about a week ago
and I’m a little bit disappointed with myself. I wanted to get this review and
the Heavyweights review out before the end of May because my reviews have been
pretty sparring. There are a couple of reasons my reviews have been sparse and
they’re not really new. I’ve been working a new job for about a month and some
change now, I have been working out a lot, I’m in grad school writing papers
that are actually graded, and I’ve been watching a lot of TV instead of movies,
all the same reasons I've had dry spells in the past. I’m hoping I’m in a rhythm now where I can knock out some reviews
of some movies I’ve watched recently and some I’m going to be watching in the
future, but I just want to warn you that that may or may not happen depending on
how busy things get.
But I’m also disappointed because due to the fact that I put
this review off, I have to write this review at the same time that I was writing
my review for Wonder Woman. If you know anything about either of these movies,
you can probably guess that Wonder Woman was a much better film than
Independence Day Resurgence and it pains me that I’m writing this instead of
that. I'm glad the Wonder Woman review came out first, but I do feel I need to write both reviews, but for different reasons.
I am in a small minority of people who don't think Independence Day is a great movie. I don't think anybody is thinking that Independence Day is Shakespeare by any means, but there is a lot of love for a fun stupid blockbuster about aliens coming to Earth and the human resistance we create to fend them off.
Personally, I could really care less about this movie. Its definitely not the worst film I've ever seen, but I'm just not on the bandwagon of it being this absolute classic. I think it's hilarious how campy the movie is but at the end of the day it's really just 90's nostalgia speaking and we need to stop glorifying this movie. It's not that great.
However, I do understand the following this movie has and that's why I did understand when they decided to make a sequel 20 years later. I didn't think it was a sequel that should have happened, even before it came out, but I also understand this is the world we live in and there are some creative ideas you could do with an Independence Day sequel if you had to make one.
Resurgence doesn't really take any of those ideas and the movie suffers because of it.
Independence Day Resurgence, or IDR as I'm gonna call it now, takes place in 2016, 20 years after a bunch of aliens made their way to Earth and tried to destroy us. It's been 20 years since President Thomas Whitmore (played by Bill Pullman) made an epic rallying speech, and flew a plane himself with Will Smith in the battle for Earth.
What has happened since then? Well we've taken alien technology and now humans live in a technologically advanced 2016. We have advanced weapons, space travel capabilities, and things are just all around futuristic.
And what happened to our band of heroes that banded together to save Earth 20 years ago? Well they're really old...
I don't want to give Pullman, Goldblum, Spiner, and all the other actors they brought in for this movie too much shit, I mean all they did was get old. It happens. There's no reason why wouldn't think this would work, especially since Harrison Ford is being brought back for old films like Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and Blade Runner and those movies always have hype around them.
However, it's how you use the characters and when these characters were more caricatures rather than real characters, it's kind of hard to make them compelling again, especially if they go from bad ass speeches, to pretty much dying from dementia like in the case of Thomas Whitmore (played by Bill Pullman).
But Whitmore is slowly losing his mind, Brent Spiner's character has been in a coma since the last film, and Jeffie Gold's character Dr. Ian Malcolm (I know that's his character from Jurassic Park, but be honest are they incredibly different from one another and do you even remember his character's name in Independence Day?) is just kind of doing work for the government.
You might be asking what happened to Will Smith's character from the first movie. Well his character died in a training accident...
This pissed me off. I know I'm digressing and going off on a lot of tangents today, but this was quite angering. Will Smith's character was Independence Day. Good or not isn't the question, it's what made the movie successful, and it was Will Smith and Thomas Whitmore's epic speech, neither of which are in this film. Furthermore, you kill off one of the most badass characters off screen in a training accident? He didn't go down in a blaze of glory? He didn't go out in some alien revolution that happened with the remaining aliens on earth after the invasion? Nope, he just died in a training accident.
Will Smith turned this movie down for Suicide Squad and while that movie has issues of it's own, there's at least a chance of a future paycheck with that film as DC is going to utilize Deadshot again. I'll talk about this more later, but IDR hints at a future franchise at the end of this film and I can tell you, that's not going to happen. So Will, even though Suicide Squad was a mediocre to bad film depending on who you talked to, I think you made the right choice here.
Anyways, you've got a new cast of characters including Liam Hemsworth, a guy who is supposed to be Will Smith's character's son, and a couple of female characters. Now before you call me sexist for not introducing the female characters, these two were really boring and almost interchangeable. Nobody thinks about IDR and remembers these two females. Their names of Maika Monroe and Angelababy to give them the credit of being in this film, but honestly, I really kind of forgot they were in it until I looked at the cast list for the writing of this review.
