Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)
Let’s start right here: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie so thoroughly devoid of any new ideas. This film was the definition of ‘creatively bankrupt.’
Sure, I’ve seen plenty of terrible movies before, or movies that don’t have a solid story line to follow, but even “The Wandering Earth” (2019) was novel. Stupid, but novel.
This was just boring and undeveloped and all-around bad.
In almost every way, “Independence Day: Resurgence” (2016) was a remake of the original “Independence Day” (1996), with the only changes being things you’d expect from a movie two decades newer: better special effects, new faces, and a disgusting amount of pandering to China.
To that last point: China only allows a set number of foreign-made films into Chinese theaters per year. I think that number is something like 27, and it counts for the entire global set of movies trying to get into the Chinese marketplace. One way around this is if a Chinese studio finances a movie and has a certain amount of “Chinese” stuff in the movie (main characters, locations/scenery, etc). So, Hollywood likes money and Chinese studios like movies. It’s a good combo for anyone who wants to line their pockets; it’s a shit deal for anyone who wants a good movie, because it inevitably means there’s going to be some bizarre Chinese influence.
“Independence Day” was about a global alien invasion, but it was inherently American. It took place on the days leading up to the 4th of July, it focused on the U.S. President and the U.S. military, and militaries across the globe followed the U.S.’s lead when it came to the winning tactics for fighting off the aliens.
“Resurgence” takes place 20 years after that alien invasion. For some reason, that convinced the governments of the world to develop into a friendly hegemony with one giant military, to fight off... someone? It’s not clear. The first movie doesn’t give an indication that a new enemy will be returning, so there’s no reason for the new World Government to develop a global military, a satellite constellation of laser weapons (pointed outward), and a moon-based defense system.
What would have actually happened in post-1996 is that every government would have scrambled to collect as much alien tech as they possibly could to buff up their own militaries, and we would have simply gone back to fighting each other with more advanced weaponry.
So: in this new world order, China was apparently heavily influential in helping rebuild the new “Earth Space Defense” (ESD) force. Considering that in 1996, the USSR had collapsed relatively recently and China hadn’t implemented their horrifying ‘one belt, one road’ program for global economic domination yet, it doesn’t really make sense that China would have been an influential player in the post-invasion reconstruction.
The logo for the ESD was just the U.S. Air Force ‘space wings,’ but with a picture of the globe instead of a star. And for some reason, everyone in an ESD uniform had either Senior Airmen (3 stripes) or Technical Sergeant (5 stripes) rank on their shoulders, regardless of position or actual rank.
If the USAF Public Affairs team was involved in this production, shame on them.
If they weren’t involved, it seems like there should be some kind of lawsuit for Hollywood using the USAF’s symbols in a very, very stupid way.
I wrote a lot of notes as I watched this movie, so I’m going to revert to bullets so I don’t write a full dissertation about the things that made me angry:
At the beginning, you see two pilots doing maintenance work on their own spacecraft. This is a huge no-no; there’s a reason why every branch of the military has dedicated maintainers for their weapons systems
The ESD officers wore uniforms that are clearly just current USAF blues.
One of the pilots calls the others “aviators” - this might be okay in the Navy, but USAF pilots don’t call themselves “aviators.” I realize this is the ESD not the USAF, but considering everything they stole, they could have at least used the right jargon.
For all of the money they poured into some stellar (heh, space) special effects, there were a few scenes that were so poorly rendered that they might as well have been pulled from a video game running on a low-end computer.
Apparently during the invasion in 1996, an alien ship landed in Africa and just stayed there. No one did anything about it; the governments of earth just left whatever unfortunate country it was to deal with it.
Brent Spiner’s character is gay now. The issue isn’t that there’s a gay character, but that it’s so clearly shoe-horned in there for the sake of getting inclusivity points.
This second alien invasion was not retaliation for the first, who wanted to strip the planet of surface-level resources. This fleet of the exact same aliens wanted the molten iron core of Earth. It’s not explained why they picked the planet with life on it, or why they don’t source the iron from non-life-hosting planets, or why they don’t just farm asteroids for iron. Earth is just unlucky.
President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) is back, and possibly crazy! His daughter from the first movie is a presidential aide/ESD fighter pilot, and Whitmore sacrifices himself to blow up an alien ship, just like Randy Quaid did in the first movie!
Jeff Goldblum returns, playing Jeff Goldblum playing Dr. David Levinson, in a weirdly self-aware role.
Julius Levinson (Judd Hirsch) plays David’s dad again, so we’re forced to experience another pointless subplot of Julius traveling to wherever David is. This results in a very cool scenery shot of a school bus driving through the desert flats of Nevada, but contextually doesn’t make any sense.
The President of the U.S. gets evacuated to Cheyenne Mountain for safety and is then killed by an alien. In the next scene, an ESD 4-star general is told that the president is dead and he’s about to be sworn in as president. A quick trip to Wikipedia shows that there are 17 federal-level civilians in line to take the presidency, so unless all 17 were crammed into Cheyenne Mountain at the same time (which they wouldn’t be, because that’s stupid), there’s no reason for this ESD general to get it.
The pilots who were allowed to do maintenance on their own spacecraft were part of a construction team on the moon, operating a specialized heavy-duty space tug to move large equipment around. The pilot then takes said tug and flies to earth, picks up Dr. Levinson, and flies back to the moon. It doesn’t make sense that anyone would waste time building a tug, designed to operate ONLY on the moon, and give it the engine capabilities or heat resistance to transit through earth’s atmosphere in either direction.
On two different occasions, pilots simply took their government-owned spacecraft to “go check on something.” That’s a good way to get court marshaled and never be allowed to fly again.
The “fighter” spacecraft are just F-35s with ‘space engines’ and the “bombers” are B-1s, also with ‘space engines.’
A C-130 ‘Hercules‘ is pointed out on the flight line. It’s the same aircraft that we have today, with - you guessed it - ‘space engines’!Despite a narrative monologue making it clear that we’ve mastered anti-gravity with the help of alien tech, all of our “future” flying machines look almost identical to the flying machines we have now, with glowing blue rings instead of whatever engines we actually use.
An incompetent civilian government goober spent the entire movie being useless, then spontaneously becomes an alien-killing Rambo for one scene.
Humans steal and pilot alien ships (again), which are clearly not aerodynamic, yet somehow manage to turn a ‘controlled dive’ into regular flying when their engines completely fail.
The “comedic relief” character immediately overdoes it, then continues to over do it, going well beyond “comedic” or “relief” and thoroughly into the “I hope the aliens get you” category.
There were so many scenes in this movie that were shot-for-shot remakes of scenes from the original film that it stopped being any kind of homage and just become a clear indicator of “we don’t actually have any new ideas, so we’re just going to recycle everything we possibly can from the first one.”
The soundtrack occasionally played the theme from the first movie, which felt like an insult since the entire thing was a ripoff.
The end of the movie has some macguffin about a far-off planet with technology that can be used to fight off these aliens once and for all. It’s clearly a set up for a third movie that I hope never gets brought into this world.
This movie was made long enough after the original that it shouldn’t have been a cash-grab, yet somehow, that’s exactly what it felt like.
I actually stopped watching at one point, because literally everything else seemed like a better media choice.
Shame on you, Rolland Emmerich.
