I am not a wise man. I
like a lot of bad things. More
specifically I’ve enjoyed many a bad movie.
I’ve sat and thought to myself, “Dear god this is garbage,” and yet watched
through to the credits being sufficiently amused by a film’s deficiencies to
compensate for the overall failure of the attempt. I did it with Wing Commander, I did it with
Battleship and I did it with Batman and Robin.
But this doesn’t preclude the simple fact that they are bad movies. Their directors creating freaks that we point
and laugh at as opposed to visions of narrative and thespian beauty.
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| We forgive you for After Earth, come back! |
So, the question becomes when faced with such
an abomination, was I entertained even if for the wrong reasons? Was I amused or was I robbed? Independence Day: Resurgence faced just such
a quandary. Following on from Roland
Emmerich’s now two-decade old tour-de-force it was a questionable enterprise right
out of the gate. Minus Will Smith and
having to capture the attention of a whole new generation of movie goers it had
an uphill battle against the likes of modern blockbusters that dominate the box
office. A world of tie ins, sequels and
what has become in no small part an exercise in brand recognition. As such, I went into Resurgence with my
fingers crossed that we were going to see alien invasions kicking it old school
with some modern tropes, but still holding a core forged from the
original. But that’s not what happened.
That’s not what happened at all.
Here on the
Internet we’re prone to the extreme opinions and reviews of the masses. Sometimes the vitriol is justified and often
it’s not, but usually the truth falls somewhere in the middle. So when I say that Independence Day:
Resurgence is bad, I want you to understand something. It's bad in a way that is not funny. If anything it's borderline tragic with
hints of pity and despair. It's the
Gulf of Tonkin incident without the amusing deception and decade long war. In summary dear reader, it's a bad kind of
bad. So, what went wrong?
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| Pod people. |
First
of all, the flesh puppets... I mean
actors. Alien invasion movies are
straight forward affairs with plenty of A to B writing. That’s no bad thing, for a tight story with
the right script can be great, much like the original Independence Day. It allows for maximum explosions and
just the right amount of character development.
As we don’t want characters we don’t give a damn about but equally we
don’t want to be flipping through their family albums while all the cool stuff
happens off camera. Resurgence however,
falls into the former category; so much so that neither I nor my friend could
remember any of the new characters’ names come the credits. Not a one.
Nada. Liam Hemsworth remained
Liam Hemsworth; not Will Smith (no matter how desperately they wished
otherwise) remained not Will Smith and Bill Pullman, somehow, was not President
Whitmore. In point of fact the only new
character that achieved their purpose was the Chinese pilot played by Angelababy
(stage name), who doubtless helped draw cinemagoers in the ever more lucrative Asian markets. There’s even a line to
the effect of, “China has been the most important partner in developing our
super anti-alien defences,” thrown in near the beginning. It’s so transparent that unless English is
your second language, you’ll flinch when you see it.
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| Bigger ship, bigger fun. |
As for the
narrative itself it’s uninspired but not fatal alone. The aliens come back, other aliens show up
and declare themselves the enemy of the original aliens and war
ensues. Then things fall down. For we are shown/told all of this in forced
exposition that feels so disconnected from the first movie it’s hard to see how
one leads to two. The invaders are now
lead by “Harvester Queens” and only by killing this Alien knockoff can they be
thwarted, although it has never been done before! Apart from last time when they nuked the sons
of bitches. But that’s semantics. After this we’re subjected to a very familiar
set of events. The humans are
overwhelmed, the alien ship lands, the humans launch a daring but ultimately
doomed assault on the now 3000 kilometres sized mothership before defeating
them at Area 51 just in the nick of time.
It was almost like paying one’s entry fee to see a favourite film
performed by second-rate actors. That
was nice; I was too young to see the original at the cinema.
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| The family underachiever. |
The
stinking, putrid glue that holds it all together is the script. For without one it’s just a bunch of people
gesturing dramatically and dying without context. In hindsight, this may have been an
improvement, but you live and learn.
Remember those modern tropes that we mentioned earlier? Well they’re present, albeit in their worst
possible forms. I’m talking about the
quips. The unending, unfunny and
unrelenting quips that are so desperately ill-judged at times it makes you
wonder at Emmerich’s sanity. The great
thing about the original was that while it was funny (“Welcome to Earth!”) it
was also plausible. That the characters
were saying one-liners and mouthing off as a coping mechanism for the fact the
entire world was ending around them. It’s
what people do. Admittedly sometimes a
one-liner is just a one-liner, but they never felt misplaced. In Resurgence however, I didn’t laugh
once. No one in the audience did either. It was offensive, it
was juvenile and best summed up by Liam Hemsworth whipping his dick out to take
a piss as to distract a bunch of aliens.
He was talking at the time which made it even worse.
I could go on for another five pages documenting this movies sins but by
the time I’d finish it would be an inquiry ten years in the making. An entire dissertation could be squandered on
the terrible effects alone before running a financial breakdown on what exactly
they spent that 165 million dollars on. Other than the nine writers who “contributed”
to the films creation of course, which goes some way towards explaining the
horrendously fractured narrative. But I
digress. For there is only one message
you should take away from this review and that is stay away. Hide. Take shelter.
Independence Day: Resurgence is an atrocity not only for its violation
of a classic, but because it took everything wrong with the current mega-movie
industry and distilled it into something more unwatchable than Transformers:
Age of Extinction. Sadly, there’s no
such thing as a cinematic crime against humanity, so if you need me that’s
where I’ll be. At The Hague, protesting
for one.
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