Anyways, the unthinkable happens and aliens come to Earth and we have to fight them off. You may say to yourself, but hey that's the exact same plot of the last film. And you'd be very, very right. There is literally nothing new in this film when it comes to story and the only difference this time is that the aliens coming in a much larger ship.
In the first movie, the sakes were higher because we had insufficient weapons and it was just our fortitude and dumb luck that the humans defeated the aliens. This time around, they've had 20 years to study the aliens, adapt their weapons, and yet I just felt like I was watching the same movie but with a different skin of different weapons and older characters.
Oh... AND NO WILL SMITH!
That's the weird thing about the first Independence Day. Like I said, it succeeded because it was campy, had great one liners from Smith, and it took itself just seriously enough to where it wasn't a comedy but just a fun turn off your brain action flick.
This film takes itself WAY too seriously at times and at other times it feels like it's making a parody of itself.
And you may have felt like I was naming off a lot of characters earlier and not really getting to the point of the movie. Well the reason for that is that the movie does that as well.
There are so many characters in this movie and I couldn't care about a single one of them because not one of them was given any kind of development or care into why they were doing the things they were doing.
Like in the beginning, Jeff Goldblum and Liam Hemsworth get in a ship to go to the moon and retrieve the wreck of a ship that was shot down prior to the alien invasion. Pretty simple right? This could give us some background on how Hemsworth and Goldblum know each other, maybe they could be related, I don't know but it's simple enough.
But on top of those two who are really the only people who needed to go, you've got an African Warlord, Goldblum's nerdy sidekick, and some scientist that Goldblum banged one time. Who are these people? I really have no idea.
Then you've got Brent Spiner who comes out of a comma. Spiner's buddy who I think was in the last film (Maybe?) who I think is in love with Brent Spiner? William Fitchner who is a random general they come across. The two random chicks they added on to be love interests for Liam Hemsworth and his random friend. Then you've got Thomas Whitmore and the new President of the United States (played by Sela Ward). Oh and I forgot that Will Smith's character's son is in this movie (played by Jessie Usher). And then out of nowhere, you've got Judd Hirsch from the original film and his band of orphans who eventually go on a road trip to Area 51 to try and find Jeff Goldblum.
Oh and I didn't even mention the random fishermen who are only in the movie to create a countdown till the aliens mine into our world and extract our molten core.
Holy crap! Why did they feel the need to put all these characters in when it really only needed to be Jeff Goldblum, Liam Hemsworth, a more developed female lead, the President (doesn't even need to be Whitmore), a hard nosed general, and a cooky scientist (preferably not Brent Spiner). Notice how I didn't include Judd Hirsch in there? That cast is basically all that was the focus of the original Independence Day, if you're going to just do the same thing do the same thing, don't add fifteen more characters that are just copies of the characters you already have.
The only character I found remotely interesting was Liam Hemsworth's character.
Poor Liam. I don't know if I've done it on this blog a lot but I know I do it in private, I definitely shit on this guy. It must be hard being Chris Hemsworth's brother and while being attractive, being more of the YA attractive than Chris Hemsworth attractive. On top of that, I don't think he's as good of an actor as Chris is and it's evident in the parts he gets.
However, I was slightly entertained by his character in this movie. They tried to do this roguish Han Solo character, kind of in the vein of Will Smith's character from Independence Day. He's definitely not to the caliber that Smith's character was but he was definitely a better replacement than Jessie Usher was. I think Hemsworth saw this as his opportunity to jump into the Independence Day franchise, because this movie definitely is pointing towards sequels and to profit off this idea, and I just don't think it's going to happen for him this time.
The issue that comes up with these characters is not only are there too many, but they don't develop or use any of these characters to a point where we might like them. None of these characters are used correctly and it is really hard to get invested. And that might be enough if the action and the threat was big enough or intriguing enough to get invested in the story, but that's not there either. Again, it's the same movie but with stakes that don't even make sense.
For some reason the aliens can give the old cast headaches now and they're really random and at the convenience of the plot. It's not an intriguing world and I just could not have cared less about any of them.
And as I've alluded to before, the funny part is they think this is going to be a franchise. They though this was going to jumpstart the Independence Day movies and greenlight more sequels to have the humans go and kill the aliens in space.
I didn't even mention the big pokeball that comes out of space and tells them that these aliens just go and kill all life forms around the galaxy. Yeah, these aliens are basically Reapers from Mass Effect.
And yeah, if I saw this in a Mass Effect movie, I'd think this was cool. But when that's such a small part and just tagged onto the end to say, hey we've got sequels coming, it's just not enough.
