User Reviews

If this sequel had appeared in 1997 or 98, it would have been averagely interesting. But in the past twenty years hence, the audience has had the delight to savor so many other much more superior movies of its genre (which were ironically spawned by the first Independence Day's success) - something which the direction of this movie did not bother to account for, hence we are in for a very badly dated why-bother sci-fi flick. The original was passably good for its time, and this sequel is but almost a poor spoof of itself.

Everything from the plot to the mundane cheesy dialogue, un-laughable jokes, and empty characters, and OK-ish CGI … all cookie-cutter mishmash from other passé movies. Situations make no sense, neither do the illogical reaction of the characters, including our supposedly 'super-intelligent' big mother-monster chasing after a school bus for no real reason apart from the fact its there, like a playful kitten after a spot of light on the floor. And of course the 'saviour' alienship with all its bombastic intellect and scientific pizazz comes right up face-on to be blown to smithereens without doing the obvious thing of announcing the altruistic reason for its presence … when apparently it does speak English at that too! Anyway, so so so many nonsensical senseless situations here, don't even bother to care two hoots after a while.

None of the characters nor actors have any lasting impression nor charisma … and the two 'romantic' couples …. totally plastic with inert chemistry. I can almost hear Jeff Goldblum whispering to Judd Hirsch, "Geez, this movie is just so bad we need to wind-up our exaggerated gestures and jaw-drops to save it!"

The original TV Star Trek would be more interesting.

How stupid do the script writers think the viewing audience is?

If the movie were made for four year olds, it would be an insult to their intelligence....

Great first 10 minutes or so then we are expected to leave logic and believability behind...

Making no sense doesn't seem to bother the director and producers...

The sphere can set up a planet to teach all other civilizations how to defend against the bad aliens...and it's credentials for doing so? Their planet got wiped out by said aliens and even the lower intelligence earthlings, using replicated, imitated weapons ripped from the bad aliens can shoot it down over the moon...yeah...great teachers they'll be...

The Queen can survive a fusion bomb blast but her shield falls under minor weapon fires...

The Queen can control all the alien ships but yeah, let the two hero's craft shoot at her for fun before taking over control...

And having all her fighters surround her...I guess to offer her protection...but they just kept flying round and round like an amusement park ride when the two rogue fighters decide to attack her...

An ex president's daughter who no longer flies can just commandeer a fighter...to fly alongside her father, who couldn't walk properly in the beginning of the film but can still fly a new age jet...all the air forces around the world obviously overdoing their pilot screening a tad...

The list goes on and on...I can't be bothered to write them all down or I might be writing an entire new script or story line...

I want my time and money back...as well as compensation for ruining my fond memory of the first film...

First off, let me say that I am a huge fan of the original film, so I might be a tad biased here in my review, but that aside, I found 'Independence Day: Resurgance' to be an acceptable sequel and definitely not deserving of the venom that a lot of fans spat at it over the last month or so.

Is it cheesy? Without a doubt, but it's no more cheesy than any other action film that's come out in the last 30 years. Were there face- palm moments? Absolutely. Like when Dr. Okun awakens from a 20 year coma and is immediately able to not only speak, but move and hop up and walk? Why did they have to go with the whole coma bit? They could have just as easily said that he spent the last 20 years in a near catatonic state in a medical care facility. It would've explained why he was lying there with his eyes open and unresponsive on ID4, but there are a lot of face-palm moments in sci-fi/action flicks. It's part of the shtick at times and is something that fans of the genre have come to expect.

That being said, the film delivered on its promise, which was to show us what has happened to earth 20 years after the first attack and how we've reverse engineered and adapted the alien technology and utilized them for our own defense systems. We got to see the aliens return and mount a second attack on earth with an even bigger and stronger mother-ship known as a "harvester". We learned more about the alien civilization and what their true intentions for our planet were and we get to see the people of earth mount a second fight for survival with their backs against the wall. What more did you really want to see with this picture??

