Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

I don't like fireworks. Never did. I didn't want to waste my time watching them, so instead I decided to go and see "Independence Day: Resurgence." I've never regretted a decision more in my life.

Wow. You ever sit in a class room, and while the teacher is talking you just kind of zone out, and then about ten minutes later you jump back to reality and realize you're supposed to be paying attention? This happened to me multiple times during this movie. There were points where I actually forgot I was watching a film, and I'm not joking.

The tag line is "We had twenty years to prepare. So did they." But did they? Because after watching this movie I really couldn't tell. In fact, the aliens seemed weaker. Sure, they had a few force fields, a few clever bait and switches, but is that really all they came up with after twenty years? No wonder no one in the movie seemed afraid of them. People actually seemed pretty calm, even though the aliens wiped out London and China immediately after entering the Earth's atmosphere, just by flying over them. But that doesn't seem to bother anyone. The Earth is going to end in a few minutes? Didn't seem to matter to anybody in this film, because no one showed any emotion, and anger, any sadness, any grief, any hysteria, or any fear relating to this, and because of this, there was no sense of tension or fear for the viewer either. And this throws the tone off, also. I understand that these movies are supposed to be guilty pleasure fun, but at least have the tone be a little darker and a little more serious. This film was so lighthearted that it was actually off-putting.

This movie never really felt like it got started either. I mean, you get your giant CGI explosion fest when the alien ship first enters the Earth's atmosphere, with cities literally being torn out of the ground, but then the action never gets any bigger or better than that. My jaw literally dropped while watching the destruction during this scene, and I was ready for the action to intensify and grow. But it didn't. It got slower. They put the climax in the first 45 minutes of the movie, and then just spend the rest of the running time focusing on the falling action.

The action was also incoherent, with a million things happening on the screen at one time. It was hard to follow and looked very generic, and while it wasn't necessarily boring, it wasn't exciting in the slightest. And the CGI wasn't even that good either; there were points where watching this movie was like watching gameplay of an off-brand science fiction video game that was released in the middle of winter to appeal to the parents of small children who have no idea that the game they're buying is a cheap knockoff of a triple A title.

And speaking of CGI, the universe that was built in the film didn't seem believable at all. I didn't see an improved and more protected Earth that used futuristic alien technology to their advantage. I saw a paint bucket of CGI vomit thrown on the screen, with Roland Emmerich stuffing it down our throats while saying "Believe it! This is reality!"

I should've watched the fireworks instead.

Fmovies: It is true that when you are young, you see movies like the original "ID4" from a different perspective, most often you judge them better than what they really are, and this undeniably is a fact of life. It holds true for most people. Yet, the original movie, even when judged by my 41 years old brain now, without considering the nostalgia factor, and even in all its cheesiness ... still manages to be far far superior from this absolute garbage!

This sequel really is a let down of epic proportions, and I felt like I wasted my money. It manages to be what the first movie totally wasn't ...and that can be summed up in one word: BORING. The bad guys ( the aliens ) are laughably stupid - even more than the first time ... the main characters could all be replaced by cardboard cutouts of people and it wouldn't make any difference. Even the CGI is bad... Avoid it at all costs.

It just rocks for the following reasons:

The robot from Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy is here. I love that film! He is still depressed too. Chinese products, Chinese technology, Chinese noodles, Chinese actors. I love that the studio is part-owned by the Chinese now and the rider orders the directors to cast a Chinese person (like Kong, like Doctor Strange etc.) because what the boss says goes! After all, like everyone else I do most of my shopping at the Chinese dollar store Wal-mart. It shows how important and the center of the universe our planet is. The aliens having been USA slapped in the original have gone back light years and have come back to Earth, yes Earth, because planets like ours are so rare. OK, the story is contradicting itself with the whole they vacuumed many other planets, but anyway. We put a station on the moon but hey it rotated and was on the wrong side when the aliens returned so we did not know what to do when an alien arrives.

Independence Day: Resurgence fmovies. Why was this movie called Independence Day... ?? What was its connection to July 4th? It should have been called Chinese product placement extravaganza. It was mostly boring (sequel!)

This is one of those movies where the grown up audience knows after 5 minutes, that the target group is teenagers. Even in the middle of the movie's major crisis, the whole world pauses, as two young characters have to talk intimately, because it is just so important, for she's hot and he's so cute, so the less important end of our civilization will just have to wait.

Unlike many famous sci-fi movies, this movie is not true to science at all. If some young script writer thought that it would be "dope" for gravity to be "defeatable", then gravity is "defeatable", whatever that means. Small objects that are hidden can be monitored in detail by the good guys, while objects the size of a continent are completely undetectable. There are dozens of these examples where the movie makes no sense.

The humor in this movie has no finesse. Watching it is like being at dinner with the distant uncle who is not funny but keeps cracking jokes, though no one is really laughing but him.

Most of the time, the dialogues sound like a wacky parody, in the way Doc spoke with Martin in Back to the Future. They even copied the Doc character so directly, that there is an actual long haired, wacky old man in a lab coat talking in a nutty way while experimenting with sci-fi technology.

One thing does work, though, the computer graphics are impressive. Most of the time, the visual and audio effects really shine. It is just sad that an obviously huge gift budget was spent fully on the wrapping, and very, very little was spent on the gift inside.

It has two good CGI scenes, which you can watch at home some months from now. The rest is garbage. The movie was cut in pieces that do not make any sense. But the complete edition is probably not better. It is BORING, and eminently stupid. Characters explain to the audience the basic plot five minutes after exposition time. It is an indictment of what film executives think about people. It is terrible. This movie needs to bomb, it needs to crash, it must be the point where the madness of the vapid blockbuster ends. Watch again any episode of "Game of Thrones" instead. Again, I repeat this point: it is not even fun in a dumb way. It treats you as a very slow person. You can feel the people responsible for this laughing at you. Make it stop. Don't go to the cinema.