Independence Day: Resurgence is a 2016 American science-fiction adventure film directed by Rolan Emmerich and written by Emmerich, Dean Devlin, Nicolas Wright, James A. Woods and James Vanderbilt. It is the sequel to the 1996 film Independence Day and stars an ensemble cast featuring Liam Hemsworth, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Jessie Usher, Maika Monroe, Travis Tope,William Fichtner, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Judd Hirsch, Brent Spiner and Sela Ward. Actor Will Smith did not return.

“Independence Day: Resurgence” is set 20 years after the first film. The United Nations has set up the Earth Space Defense (ESD) , a global defense and research program. They reverse-engineered alien technology and serve as Earth’s warning system against extraterrestrial threats.

The Main Defense Force (MDF) uses equipment salvaged from the remains of the alien forces. It has operational military bases on the moon, Mars and Rhea. The Area 51 base in Nevada is now the ESD headquarters. Because, you know, reasons. Or something.

On the moon base we’re introduced to one of the main characters of the film, Jake Morrison, a pilot who was competing with Dylan Dubrow-Hiller (Seriously? He has a hyphenated name? Who does that to an audience?) to be the Leader of Legacy Squadron.

Since he almost got Dylon killed, Jake is stuck working on a tow-truck spaceship (aka the space tug boat of love) with his friend Charlie Miller.

They both are the only family they have, so they look out for each other. Awwww!

The world is preparing to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Invasion. In the provincial African state Republique Nationale d’Umbutu, ESD Director David Levinson meets with Dr. Catherine Marceaux and warlord Dikembe Umbutu (African warlord? Where would they get the funds to afford to be that important? Hmmmm…)  who leads him to an intact alien destroyer.

Aboard the ship, they discover that the aliens were able to send a distress signal call to their home planet before being defeated. Some of the people who have had contact with the aliens before like Umbutu, former U.S President Thomas Whitmore, and Dr Brackish Okun (He awakens at Area 51 from a 2o year coma) They are all telepathically linked with the aliens after their respective encounters with them. And they’ve received strange visions of an unidentifiable spherical object. (A U.S.O? Eh? Eh?)

The unidentified spherical ship, with a technology different from that of the aliens who attacked 20 years earlier, emerges from a wormhole near the ESD’s Moon defense headquarters.

Levinson believes that it belongs to another extraterrestrial race that might be benevolent and urges the world’s Security Council not to attack, but they vote to shoot it down regardless, because reasons.

Against ESD’s orders, pilots Jake Morrison and Charlie Miller pick up Levinson, Marceaux, Umbutu, and Levinson’s accountant Floyd Rosenberg on a space tug, and they head for the wreckage, where they recover a container.

The spherical ship plays an important role later on the film, however I found it seriously freaking stupid that the ship was shot down even though it didn’t do anything.

While Levinson and Co. are investigating the crash site, an alien mothership emerges and destroys Earth’s planetary defenses, because reasons.

The space tug is caught in the mothership’s gravitational pull, which lifts objects from across Asia. The debris falls all over Europe, where the tug manages to escape before heading to Area 51.

The mothership lands over the north of the Atlantic Ocean, destroying cities on the Eastern Seaboard. It begins drilling a hole through the bottom of the ocean floor to harvest the Earth’s core for fuel, because you know, it didn’t really feel like stopping by Jupiter or any other gas giant on its way. Nope. They waited until they ran out of gas and then landed on Earth… I bet they didn’t even stop to ask for directions. Typical.

Anyways, sucking out the impossibly hot and incredibly dense, highly pressurized core (with space magic!) will destroy Earth’s magnetic field, and let the Sun’s rays and solar flares smack the planet around like its little bitch. Which it would. Cosmic and UV rays would destroy the planet, evaporate all the water and scour the Earth clean…you know, like how Mars is now? Good times.

So the mother of Dylan Dubrow-Hiller Miller’s mom, Jasmine, dies when the aliens (being the jerks they are) destroy the hospital that she is working in…Oh come on now. It’s a hospital. Full of sick people who can’t fight back. That’s a low blow aliens…

Wrrrrryyyyy?!?!?!?!

Whitmore interrogates one of the alien war prisoners (yes, that’s an alien that they imprisoned from the first movie) who recently woke up from a 20 year catatonic state. The ESD learns that the aliens exist in eusociality (you know, like a colony of ants? aka a hivemind) and that one of their colossal Queens is commanding The Invasion. The basic idea is that if the Queen is killed, the soldier aliens will leave, kind of like beehives work– they all follow a queen. No queen, no orders to follow, and they’ll retreat and find a new queen to follow. Or something.