There were some sad parts as well. I hated seeing Vivica Fox and Bill Pullman's characters die. They were such huge, and integral parts of the original film and it stinks to see them go out that way, especially Foxes death because it was so unceremonious really. It also sucks that Will Smith had to be written out of the film. I think his inclusion would've made a huge difference in audience perception of the film and I think he would've been better off in ID4-2 than 'Suicide Squad'. I was particularly saddened to see Robert Loggia knowing it was the final film appearance for this great actor. I was moved at the small interaction of Loggia's character General Grey waving at President Whitmore at the ceremony. It was a very brief yet very poignant moment.

Although the acting could've been better and was a bit wooden at times (Usher's and Hemsworth's performances were particularly awful) it wasn't terrible overall. I'm not really sure what people were expecting to see when they saw this movie, but as far as I'm concerned, it delivered in bunches.

Same plot as the first, just bigger monsters, extreme CGI and bad acting... Why does Liam Hemsworth have a career??? Only positive thing in this epic t u r d is Jeff Goldblum. He just rocks!

To sum up... Its a disaster and I have never had the urge to consider demanding a refund, until now. This is just pure cash cow, because they know is box office due to the franchise.

The thing that is even more terrific is that they cliff hanged it, so if its a financial success, then rest assure, there will be a third... God Help Us. God Help Hollywood.

have a nice day!

Twenty years ago, the summer blockbuster movie season was changed forever. Independence Day's tale of human perseverance in the face of an overwhelming alien invasion became one of the highest grossing films of the 1990s thanks to a combination of memorable characters and iconic special effect sequences. It was also a film that felt quite standalone with a definite beginning, middle and end to it. Yet Rolland Emmerich and Dean Devlin (who scripted it as well as respectively directing and producing it) came back for more. Moving forward two decades in time, the film promised to build on the first by showing a rebuilt world taking on the threat of renewed invasion. Needless to say, expectations were high. Did it live up to them?

The short answer: not at all.

Independence Day: Resurgence often feels like it's simply re- treading over old ground, only on a much bigger scale. Many of the iconic moments of the first film are done here from shots of the lunar surface, aerial battles, infiltrating an alien space ship, the destruction of landmarks and much more. Even the film's big threat is really just a much larger version of the ships from the first film (this time an even more improbable 3,000 miles in diameter). Or take the ending when combines the ending of the original film with the duo's first project post ID4. Though the film finds the occasions where it subverts those moments (such as with the original film's most iconic scene), Emmerich and Devlin don't seem to have brought much new to the table here.

What they bring instead is the attitude that "bigger is better". From the rebuilt cities we glimpse in the opening moments to the over-sized alien ship, all the film can seem to do is take what came before and give it to us again on a larger scale. Yet despite the two decades that have passed and all the apparent advances in special effects, those featured here are less impressive and less convincing than their 1996 counterparts. Whereas the first film relied on the physical as well as CGI, this film seems to make almost extensive use of CGI throughout including with the aliens themselves. Gone is the sense of reality and physicality that made the first film's effects so effective, replaced by a kind of CGI blandness that could make this film fit in with any other number of would-be disaster epics that came in the wake of the original film. It's as if Emmerich and Devlin forgot what made their earlier work so memorable.

That extends to much of the rest of the film as well. Whereas the original film was populated by memorable characters with witty dialogue, this film lacks that completely. We're given a handful of characters from the original film twenty years on, primarily in the form of Jeff Goldblum's David Levinson as well as Bill Pullman's former President Whitmore and Brent Spiner as Doctor Okun, plus cameos from others who really don't add much of anything to the film (most especially Vivica A. Fox) though none of them feel like their anything but caricatures of their original selves. The new cast of characters are scarcely memorable from the recast roles of Dylan Hill and Patricia Whitmore (played by Jessie Usher and Maika Monroe) to Liam Hemsworth's pilot Jake to Sela Ward's President Lanford and William Fichtner's General Adams, all of whom are written so bland that no actor in the world could have found a way to make them more memorable. Like Emmerich's White House Down three years ago, he managed to put an impressive cast into an otherwise unmemorable film.

