That Gene Shalit-esque atrocity is as much effort i'm going to put into criticizing Independence Day: Resurgence, because that is exactly as much effort Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin put into writing, directing, producing, casting, and generally interacting with this horrible piece of shit.
It's very fitting that it is 2016 and this is the movie we get for this year to celebrate america since we have demonstrated we are an awful trash society and this garbage is bad and should feel bad it exists.
The lasting cult following the original Independence Day: ID4 Invasion has is quite odd, since it's a pretty bad movie with a nebulous premise and centered mostly around 2-3 action setpieces, then it ends. Roland Emmerich is a fan of (and quite possibly responsible for creating) the disaster porn genre of summer blockbuster movies. He hit the scene in the early 90's when everything used to be good and we were at the peak of civilization due to the popularity of POGs, and transformed what a summer action movie truly meant.
Many other imitators flourished in the manifest destiny universe that Emmerich created, refining it, perfecting it, and making sure to ironically enough consume as much of earth's resources as possible in as small an amount of time to make us flock to the magic picture palace to shovel food into our disgusting gullets and laugh at people different from us and marvel at the hubris of our culture assuming it's worthwhile or possibly better than anyone else.
I don't know where to start outlining what went wrong with this (everything), a problem common to most of my forays on this blog, but let's try.
*ahem*
Nothing in this movie made a goddamn lick of sense, and the primary reason this catastrophe is a tremendous misfire is because Emmerich KFC Double Downed and went so huge that the sheer scale of the picture was impossible to comprehend and tiring to try to observe. Everything in this movie is like the first one, only several orders of magnitude bigger. And unlike other cases, like Amazonian women or computer monitors, or Taco Bell dumps, bigger is not always better. In this case it was much much worse. A vast majority of time in this was spent with infinite shit flying back and forth across the screen, a tiring level of green screen excess, and absolute total destruction, death and annoying dialogue. It's odd for a movie costing a quarter of a billion dollars to create and market feels shockingly lazy and tedious, but this is where we are. A strange amount of this movie was CGI, i guess because it's easier to shoot your actors in a tiny set with green screens behind them and insert a school bus behind them, rather than actually film your characters in the scary outdoors with an actual school bus behind them.
Retconning the (nonexistent) motivation of the aliens from the previous film, the ID4's in this are apparently a race of harvesters that fly around in ships 3000 miles in diameter (half the size of earth, bigger than the moon) and suck out "the molten core" of planets which somehow is a source of energy that fuels these massive planet-ships and their mile-wide digging lasers. Even though there is a tremendous nuclear furnace a few minutes away whcih has almost infinitely more fuel than the earth's core can provide and is a far better target (the sun, in case you're Roland Emmerich reading this and cannot grasp what i am talking about).
In fact let me take a break for a minute and point out a very, very annoying specific problem i have with this turd, which is the horrible dialogue. The one-liner action quips are completely forgettable and stupid, but the science-y garbage they pepper into dialogue to technically make this a science fiction movie is infuriating. Two examples:
Over the course of this shit there's a dumbass group of drunk sailors on a boat in the atlantic who somehow possess a computer monitor that can observe the depth of the gigantic laser the aliens are using to dig to the center of the earth, and give updates to the rest of the movie about how far away they are from what is constantly referred to as "the molten core of the earth". "we need to stop these aliens before they get to the molten core of the earth", "the aliens are only one hour away from reaching the molten core", "we have 15 minutes to kill the alien queen before they reach the molten core", the KEEP. FUCKING. SAYING IT.
This is also the case with the supposed superweapon humanity possess, which are called "cold fusion bombs". Exactly like the case of Star Trek Into Darkness, the movie assumes the audience is extremely stupid and easily impressed, less intelligent than a gang of feral raccoons devouring the theater for its delicious popcorn, and use the term "cold fusion" because it sounds sciencey and therefore is an acceptable plot element, despite the fact that the fucking term is meaningless. I don't mean to go off on a rant here but cold fusion is simply a nuclear fusion reaction that occurs without any outside catalytic force on the fusing of two nuclei. EXCEPT THESE STUPID BOMBS ARE EVEN ANIMATED TO JUST BE GIGANTIC NUCLEAR BOMBS WHICH ARE NOT COLD FUSION DEVICES. FUCK YOU.
Every five minutes they're talking about these dumb cold fusion bombs, and how the cold fusion bombs need to be dropped on the aliens, and how powerful the cold fusion bombs are.
