Wait…after all his criticism, The Cap’n actually liked it?
I’m guessing a lot of you skipped this one at the theaters. A sequel to a film 20 years ago? What is this, Ghostbusters?!
I think liking this film requires two things, you have to be able to shut your brain off for two hours and let the fun just happen. Just let it wash over you. That’s what I did and I got to tell you… I kind of love this movie.
Don’t get me wrong, this film has a million different issues, tons of things wrong with it, from too many characters, shitty acting, terrible dialogue and writing, but it has one really important thing going for it.
Fun!
Also Jeff Goldblum.
Goddamn do I love Jeff Goldblum. He really is the best thing about this movie. This film should have been called Independence Day: Resurrection because I haven’t seen most of these actors in years.
I mean, what the hell has Vivica A. Fox been doing since Kill Bill?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15MqcNwkpq4
Oh no.
It has been 20 years since the events of the first film happened. And for 20 years earth has been planning for another attack. This is one thing I really loved, they’ve been planning for the aliens to return, setting up moon bases, giant laser weapon cannons… all this shit and… as soon as the alien ship arrives, all their planning goes right down the shitter. All of earth’s defenses, gone in a second.
If you’ve ever watched or heard of the anime Robotech, this film basically stole that idea. After an alien invasion, earth survives and out of the wreckage, we are able to reverse engineer their technology.
So even though it is 2016, we can now easily take trips to the moon, and build bases there. I think they even mentioned they had a base on Venus, but I’ll have to recheck that.
The earth has become kind of a Star Trek universe utopia. Nations no longer fight with each other, I think mainly because there aren’t nations anymore. They kind of make it seem like America now dominates the world. I’m sure a few might have an issue with that. I guess this is a world without terrorist groups.
Though… one of the many many characters in this is the leader of a rebel militia somewhere in Africa. Think Boko Haram if they only killed aliens.
Okay, so Jeff Goldblum. Like I said, he is the best thing about this movie and I really just want to talk about him for the rest of the review. But I know I can’t… or can I!
Like Bill Pullman’s character and Will Smith’s character, Jeff Goldblum is like this mega star. I’m not completely sure what his job is now. I think he works for the UN, investigating the crashed UFO spaceships, but who knows.
That is the reason why we’re introduced to him, he is on his way to check out this ship, the only one that landed during the invasion 20 years ago. Turns out it was mining for something. That also introduces three more characters, our Boko Haram leader, this IRS guy I think and Goldblum’s new lady friend. What happened to his wife? It’s never mentioned. My guess is she must have run off with Harvey Fierstein’s character. It’s the only reasonable explanation!
Now let’s switch off and focus on two more characters played by Liam Hemsworth and Jessie T. Usher, who gave one of the worst performances in the film. And this is a film that also stars Liam Hemsworth! That’s just sad.
These two are best friends, Usher being the son of Will Smith’s character who is now dead. He died doing a pilot test for one of the new Robotech jets.
These two once best friends now hate each other because Liam Hemsworth did a tricky move during a training session, almost getting Usher killed. Now they’ve thrown away their BFF bracelets and stepped on their matching heart necklaces.
FREINDSHIP OVER!
Usher went on to be the captain of a jet force squadron and Hemsworth got shoved off to some shit job on the moon.
Thankfully Hemsworth has got a sexy girlfriend back home, Patricia Whitmore President Whitmore’s (Bill Pullman) daughter, played by Mae Whitman…. Wait. Not Mae Whitman? But she’s like the only one besides Will Smith that still acts in movies. Did they not think it would be believable that someone like Liam Hemsworth would fall in love with her? This is a movie about aliens invading for a second time, I’m pretty sure we could suspend our belief that Liam Hemsworth could fall for someone who wasn’t a blonde waif.
Bill Pullman! He’s kind of gone crazypants. He has been getting these visions, the aliens are returning. But no one really believes him, because he’s crazypants. And has a long beard.
He keeps drawing this same picture over and over again from his vision. The Xbox power on symbol. For real, that’s what everyone is drawing. What could it mean!
A spaceship appears at the moon base, but it doesn’t attack, just kind of floats there. Us course we shoot it down. Duh.
Turns out they were friendlies. But I don’t really know what good they could have done, seeing as the mothership to the bad aliens arrives like 5 minutes later.
Okay, also, it turns out the ship they shot down, like I said were friendlies, a race that has shed their physical form and have become cyber people! Actually, they just look like Marvin the robot’s head from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. They are a race that has all but been wiped out by these evil aliens.
So my gripe with that is… how can they help? They say they have all this useful information to help defeat the baddies, but obviously it didn’t help them any, seeing as this Marvin head is the only thing left of their people. That’s like cheating of the test of a guy infamously known for only getting D’s.
