Independence Day: Resurgence (2016) full spoiler rant

4/10

Independence Day: Resurgence (2016) full spoiler rant

I decided to make this a full spoiler review, because nothing makes any sense in it. The original Independence Day (1996) is a streamlined, coherent story by comparison. I will list the stupidities one by one.

1. The aliens are once again going for the Dumb Alien Award, but this time, they’ve gone full retard. In the first Independence Day, it was said that they were after our resources. I could only imagine that they wanted our planet. Inhabitable planets must be quite rare, so they must consider the Earth some fine real estate. They just needed to destroy us; the natives and their competitors. You might wonder why you need city-sized ships to enter the atmosphere to do that, but whatever.

But in the new movie, it turns out that they were after our molten planet core. Why? For fuel and material. What? Why couldn’t they go to another planet for that? Nothing special about our core. Why not get your material from an uninhabited planet, so that you won’t need to fight anyone? Why destroy a planet with a biosphere? It doesn’t make any sense. If you have the resources to build a giant ship, you won’t need to fly across the galaxy for our silly little planet core.

Moreover, this sequel shows that their motivations in the first movie were the same as now, but now they skip the invasion and decided not to systematically destroy our cities. So, either the first movie doesn’t make sense, or this one doesn’t. I’m confused.

1. So, they have a moon-sized ship. It is big enough to exert its own gravity, like the moon. At first I thought it was quite clever of the writers to consider this, but then as the ship maneuvers into position, it somehow turns the gravity off and everything falls down again. What? Does it cancel its own mass? Goldblum says “what comes up must come down again” but why? The ship is still there, isn’t it? Was it because of their anti-gravity engines? And when the ship decides to land, is the gravity back up again?

1. Why does the giant ship scrape across the moon? Couldn’t they fly around it? Were they trying to park it? Were they hiding behind the moon? But we already spotted their gravity pit when they stupidly scraped around Saturn. Also, they say the ship touches down over the Atlantic, but then why do we see it sucking up Singapore? Why does it throw the Burj Khalifa and the Petronas Towers on London? Did the ship slide halfway across the planet, destroying Asia in the process? We don’t see that. Who’s steering this thing?

1. A super advanced ship emerges from a wormhole, but apparently it couldn’t protect itself from our tiny laser. And why hover over our tiny moonbase with its laser anyway? If they came to warn us, be more intelligent about it. The super advanced computer sphere also lacks any self-defense against its mortal enemies, or against primitives like us. And they are going to teach us technology?

1. That famous scene where the scientist (Dr. Okun) is held captive and an alien speaks through his mouth, yeah, they redo it. But this time, the president enters the room and lets it happen on purpose and that doesn’t make sense. Why would he do that? And where did the smoke come from? It was just a room, not a shot-apart laboratory.

1. There is this countdown for the mining operation of the aliens to reach the planet core. And then what? Would the Earth explode? Would it create a submerged volcano? Would the core be sucked dry in a matter of minutes? Where is the alien ship going to keep that molten core?

1. Nothing the big alien queen does, makes any sense. Why put yourself in harm’s way by leaving your moon-sized ship like that in full battle armor? Why start hammering at the roof of a military base when you’ve got a few hundred armed ships flying around you that could blow a hole in it? Not to mention when you carry a giant gun in your arms. Oh, and she can take over her alien ships, but then why does she let humans in her own ships fire at her? Why are the hundreds of ships flying around her not protecting her?

1. The humans are just as dumb. At the climax, it turns out that we are in possession of shielding technology, that can shield the blast of the most powerful bombs, and coincidentally can even stop a giant ship in its tracks. Why was this shield not used to protect the Area 51 base? Or the fighters? Or any other part of the planet? And why did they let the alien prisoners keep their bio-exoskeletons?

Finally, after the alien queen is dead, the aliens just leave? That is just lazy writing. The aliens have power that is so overwhelming that the screenwriters just had to resort to such a trope to make a happy ending. It is very unsatisfactory.

Anyway, a final word about Jeff Goldblum, Brent Spiner and Bill Pullman. They are worth seeing, even though they are largely wasted. All the new characters are boring. The script doesn’t have the good buildup of tension of the first movie either. Basically, everything that I loved about Independence Day is badly repeated here.

The problem is that if you have even a single brain cell, things will not make sense.