The hilarious part of all of this is that after watching this, I've noticed that there are possibilities that could have happened and potentially could happen in the future to make a successful Independence Day sequel.
I'm stealing a little bit of this from the Cracked Podcast where the After Hours cast talks about the Independence Day sequel that was actually too awesome to be made. It starts at the 2:40 mark and they talk about how they mention in this movie that between the first movie and this one, there were motherships all around the Earth that remained after the events of the first film and there have been African warlords and tribes fighting aliens for 20 years.
This African Warlord (played by DeObia Oparei) probably has the most interesting backstory of any of the characters in this film, even the ones we knew from the first one, and he's just in the background while we play the same movie we saw 20 years ago with a different skin.
I had a theory that the weird pokeball at the beginning of the film was actually Jeff Golblum from the future because the aliens basically defeat the human race and Jeff Goldblum has to go back in time to stop the aliens. That could have been a wacky element that was different than the original. There are so many things that this movie could have done if it was just focused on one movie at a time and not trying to build up a franchise.
I said it in my Wonder Woman review, when people are just trying to tell good stories and they have the talent to back it up, you can usually get good movies like Wonder Woman. But when we're just trying to make money because we have that 90's nostalgia for movies like Independence Day and we need to reboot everything, we get movies like Independence Day Resurgence.
But what you have right now is a poor attempt to cash in on 90s nostalgia. The story is complete garbage. The pacing is way off. The characters are boring. There were so many opportunities missed. This could potentially be one of the worst movies I saw from 2016, and that is saying a lot... it was 2016.
But what do you think? Are there any redeeming qualities of IDR that I missed? Do you think there should be a sequel, and if so what should that sequel be about? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.
I'll leave you with this. Yeah I don't really like the original movie, but no one can deny that this speech gets you pumped up for anything. Enjoy!
Personally, I could really care less about this movie. Its definitely not the worst film I've ever seen, but I'm just not on the bandwagon of it being this absolute classic. I think it's hilarious how campy the movie is but at the end of the day it's really just 90's nostalgia speaking and we need to stop glorifying this movie. It's not that great.
However, I do understand the following this movie has and that's why I did understand when they decided to make a sequel 20 years later. I didn't think it was a sequel that should have happened, even before it came out, but I also understand this is the world we live in and there are some creative ideas you could do with an Independence Day sequel if you had to make one.
Resurgence doesn't really take any of those ideas and the movie suffers because of it.
What has happened since then? Well we've taken alien technology and now humans live in a technologically advanced 2016. We have advanced weapons, space travel capabilities, and things are just all around futuristic.
And what happened to our band of heroes that banded together to save Earth 20 years ago? Well they're really old...
However, it's how you use the characters and when these characters were more caricatures rather than real characters, it's kind of hard to make them compelling again, especially if they go from bad ass speeches, to pretty much dying from dementia like in the case of Thomas Whitmore (played by Bill Pullman).
But Whitmore is slowly losing his mind, Brent Spiner's character has been in a coma since the last film, and Jeffie Gold's character Dr. Ian Malcolm (I know that's his character from Jurassic Park, but be honest are they incredibly different from one another and do you even remember his character's name in Independence Day?) is just kind of doing work for the government.
This pissed me off. I know I'm digressing and going off on a lot of tangents today, but this was quite angering. Will Smith's character was Independence Day. Good or not isn't the question, it's what made the movie successful, and it was Will Smith and Thomas Whitmore's epic speech, neither of which are in this film. Furthermore, you kill off one of the most badass characters off screen in a training accident? He didn't go down in a blaze of glory? He didn't go out in some alien revolution that happened with the remaining aliens on earth after the invasion? Nope, he just died in a training accident.
Will Smith turned this movie down for Suicide Squad and while that movie has issues of it's own, there's at least a chance of a future paycheck with that film as DC is going to utilize Deadshot again. I'll talk about this more later, but IDR hints at a future franchise at the end of this film and I can tell you, that's not going to happen. So Will, even though Suicide Squad was a mediocre to bad film depending on who you talked to, I think you made the right choice here.
Anyways, you've got a new cast of characters including Liam Hemsworth, a guy who is supposed to be Will Smith's character's son, and a couple of female characters. Now before you call me sexist for not introducing the female characters, these two were really boring and almost interchangeable. Nobody thinks about IDR and remembers these two females. Their names of Maika Monroe and Angelababy to give them the credit of being in this film, but honestly, I really kind of forgot they were in it until I looked at the cast list for the writing of this review.
In the first movie, the sakes were higher because we had insufficient weapons and it was just our fortitude and dumb luck that the humans defeated the aliens. This time around, they've had 20 years to study the aliens, adapt their weapons, and yet I just felt like I was watching the same movie but with a different skin of different weapons and older characters.