Levinson (that dude that knocked out the space ships with his Mac in the first film) hypothesizes that if they kill the supervising Queen, her forces will stop drilling (because seriously, they should’ve just stopped at the inter-galactic space station ON JUPITER! But noooooo! We just had to keep going until we ran out of gas. Thanks a lot alien dad.)

An ESD aerial fleet counterattacks the Queen’s chamber on the mothership, and d’oh! they are trapped and exploded. Except for the main character, because you know, he is the POV person of the film or something.

Pew! Pew! Pew!

In Area 51, Okun opens the container and releases a giant white sphere that is run by a benevolent AI robot. The Sphere reveals that its mission is to evacuate survivors from worlds targeted by the aliens, whom it calls “Harvesters.”  It has gathered a resistance force against the Harvesters, which is currently hidden on a refugee planet.

Wait what?

So uhhh…all agency is taken away from the human characters and they can’t do anything to stop the alien invasion, so a giant sphere buddy magically appears out of a crate and gives them the solution to their problems? That is WEAK!

Then, in an even dumber move, the sphere asks to be destroyed, so that the location of the refugee planet isn’t discovered.

Even though it was going to share that information with the humans? How the hell does that make any sense? Anyone? Buelller? Billy? Mom? No? Sigh…OK then.

In the mothership, Dylan, Jake, and other survivors manage to escape by hijacking enemy attack craft, and pursue the Queen’s personal ship, which is heading to Area 51 with its convoy.

Hold on. I thought the Queen was in the mothership? Now she has her own personal flagship, that’s NOT the mothership? Who the hell wrote this bullshit?! They should be fired! Ah…I see the problem now. It was (re)written by 5 people. No wonder it’s such a craptastrophe.

There’s another dumb scene in the mothership. Before they leave where Jake the cocky pilot pisses at the floor and gives the middle finger to some aliens. HE PEES ON THEIR SHIP! Who does that? Where was he raised? A barn?

Against his daughter Patricia’s wishes, Whitmore volunteers to pilot the space tug boat of love on the suicide mission, and leads the warship into a human made trap and detonates the bombs and sacrifices himself, because autopilot hasn’t been invented yet…Oh wait. It has. Oops.

Naturally, the alien Queen survives by using (space magic!) an energy shield on her biomechanical suit.

Patricia (minor romantic subplot chick) manages to fire through a gap in the shield when the Queen prepares to fire her own gun. She kills Smaug, I mean, disables the Queen’s shield, allowing Dylan’s party to kill the Queen before she can take the sphere.

Oh, she was after the sphere all along? Why bother being so overt like that then? Isn’t that a waste of expensive machinery, spaceships and men (aliens)? She couldn’t just sent one clever alien down to the Earth to sneak into Area 51 and steal the damn thing. But nooooo! We needed explosions! And events that matter little, to characters that no one cares about! *facepalm*

And so, with their beloved Queen dead, the mothership stops drilling and leaves the planet.

Sequel Bait:

Okun reveals that the sphere has asked humanity to lead its resistance (wait, I thought it wanted to be terminated so that the aliens couldn’t get a hold of the location of the refugee planet?) and has offered the humans new technology in preparation for a counterattack to assault the Harvester’s home world.

They gonna take the fight to the aliens. Ugh. Yay.

GENERAL THOUGHTS

• This seems like a cash grab to win some money by releasing a sequel to a movie a lot of people enjoyed. Like some other films *cough* “Ghostbusters” reboot *cough* it is a soulless, trite, inane piece of cinema that tries too hard to be the hip and new cool kid, and falls flat on its face.
• Explosions for the sake of explosions? Yep, can get boring after a while. Who directed this film? Michael Bay?
• Introducing random characters all of a sudden and not developing them at all, is a bad choice.
• The only thing that was interesting is the alien artificial intelligence and the giant alien queen.
• The few characters that returned like David Levinson, his dad Julius and former president Whitmore were the few salvageable elements of this movie.
• I find it a bit ironic that years after the first one a sequel was made, and without one of its big stars- Will Smith- but Jeff Goldblum is back playing the same character he played in the first one, David Levinson.
• To be honest, the new characters introduced in the movie? Yeah… I didnt care about them. Nope. Not one bit.  Dylan is trying to live up to his father’s legacy, Jake is the cocky pilot who constantly seems to need to prove himself, and Smartypants Charlie–whose defining trait appears to be that he is THE BESTFRIEND of the main character. They’re just bland, and boring. Nothing really makes me want to cheer for them to succeed. Compared to the colorful cast of characters in the first film, these new guys are duds. BOOOOORING!