Just the Ticket #150: Independence Day - Resurgence

Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. the Ticketmaster

Despite my claims that I would spend my three-day weekend "blogging my ass off" no matter what the weather said, I am composing this on Thursday afternoon following a taxing day at work because it took me four days to get through Independence Day: Resurgence, which includes three days of me falling asleep after ten minutes. Also, I heard so many bad things about it from other reviewers, like Honest Trailers, Pitch Meetings, and PointlessHub, that it made me not want to watch it at all. But I've endured the Midnight Run movies, the Bunnyman trilogy, the Children Of the Corn franchise, and Prehysteria! 3, so what's the harm? It only put me to sleep three times.

Go ahead and make your "sleepy old man" jokes, Ticketholders! When I wake up and read them, I'll fire back with some tired anti-Zoomer material about how you're too dumb, distracted, and lazy to read something because you spend half of any given day obsessing over the lives of nightmare-inducing CGI human-headed toilets when what you should really be doing is remembering to Become A Ticketholder because you haven't already, comment your favorite "sleepy old man" joke at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to spend another twenty years coming up with something stupid and pointless to disappoint you with, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my alien-punching content.

Perhaps this is informed by recency bias and "expert opinion," but everything bad you've heard about Independence Day: Resurgence is true:

• It tries hard but feels almost nothing like the original Independence Day, right down to the returning characters having completely different personalities and narrative purposes (with the exception of Brent Spiner as Dr. Brackish Okun, who is a gem of a character no matter which entry he's in, and his name is fun and original) and the new and legacy characters being devoid of personality and delivering their lines like they studied acting at Dr. Light's Academy Of Drunken First Takes.
  
• Most of the movie's two-hour runtime consists of attention-deficit CGI nonsense and scenes of people talking in dark, blue-tinged rooms.
• The director, five credited writers, six-plus executive producers, and the global cast of idiotic characters had twenty years to prepare, and this was the best they could do.
• Judd Hirsch's character parlayed his "you'll catch a cold" line from the first movie into a pretentiously thick book about how his "idea" saved the world, and he spends the bulk of the movie rounding up children in a context that has very clear pedophilia and cult leader implications in the associated dialogue.
• Humanity has reverse-engineered the Harvester (that's the name they're going with) technology to turn the once-recognizable Earth into an impersonal, CGI knockoff of a Star Wars establishing shot, so they have improved extraterrestrial detection and defense measures and advanced transportation and weapons technology...but they didn't think to put shields on their fighter jets, they capture the enemy alive (which bites them in the ass later), and they still manage to not see the new Queen mothership (yes, they're doing an Aliens with this one) despite it being an entire hemisphere in size.
• There are many attempts to recapture the spirit of THE Speech, including just replaying that scene from the original during the opening credits, and they fall flat (with one exception that I'll talk about later).
• Will Smith read the script and decided he would rather commit suicide.... Wait. *checking notes* Correction: Will Smith read the script and decided he would rather commit to Suicide Squad. Massive difference! But the result is the same because they had to just kill his character in a training exercise offscreen (so they're doing an Aliens AND an Alien 3?).
• Despite being filmed in New Mexico and Canada, Independence Day: Resurgence was heavily funded by China, so one of the new characters spends the entire movie trying to have sex with China. So, yeah; fuck China!
• President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) - not former President; they just call him President Whitmore and the movie basically pretends he's still in charge even though his offhand psychic vision from the first film makes everyone think he's an old man with dementia migraines now because Roland Emmerich characters are among the stupidest fictional humans ever conceived of - makes a big, heroic sacrifice to take out the Queen, but it doesn't work and means nothing.
• The talking orb. It's the last survivor of one of the many Harvested planets in the universe, which means it failed to kill the Harvesters, but is framed as the "last hope" for teaching humanity how to succeed. This makes no narrative sense.
• David Levinson is just Jeff Goldblum now.
• Vivica A. Fox's character went from stripper to doctor between movies...and dies in an 80s action movie villain fall into CGI rubble almost immediately after the aliens start attacking.

I didn't intend for this review to take this format, but it is, so now, I'm going to have a section where I talk about flaws I noticed on my own.