So now the mothership has arrived. You must know the rules about sequels, right? If you do a sequel you have to do the same thing over again, but this time make it BIGGER! This time the mothership is almost the size of the world, when it lands it reaches across continents. And the queen, I bet you’re pretty anxious to find out what the queen looks like, right?
It’s Godzilla.
Yeah, Roland Emmerich said fuck you guys and just gave us a repurposed model of his Godzilla from his 1998 travesty. Maybe he thought it would be funny, I don’t know. He also thinks he is as good as someone like Steven Spielberg. Seriously, in his head he thinks he is as good as Steven Spielberg.
Okay, maybe that comparison isn’t completely off the crazypants meter. If you look at it like this, Steven Spielberg brought in the blockbuster summer movie with his film Jaws, right? Roland Emmerich did the same thing with the first Independence Day. Creating the new blockbuster. One made you afraid of sharks, the other made you afraid of CGI. Oh my!
Hey! Don’t go trying to distract me, this film is awesome and damn it, I’m going to convince you of that… somehow.
But first, let’s talk about unnecessary characters!
Jeff Goldblum’s dad returns for absolutely no fucking reason. Aren’t you all curious about what the fuck he has been up to? No? He wrote a book, doing a book tour with it… at old folks homes. He lives on a boat, only for the reason so we could cut to him in peril when the giant mothership lands, creating giant tide waves.
I was really hoping they’d kill him off like they did with Vivica A. Fox. By the way, no longer a stripper. She’s now a respectable doctor… or is she a nurse… either way she has like 2 lines and is quickly killed off. Back to appearing in Cool Cat videos!
This gives our characters… mainly Usher some motivation. Like giant alien ship wiping out whole cities wasn’t enough. But at least it gave him a chance to really show us those acting chops. FYI, never show us your acting chops ever again!
Here is another cool thing. Inside the mothership, is like this whole ecosystem. They’ve got plants, trees, rivers… it’s really cool.
You do get to learn a bit more as to why they are here. They need planet cores to grow their technology and power their ships. So they just go around destroying planets to fill their tank. Have they never heard of corn ethanol? Plus it would make their ship smell like french-fries! Yummy!
And of course the aliens invade on Independence Day. Which might not be a day anymore in America, seeing as all the countries united? Independence Day, even though we are all one nation now, defeats the whole term “independence”.
Oh and Brent Spiner is back. And gayer than ever! I don’t remember his character being gay in the last film. In fact, I don’t even remember his character being alive. There was no question mark on his fate, he died. Anyway, he’s back and kind of great in this.
Just about every plan we have to fight the aliens fails. Usher and Hemsworth fly a suicide mission inside the mothership, but it was a trap.
Thankfully, Jeff Goldblum comes up with a plan. The bad aliens really want to kill the good aliens that arrived before them, so what he does is mask their signal, make it look like it is going someplace it’s not. In its stead, all the nukes!
They are also on a timeline here, because the mothership is drilling to the earth’s core. If they do that, goodbye planet.
The queen hops into her exosuit and flies her smaller ship to collect the good aliens at area 51. You know, where the last film took place.
They do manage to trick her, having Bill Pullman suicide bomb the ship. But! The queen Godzilla has her own force field, shielding her from the blast.
So now we get that Godzilla sequel we never wanted, of them trying to kill the queen in hope that killing her means the mothership will stop drilling.
Our two heroes Usher and Hemsworth(and like three more unnecessary characters) show up just in time, killing the alien queen and saving the day.
But what about Jeff Goldblum’s dad? What about his side story? He died. Not true. He gets saved by a bunch of kids, who then run into more kids and they drive a bus to area 51, in the middle of the alien’s assault. Nothing really happened, was pretty pointless.
Now for sequel baiting! It’s like masturbating, but with a 100 million dollar budget!
The robot Marvin head has plans to interstellar travel, weapons, so on and so forth. Now it is time to take the battle to them.
Why does all of this sound familiar? It isn’t just the Robotech thing… it’s something else. Like I’ve seen this all before, but on tv. Okay, yeah, it’s Falling Skies. Like a good portion of it is plot taken from Falling Skies, minus the trying to sell you Hershey’s chocolate bars.
But I still had a blast watching this. It is the definition of a fun dumb movie. The first film, I really enjoyed, it has been awhile. You can obviously pick it apart for its many faults, kind of what you can do for any Roland Emmerich film. Looking at his filmography, he has done some pretty terrible films. Except for Ghost Chase, no one say anything bad about Ghost Chase!
Maybe I didn’t convince you to see this movie, but I really hope you at least give it a chance. If you enjoyed the first, I think you will get a kick out of this. Me? I loved it.
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