Review of Independence Day: Resurgence (2016) by Bigdegs29 — 16 Jul 2016

It's hard to nail down where this movie goes wrong exactly. Probably because it goes wrong in so many different ways, but not so much to fall completely flat in any one category.

Only ten minutes in and you'll realize the story is far too disjointed. There's no flow to the movie. There's no time to make us care about the characters, or for character progression, or much in the way of back stories. Which might not be a bad thing considering how bland the new cast is.

Also, if a movie is going to take itself serious, it better make logical sense. This movie had so many cop-outs and miraculous coincidences, it's difficult to suspend your disbelief long enough to actually enjoy it. The characters often make incredible leaps of insight that no one could actually do. "They're drilling. Oh, they must be here to harvest our molten core!" What? How'd you come to that conclusion? I mean, even the opening credits had a logic fail, where the aliens somehow had a recording of the President's 4th of July speech from the original movie! How exactly did they get that?

I think the biggest problems with this movie were the screenwriting and the directing. Scenes often didn't go together cohesively in a logical way. Their homages to the original amounted to basically copying and pasting lines directly from it. Most of the gags fell short, or were overly cheesy for the seriousness of what was going down. Characters didn't react realistically to what was going on around them. I could go on and on with these faults.

As I mentioned before, the visuals were top-notch. I have a serious hatred for CGI that doesn't look realistic, yet gladly this movie doesn't fall into that trap. It has plenty of CGI, but it is incredibly well done. Too bad the other aspects of the movie don't match up.

If nothing else, this movie has shown me how much I want a GOOD space opera. Yet sadly, it may also be the reason we don't get one in the near future.

Good luck with that third installment Fox.