• The editing after Whitmore nukes himself trying to take out the Queen absolutely dismembers any kind of dramatic weight his sacrifice should have had.
• The main characters (?) defeat the Queen through the tried-and-true method of "that didn't work, so let's try it again, but same-ier and with more screaming because anime is real."
• The main characters (?) also survive something they say that they won't be able to survive, and then manage to fly alien fighter planes after saying they can't because the thrusters are broken.
• Levinson's signal decryption and computer hacking skills from the first movie are never mentioned or used here because his new French girlfriend with a sometimes-French-sometimes-British accent is better at it than him.
• African warlords are good guys if they can dual-wield machetes and have the same psychic headaches as the President.
• This was one of Robert Loggia's last movie roles. He has a cameo appearance with little or no dialogue, perhaps for health reasons, and I feel bad for him.
• There's a scene where Liam Hemsworth's character (because most of the characters are too blank to bother remembering their names) tells Dylan Hiller (Jesse T. Usher, replacing Ross Bagley from the original as Will Smith's character's adult son) to "go up where you belong." We know in context that he means "you're a pilot; fly the ship while I shoot stuff," but the phrasing of the line is racially awkward.

And now, some missed opportunities:

• The most obvious is the cliffhanger ending. There were supposed to be two more films after this, shot back-to-back, with the surviving focus characters traveling to targeted planets and the Harvester homeworld to end the alien threat. In true Hollywood cringe fashion, they were to be called ID4Ever: Parts One and Two.
• The characters who were recast or didn't appear. Will Smith was a big loss for the sequel's tone, and the return of Mae Whitman as Whitmore's daughter could have brought some much-needed levity. We know from the 2012 TMNT cartoon and Good Girls that she has the range to do action-focused line delivery as well as comedic and dramatic acting. Also, it would have been interesting to see Margaret Colin return as Levinson's ex and watch the evolution of their rekindled relationship instead of giving him a new (younger) love interest who compromises his importance by her mere existence.
• William Fichtner is in this. He usually plays shady characters, and there's a moment where the entire Constitutional line of succession is declared dead and his character gets sworn in as the new President. Maybe there was some real-world political reason to not go this direction, and it would have been predictable, but it might have been interesting to have a reveal where he had been secretly working with the Harvesters in exchange for political power, like, "make me President and spare America, and in exchange, I'll help you destroy the planet" or something. He didn't have to succeed; it just would have made the movie more interesting.
• The Harvesters' psychic link wasn't used to its full potential. They could have used the linked humans as sleeper agents or killswitch hostages, but all it really amounted to was a given character having a migraine when time was of the essence. Repeatedly.

But, there are some good things to note, too.

• Even though they are CGI now, I like the look of the Harvester foot soldiers and the Queen. I like that she's huge and has her own shield and can control Harvester fighter planes. That makes her cool and interesting and threatening as a villain even though she doesn't have much of a personality beyond "EVIL!"
• Dr. Okun is a fun character. Even at the expense of his dignity, Brent Spiner acts the hammy hell out of him. And it's refreshing that Okun is gay. Sure, it may be one of those forced inclusivity pandering situations that doesn't commit hard enough because the the yuan is talking, but I like Okun as a character, and homosexuality is just another facet of him.
• William Fichtner can play a good heroic character, too. While I'm disappointed with what they didn't do with him, I like Fichtner as acting President Adams, and I'd like to point out that everyone makes note of all the failed attempts at THE NEW Speech, but I haven't heard anyone talk about how Fichtner absolutely nails it. This is totally subjective, but I felt his delivery here the same way I felt Pullman's delivery in the original. Fight me.

And that's about all I could think of.

Independence Day: Resurgence is a boring, unfocused, soulless, idiotic anniversary cash-grab of a thing with a few bright spots twinkling in the depths of its "What if The Asylum had a billion dollars?" aesthetic.

Watch if you're curious, but get ready to make this bitch a distant encounter.

F+

Also get ready to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your hidden binary doomsday countdown at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to watch this movie again, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my alien-punching content.

Ticketmaster,

Out for a wine tour.