Independence Day: Resurgence is Roland Emmerich’s follow up to Independence Day which was made way back 1996 and stars Liam Hemsworth, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Jessie Usher, Maika Monroe, Sela Ward and William Fichtner. I have some thoughts on this train wreck of a movie, but the TL;DR is do not waste your money on this tripe.

In no particular order, as I’m writing them off the top of my head. Oh and spoilers abound:

I love SciFi movies. The plot doesn’t even need to be 100% believable for me to get on board. But ID:R’s plot came and went, like water in a leaky bucket. Even worse, it was a lazy carbon copy of the first movie! Wikipedia lists 5 writers. I hate to be a dick, but I don’t have a clue what they were doing. To start with, The movie opens starts of with humanity building a laser base on the moon. But five minutes later we learn that Earth is surrounded with them - Why put another solitary one on the moon? Within minutes, Everyone ignores the advice of the one man apparently responsible for making sure we were ready for when the aliens return for the past 20 years. Then an alien harvest ship shows up, lands, and starts drilling into the earth, completely ignoring a salvage ship right beside them, which in a stroke of amazing luck has equipment able to monitor drilling to the earths core.

The fucking “harvest” ship

At the end, the harvest ship just ups and leaves - explained earlier in the movie in a mental leap that seemed to require some of those jet boots from Guardians of the Galaxy - to return to another harvest queen. A convenient fact given that it lands and covers half the planet. But that would be awkward at the end so lets just say it flies off from where it came. Then there’s another leap of faith where we decide that the aliens have a hive mind. The queen controls all the other “worker/warrior” aliens, so after she/he/it dies they just stop moving. Alien ships fall out of the sky, so I guess so. OK. So believing that, if the workers/warriors have just stopped moving, the harvest ship has no working crew. This means that the harvest ship must have enough programming to fly itself back where it came. But apparently not enough to keep a stupid drill running for 5 more minutes? Who wrote this??

The alien queen is actually a puppy

So there’s a sequence towards the end where the queen is running around on Earth, with some massive lasers and other alien stuff ready to kick ass. Some fighter jets engage but Queenie is two busy to take them out because she’s chasing after a school bus full of kids like it was your dog and its favourite tennis ball. Every so often she takes a break from the bus to kill a fighter jet with one shot. Then back to the bus. For no reason as it poses no threat, but by all means let the jets keep shooting at you.

The dialog

Oh Jesus, the dialog. In the original movie, there were some good one liners - delivered pretty well by some pretty decent actors. This movie tried to recreate that, but instead of inserting them tactically every so often went for the machine gun approach. And like bad guys with machine guns in every movie ever - they missed. Badly. There were a few laughs, but it was just too hard to gloss over the rest of the painfully delivered “inspirational” speeches and crap dialog. The Bill Pullman hanger speech was just awful. And the time I just thought it was cheesy, but I’ve thought about it and it was just awful. And we’re not going to talk about the perfect shave he has time to have.

Good grief. I paid to see this movie. Actual money, and in a post #brexit world I should probably have held on to that cash - so should you.