Oh... AND NO WILL SMITH!
That's the weird thing about the first Independence Day. Like I said, it succeeded because it was campy, had great one liners from Smith, and it took itself just seriously enough to where it wasn't a comedy but just a fun turn off your brain action flick.
This film takes itself WAY too seriously at times and at other times it feels like it's making a parody of itself.
There are so many characters in this movie and I couldn't care about a single one of them because not one of them was given any kind of development or care into why they were doing the things they were doing.
Like in the beginning, Jeff Goldblum and Liam Hemsworth get in a ship to go to the moon and retrieve the wreck of a ship that was shot down prior to the alien invasion. Pretty simple right? This could give us some background on how Hemsworth and Goldblum know each other, maybe they could be related, I don't know but it's simple enough.
But on top of those two who are really the only people who needed to go, you've got an African Warlord, Goldblum's nerdy sidekick, and some scientist that Goldblum banged one time. Who are these people? I really have no idea.
Oh and I didn't even mention the random fishermen who are only in the movie to create a countdown till the aliens mine into our world and extract our molten core.
Holy crap! Why did they feel the need to put all these characters in when it really only needed to be Jeff Goldblum, Liam Hemsworth, a more developed female lead, the President (doesn't even need to be Whitmore), a hard nosed general, and a cooky scientist (preferably not Brent Spiner). Notice how I didn't include Judd Hirsch in there? That cast is basically all that was the focus of the original Independence Day, if you're going to just do the same thing do the same thing, don't add fifteen more characters that are just copies of the characters you already have.
Poor Liam. I don't know if I've done it on this blog a lot but I know I do it in private, I definitely shit on this guy. It must be hard being Chris Hemsworth's brother and while being attractive, being more of the YA attractive than Chris Hemsworth attractive. On top of that, I don't think he's as good of an actor as Chris is and it's evident in the parts he gets.
However, I was slightly entertained by his character in this movie. They tried to do this roguish Han Solo character, kind of in the vein of Will Smith's character from Independence Day. He's definitely not to the caliber that Smith's character was but he was definitely a better replacement than Jessie Usher was. I think Hemsworth saw this as his opportunity to jump into the Independence Day franchise, because this movie definitely is pointing towards sequels and to profit off this idea, and I just don't think it's going to happen for him this time.
The issue that comes up with these characters is not only are there too many, but they don't develop or use any of these characters to a point where we might like them. None of these characters are used correctly and it is really hard to get invested. And that might be enough if the action and the threat was big enough or intriguing enough to get invested in the story, but that's not there either. Again, it's the same movie but with stakes that don't even make sense.
And as I've alluded to before, the funny part is they think this is going to be a franchise. They though this was going to jumpstart the Independence Day movies and greenlight more sequels to have the humans go and kill the aliens in space.
I didn't even mention the big pokeball that comes out of space and tells them that these aliens just go and kill all life forms around the galaxy. Yeah, these aliens are basically Reapers from Mass Effect.
And yeah, if I saw this in a Mass Effect movie, I'd think this was cool. But when that's such a small part and just tagged onto the end to say, hey we've got sequels coming, it's just not enough.
I'm stealing a little bit of this from the Cracked Podcast where the After Hours cast talks about the Independence Day sequel that was actually too awesome to be made. It starts at the 2:40 mark and they talk about how they mention in this movie that between the first movie and this one, there were motherships all around the Earth that remained after the events of the first film and there have been African warlords and tribes fighting aliens for 20 years.
I had a theory that the weird pokeball at the beginning of the film was actually Jeff Golblum from the future because the aliens basically defeat the human race and Jeff Goldblum has to go back in time to stop the aliens. That could have been a wacky element that was different than the original. There are so many things that this movie could have done if it was just focused on one movie at a time and not trying to build up a franchise.
I said it in my Wonder Woman review, when people are just trying to tell good stories and they have the talent to back it up, you can usually get good movies like Wonder Woman. But when we're just trying to make money because we have that 90's nostalgia for movies like Independence Day and we need to reboot everything, we get movies like Independence Day Resurgence.
But what you have right now is a poor attempt to cash in on 90s nostalgia. The story is complete garbage. The pacing is way off. The characters are boring. There were so many opportunities missed. This could potentially be one of the worst movies I saw from 2016, and that is saying a lot... it was 2016.
But what do you think? Are there any redeeming qualities of IDR that I missed? Do you think there should be a sequel, and if so what should that sequel be about? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.
I'll leave you with this. Yeah I don't really like the original movie, but no one can deny that this speech gets you pumped up for anything. Enjoy!
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