Independence Day:
The Second One
Slight Spoilers!
When I watched Furious 7 I was drunk and I had a giggle at the cinema. Good lobotomy inducing action with some gorgeous cars, scenery and flesh. Today, I wasn’t so lucky. Independence Day was one of those films that I felt compelled to watch. ‘I write Sci-Fi, I should watch Sci-Fi’ was the mantra, or logic that drove me to the cinema on a rainy day in London, but without a serious I was forced to sit through 120 minutes of mind-numbing shit.
Will Smith might still be reeling with the catastrophe that was After Earth, and as a result wary of taking on any new science fiction projects, and in this case, he chose wisely. There were some familiar faces from the original 1996 classic reprising their roles, Lone Star was back as a mentally damaged ex-President/save the day fighter pilot; Robert Loggia was present, at least in body; Brent Spiner, best known for his work as Data on TNG was as loopy as ever, but the crown jewel returning for round two was Jeff Goldblum playing Jeff Goldblum.
Weighing in with a reported budget of $165 million dollars, Resurgence is a top to bottom failure. The cast is either wasted, as in the case of Madame President Sela Ward, or completely incapable of acting, enter Liam Hemsworth. It seems that the producers and writers convinced the chaps with the money at 20th Century Fox that if they bombarded the audience with CGI and sets that looked like they came out of a 1950s western they’d have a winner. What they seemed to forget is that they could act in the 1950s.
If what you’re looking for is entertainment fit for a lobotomized chimpanzee, this is the film for you.
When a massive alien space craft sets down on Earth in search of precious resources, our heroes will jump from Singapore to London in two seconds flat, I’m still confused about that. The fighter jock heroes will celebrate every enemy they shoot down for such a long time that logic would suggest that they themselves would be susceptible to being shot down. The whole film just runs from here to there with very little thought towards character development or logic.
Perhaps the entire film is directed at the Twitter/Instastupid generation that has neither imagination nor the ability to poke a hole in the plot (there was a ground war in Africa for ten years?), or ask why the actions that are taken by people in the film are so freaking stupid.
What we have here is an unoriginal, formulaic waste of time that’ll make too much damn money not to warrant another film. Youth focused drivel seems to have found an audience, and that is the real tragedy of this film. Instead of doing something fun and original, the filmmakers decided to produce a giant turd and dump it on an audience that has been dulled into thinking that bad ScI-Fi is good Sci-Fi. Recent years have brought us two mega-fucking disasters in this genre that shouldn’t have been: Prometheus and Force Awakens. Two films that had an awesome heritage, but instead dropped the ball.
Perhaps that’s the real tragedy of Resurgence, it had a strong foundation, but those that were tasking with taking the story forward failed us the fans, and perhaps more importantly, the legacy of a really fun film from 1996.