I don't like fireworks. Never did. I didn't want to waste my time watching them, so instead I decided to go and see "Independence Day: Resurgence." I've never regretted a decision more in my life.
Wow. You ever sit in a class room, and while the teacher is talking you just kind of zone out, and then about ten minutes later you jump back to reality and realize you're supposed to be paying attention? This happened to me multiple times during this movie. There were points where I actually forgot I was watching a film, and I'm not joking.
The tag line is "We had twenty years to prepare. So did they." But did they? Because after watching this movie I really couldn't tell. In fact, the aliens seemed weaker. Sure, they had a few force fields, a few clever bait and switches, but is that really all they came up with after twenty years? No wonder no one in the movie seemed afraid of them. People actually seemed pretty calm, even though the aliens wiped out London and China immediately after entering the Earth's atmosphere, just by flying over them. But that doesn't seem to bother anyone. The Earth is going to end in a few minutes? Didn't seem to matter to anybody in this film, because no one showed any emotion, and anger, any sadness, any grief, any hysteria, or any fear relating to this, and because of this, there was no sense of tension or fear for the viewer either. And this throws the tone off, also. I understand that these movies are supposed to be guilty pleasure fun, but at least have the tone be a little darker and a little more serious. This film was so lighthearted that it was actually off-putting.
This movie never really felt like it got started either. I mean, you get your giant CGI explosion fest when the alien ship first enters the Earth's atmosphere, with cities literally being torn out of the ground, but then the action never gets any bigger or better than that. My jaw literally dropped while watching the destruction during this scene, and I was ready for the action to intensify and grow. But it didn't. It got slower. They put the climax in the first 45 minutes of the movie, and then just spend the rest of the running time focusing on the falling action.
The action was also incoherent, with a million things happening on the screen at one time. It was hard to follow and looked very generic, and while it wasn't necessarily boring, it wasn't exciting in the slightest. And the CGI wasn't even that good either; there were points where watching this movie was like watching gameplay of an off-brand science fiction video game that was released in the middle of winter to appeal to the parents of small children who have no idea that the game they're buying is a cheap knockoff of a triple A title.
And speaking of CGI, the universe that was built in the film didn't seem believable at all. I didn't see an improved and more protected Earth that used futuristic alien technology to their advantage. I saw a paint bucket of CGI vomit thrown on the screen, with Roland Emmerich stuffing it down our throats while saying "Believe it! This is reality!"
I should've watched the fireworks instead.