Indeed, the word "unmemorable" describes the end result of Independence Day: Resurgence. Despite its pedigree, the return of both the original filmmakers and some members of its original cast, not to mention twenty years of advances in special effects technology the end result is a film that isn't half as good or half as memorable as the original. Instead it's a bland piece of work, filled with what should be eye-catching special effects that instead remind of us of just how much better the original film was.

All of which leads me to ask a question. Rolland, Dean: you had twenty years to prepare. Was this really the best you could come up with?

Independence Day, which first came out 20 years ago, has a venerable position as one of film's most enjoyable 'guilty pleasure' movies. Yes, it's cheesy. Yes, it's ridiculous. But damn, it looked good and was buckets of fun back then and still is. It didn't need a sequel, but I was surprised to hear when one was in production and was mildly excited at the thought.

I didn't expect much, we've moved past being wowed by fantastic CGI (indeed, people seem to appreciate much more the practical effects which are put to good use in certain films and TV shows these days), but I thought it'd be great to tune out and watch an even bigger ship and even more aliens again attempt to take out an extremely patriotic and stoic human race.

By the time I left, I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, feel anger, hate, one thing I did feel was ripped off... gone is the charm and appreciable cheesiness of the first film, what we have as a replacement are characters you can't possibly like, let alone root for, inane and predictable self-sacrificial acts that fell flat and generated no emotion whatsoever, scene after scene of horrible one-liners mixed with 'it was great working with you' exchanges of dialogue from the indestructible arrogant young army types and attempts at humour in the face of millions of human deaths, by-the-book disaster film rivalries that turn into friendships which also ended up turning my stomach, boring plot lines that resurfaced again and again which slowed down the pace of the main conflict, are immediately forgettable, add nothing to the story and went nowhere, an alien race whose entire existence is based on militaristic invasion with 20 years to prepare continuously showing their glaring ineptitude at said invasion rather than having humans fight back against insurmountable odds like the first film, a cheap-looking CGI alien queen with a shield that survives a nuclear blast yet can't take a few shots from an aircraft based on the technology from her own race who'd rather chase a busload of kids than shoot down said aircraft firing at her, a coma patient who wakes up after 20 years and can immediately make jokes and walk around with no sign of muscle atrophy whatsoever, a disabled, insane war veteran who can still perfectly fly a jet based on alien technology...

I could go on, needless to say if you see this, be expecting every disaster movie trope and cliché with none of the charm and likable humour of the first film, and just try and enjoy the above-average special effects. Aside from that, there's really nothing else there.

And also, one of the worst sequels ever to be made. The truth is, like some other films, Independence Day: Resurgence didn't have to be made. Why it was made, I can't tell. Perhaps 20th Century Fox needed a to resurrect this brand to compete with other studios. And as the ending makes sufficiently clearly, there's more coming (please, spare us from it!). There's truly nothing to be recommended here: the story is dumb, the script very poor (some lines or scenes are unintentionally laughable), every single joke falls flat, the characters are one dimensional, the performances from the veteran actors could have been phoned in, and those from the young ones are rather stiff and uninspiring. Relationships have no chemistry and one doesn't really care for anyone. Boring is a good word to describe what happens on screen at every turn. There's never any real tension built, nor there is ever a sense of urgency. And they make the mistake of merely making the threat merely bigger (absurdly so; then again, Star Wars has recently stumbled upon that same rock). The film boasts a democratic, all inclusive, multicultural, globalist vibe. It also features a very prominent same-sex relationship from a significant, albeit secondary, character. It may be a SJW dream of a movie, since every requisite box of social justice is checked. In this sense the movie turns out to be quite lofty. If it proves anything, it is this: than the inclusion of such topics, or their filmic depiction per se do not better a film. It may just have the opposite effect, since all felt rather tiresome and fabricated. The movie fails in every department: story, script, acting, soundtrack, editing. But also in special effects. Imagine that! One of the main draws of the original ID4 was, precisely, its SFX. This one also boasts special effects galore, but they aren't of very good quality. It looks like everyone is in front of a green screen all the time. Objects don't have weight to them and all the presentation feels very cartoony. If you stay away from this movie, you will have made yourself an enormous favor. You won't have wasted any money nor two precious hours of your life.