Ugh. So Independence Day: Resurgence is the aggressively mediocre sequel to the 1996 Independence Day, itself a dumb but enjoyable flick. The original was accused by critics of the time for being exactly what this new movie is. Dumb, full of noisy action, all spectacle, and lacking humanity. For twenty years, I’ve said, yes a lot of that’s true, but I still think it was fun. I have no rational excuse why I liked it – but this terrible sequel explains it.
It’s twenty years after the War of 1996 and humanity has co-opted all the alien tech to build its own ray guns, advanced fighters, and moon bases. They will be ready when they come back… and they do. And they aren’t ready. And much noise and chaos occurs and then the movie ends, assuring us of a sequel. Yeah, bud, good luck with that.
The original movie was a disaster movie mixed with an alien invasion flick. It understood that, while big and noisy, the destruction of major cities mattered. This movie doesn’t care. A spaceship so ridiculously huge lands on earth and destroys major cities just by passing over them and the movie treats it as pure spectacle and barely mentions it again. It has no impact and the stakes are technically huge, the movie just doesn’t care.
The flick barely spends time with its characters and, when it does, they are all bland. This movie gives us enough boring characters that you really miss Will Smith’s charm and not even a returning Jeff Goldblum can save it.
Look, I can’t say this is the worst movie ever. It’s too dull and boring to be the best worst movie… and it’s too dull and boring to really get angry about for wasting my time. It’s just a visual example of the world’s biggest shrug. A giant meh to the the universe. It doesn’t even deserve this much text (in fact, I went back through the review and cut about half of my response to it because, really, who cares).
Score: 65