How, how i ask you, how did so many grown adults write something that looks like it fell out of an eighth grader's shitty composition notebook?
The plot is just aggressively stupid and excessively pointless, with moronic characters strewn about magically appearing exactly when something is supposed to happen to keep the audience from falling asleep.
Judd Hirsch, in an embarrassing role, returns as the superjewish (DID YOU GET THE JOKE HE'S JEWISH YET? HERE NOW HE'S EATING A BAGEL AND TALKING ABOUT MONEY DID YOU GET THE JOKE YET?) nagging father to Jeff Goldblum, living on a boat just ouside what i assume is New York. When the titanic, decadent offering to pure CGI excess lands on half of the world, it creates a tidal wave that destroys most of the Eastern seaboard. Giving Hirsch something to do, a scrappy group of kids driving a car through the flooded wastes finds him on his now marooned boat, and he drives the car for them to take them to the "safety" of Jeff Goldblum in Area 51, ironically endangering them even more since that's where tte last battle occurs. From New York. To Nevada. In one day. ON A QUARTER TANK OF GAS.
It's really hard to describe just how much I fucking hate magic teleporting characters that are shuffled around for no reason other than that it's easier for the writer to explain something to his dumb retard audience, for example the magical Speedy Gonzalez of Westeros character Varys on Game of Thrones, instead of actually putting effort into and taking pride of their work. It's lazy. It's shameful. And they should be reprocessed into Soylent Green so their nutrients can better serve civilization.
I fucking hated this movie. So much. There was no sense of time, of scale, no reason to like any of the characters since they were either flat mirrorlike slates of noncharisma like:
1) the lesser Hemsworth brother who is absolute trash and should be eaten by his more talented handsomer older brother,
2)that girl from It Follows that replaced Mae Whitman for unknown and definitively sexist reasons (who fucking sucks the life out of everything she's in since she sucks),
3)the guy that's supposed to be the deceased Will Smith's kid who is the head of all pilots and gives a mission briefing with the strategy "fly at the alien ship, shoot it, drop bombs, the end.",
4)Bill Pullman who showed up in his pajamas and looks half asleep the whole movie
Or over the top hammy scene-chewing jokes like:
5)Brent Spiner (who lived, apparently), walking around half the movie with his fat ass hanging otu of a hospital gown. Followed by another scientist who is apparently his homosexual lover, which i thought the movie was treating as comic relief since Emmerich is clearly a self-hating gay man, but instead they're supposed to be in a loving relationship that is played completely straight-out comedic relief,
6)Jeff Goldblum, who appears to be in this solely on a dare to see how many scenes he can keep his hand on his chin,
7)This stupidass John Oliver-lookalike pencilneck geek accountant following Jeff Goldblum around, who becomes best friends with the gruff African Warlord that has a psychic link to the aliens since he spent ten years after the end of the last movie killing surviving ID4's in central Africa, which is a movie that I would have actually wanted to see and would like.
8) The awful supporting character pilots that includes an ace pilot chinese lady and hemsworth's "wise"cracking shithead sidekick that has Yellow Fever the whole movie and keeps trying to nail her
I hateful eight this entire movie, it was overcooked, overdone, overanimated, overbudgeted, overindulgent tripe. My good friend on facebook that is amused by my psychotic ramblings compared it to Starship Troopers, which it certainly unabashedly rips off (excellent comparison, Michael, props). But where Verhoeven tongue-in-cheek lampooned a culture that we should not look up to even if its successes are tempting, Emmerich went whole hog in support of it. The massively overbuilt Capitol building looms over the skyline of D.C. like a Mussolini wet dream, and President Sela Ward orders a first strike attack on an alien ship that arrives at the moon (different aliens, and Goldblum tries to point out), murdering a peaceful envoy from a race of aliens that claim to possess the knowledge and means to eliminate the bad alien menace.
These stupidass other aliens, by the way, are apparently digitized consciousnesses that live inside of big white spheres that look like hte decapitated head of Marvin the Paranoid Android from the theatrical adaptation of HHGG.
This plot device fully confirms that at the end of Resurgence that the fight is not over, as Brent Spiner proclaims, but now armed with an entirely new form of technology we can "go kick some alien ass" and have galaxy-spanning wars and sequels to come forever, since this stupid movie made a lot of money in China and guarantees more stupid shit like this will continue to be churned out. Fuck Donald Trump.
