Independence Day: Resurgence Review

Happy Fourth of July everyone, I hope you all are doing well and enjoy reading the following review of an underwhelming and unnecessary sequel. Writer/Director Rolland Emmerich brings us 'Independence Day: Resurgence and shows us the lack of clever touches and ingenuity that was present in the first movie that premiered in 1996. It's been 20 years since the attack from the first movie and now the Aliens are back for some revenge , and it's up to David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) and a handful of other characters to stave of the invaders .

There are NUMEROUS flaws with this movie that severely hurt the product on the whole, firstly, the intense buildup from the first movie that led up to the attacks in the previous film is totally absent. We're not given enough time to feel uncomfortable about the presence of extra-terrestrials which was what made the first film work. It created a suspenseful tone that kept the audience guessing and allowed us MORE time to get introduced to the many characters. Here, we're given less character or story development, Emmerich and his buddy Dean Devlin were clearly more concerned about getting to the action scenes as opposed to setting up decent characters and telling a story that was worth the wait of the past 20 years. The film is so poorly written that it makes the climax HILARIOUSLY underwhelming and confusing. Which is a piece of criticism I shall provide later in the review.

Another flaw of this film is in addition to the poor character development, there are two characters that were completely expendable to the film. The overly excitable scientist Dr. Brackish Okun (Brent Spiner) is still alive even though we CLEARLY saw him get axed off in the last movie. Though to be fair, he's not an annoying character it's just a stupid PC move by the filmmakers that ruins one of the most disturbing scenes from the first film. In addition they bring back David Levinson's father Julius (Judd Hirsch) and he has NO significance to the plot. Both characters could've been removed from the film and nothing would've been missing from the story. If anything they might've helped the movies juvenile sense of humor that isn't as funny as the filmmakers naively thought.

Lastly, let's talk about the clunky and confusing climax that I can sum up to you all in ONE word.......underwhelming and that's it. A group of fighter pilots face off against the Alien mother ship and all of them end up getting shot down. Prior to that they find that the Aliens have created an environment for themselves (The Aliens) on the ship, after we're to supposedly believe they are dead, we get Goldbum and Hirsch driving a school bus full of possibly orphaned children and almost get them killed in the process as they're trying to elude the Alien queen. After about 5-10 minutes of screen time we cut back to the pilots. Since the film played it out like they were dead and ignored them for so long, I forgot about the Alien environment, I forgot about where they were and thought that the pilots were on some random planet. The film's climax is such a let down because unlike the first film, you feel how great the stakes are, you feel like that we might lose to these aliens. Here, you know we're going to win, you know the queen is going to get killed, so the ending HAS no thrill or sense of fun to it. I hear there's going to be a THIRD movie coming out this decade......I think the bar will be lowered by that film even more so than this one.