Independence Day: Resurgence

Why did they fucking bother making Independence Day: Resurgence? Really, I get it. It’s about money. It’s about lazy, greedy assholes cashing in when they’re out of ideas. Who else but creatively bankrupt grassfuckers would crank out a sequel to a twenty-year-old product that wasn’t that good and that nobody was begging for more of? Not anyone with a good idea, that’s for damn sure. 

The original Independence Day was popular, for sure. That’s different than good, and sometimes people dig something new that doesn’t seem so great after we’ve had time to reflect on it. Once, someone left an inflatable sex doll in the men’s room at the old Arvada Tavern. It was really popular. We all took turns sticking our dicks into that thing until it deflated and collapsed into the clogged urinal. A week later, we all got diagnosed with crabs and, with the wisdom of hindsight, regretted what we had all really enjoyed at the time. Enough to go back for seconds and thirds, even.

What I’m trying to say is Independence Day was the crab-infested, urine-soaked, punctured sex doll of movies. This unrequested sequel is worse. This thing is like buying used panties from a Tokyo vending machine and discovering they’re your own. And they’ve got Hershey squirts.

Director Roland Emmerich has made a buttload of shitty movies like the first Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 B.C. and the ass-wrenching 1998 Godzilla, but I don’t know why. I don’t think he loves movies or is compelled to tell stories. He has no aptitude for bringing characters to life or for engaging an audience in a plot or theme. He’s like a German man who doesn’t speak English trying to tell a joke he has memorized phonetically. He may put the sounds in the right order, but that doesn’t make it funny. Emmerich movies have people in them, and they have special effects, but they make no sense and they have no soul.

As bad as his previous movies were, though, Independence Day: Resurgence feels worse. It’s like he’s been cooking a big shit stew for twenty years, and as time went by he boiled out more and more humanity, reducing the product to a thicker, more concentrated mass of soulless turd.

There’s a plot here, and a shitload of cheap-ass B stories. They don’t make sense and they seem about as computer-generated as the CGI. Obviously, the aliens in giant space ships who attacked earth in the first movie are back. They aren’t any smarter about it, just bigger. That’s how Hollywood does things because it takes no brainpower or creativity just to make shit bigger. The audience is told for most of the movie that the aliens are invincible and we’re going to lose. Of course, that’s just subterfuge to hide how easily the monsters will be defeated in the third act. Seriously, we see almost no evidence of them being invincible, just a lot of characters saying amidst some of the most horseshit science ever put on screen.

There are movies that want to look authentic, who tie the sci-fi on screen to real science. Movies where, when people talk, it sounds plausible. Independence Day: Resurgence can’t be bothered. The fake science isn’t even pretending to be based on fact. Instead, it’s clearly from the mind of a criminally stupid screenwriter who refused to even use Wikipedia to understand how gravity works, or that a round planet has a curved surface. There is talk of lasers, ecospheres and reentry, all of it wrong enough for a drunk from Arvada to know better.

The human stories in Independence Day: Resurgence is like getting spaghetti at the Olive Garden. The characters are the wet, bland noodles piled up in a limp and soggy knot. Sure, there’s a lot, but it’s all shitty. And all of it was boiled up by some incompetent asshole with a runny nose who doesn’t give a fuck how it tastes, just that it covers the plate. It’s obvious the moviemakers didn’t care enough about these characters, so why would an audience? This is canned food, preprocessed shit, made by a factory. Will a husband and wife torn apart by the battle find their ways back to each other? Yes. Will the children in peril end up safe? Yes. Will the cute dog be saved? Yes. Will an arguing father and son reconcile? Yes. Will the multitude of old guys everyone thinks are loony coots (all the returning characters from the first movie) prove themselves to be right all along and heroes? Yes. Will the hunky fighter pilot have some snappy comebacks in the heat of battle? Of course. Shitty moviemakers would have it no other way because that would take effort or thought.

If there is nobody to root for, the movie should at least have great special effects, right? Independence Day: Resurgence doesn’t. It looks like a five-dollar grab bag from the thrift store: you get a lot of stuff, but it’s all worn out odds and ends. There is nothing unique or visually interesting here. And that’s pretty fucking ridiculous because the original movie only existed to dazzle us with exploding national monuments. This time, though, the movie is stupider and the special effects are worse. There are tidal waves, collapsing nondescript buildings and aliens derivative of Alien, Predator and other space monsters movie of the last twenty years.

Independence Day: Resurgence also declares independence by making a clumsy and desperate salute to the Chinese market. There are a smattering of Chinese characters grafted onto the periphery of the story. None matter, but I got the sense there is another version of this movie in Asia where maybe their roles are expanded. Yes, nothing makes Americans feel more pride with their independence than knowing their entertainment is slowly being hijacked by awkward pandering to foreign markets.

This is self-indulgent horseshit made by an industry so sure of themselves that they don’t even have to try. They’re running Hollywood like an Olive Garden: serving up shitty products in large amounts. This is crap that requires no skill to prepare and appeals to people who are too fucking lazy and timid to try something different or new. One Finger for the dreadful Independence Day: Resurgence.