REVIEW OF INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE

Sequel to INDEPENDENCE DAY Reviewed

Well there's good news and bad news to anyone who loved INDEPENDENCE DAY and wants that day to happen all over again, or people who thought the first was too sentimental and mainstream.

The mainstream original blockbuster provided the first movie a corny (or clever) one-liner by all the characters occurring every ten seconds of the two-hour run-time, but now, in the day of Marvel's "Starkasm" i.e. everything must be witty, RESURGENCE throws out a one-liner every twenty seconds and they're (mostly) spoken by a few characters including a young annoying lawyer and an insecure co-pilot of the new main male hero in Liam Hemsworth as Jake Morrison, one of the few folks without ties to the original...

Looks more like Roland's GODZILLA

Speaking of the original, Will Smith had to bow out since he was working on SUICIDE SQUAD and so his grownup son is on board, and like Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman's President had had a fist fight in their backstory, so did the black hero's son, Dylan Hiller with Hemsworth's Jake, both friends with the President's former "munchkin" daughter, now a beautiful brave young soul who's actually the girlfriend of Hemsworth and has to keep her dad, former President Whitmore, played by a bearded Bill Pullman, from speaking too much... For he alone knows these aliens aren't going to be as "easy" as the last time: Not like that was a piece of cake...

FILM SCORE: **1/2

Basically, the fact these people (in both films) always have something clever to say is director and co-writer Roland Emmerich's lack of faith in his science-fiction mainline, needing characters to ground any and all creative aspects so that the "common core audience" can laugh their way through the movie without having to be taken completely into another world, which, in this case, is a hybrid of our powers mixed with the aliens; having learned plenty from their grounded vessels, Earth looks more like the year 3016 with space ships shooting to the moon in minutes, and flying around the earth like sports cars.

The main two problems with RESURGENCE is the lack of character-development as returning reluctant hero Jeff Goldblum still speaks with his hands, always on the verge of figuring things out and for some reason, Brett Spiner's super-annoying Area 51 hippie scientist makes like Lazarus and, it turns out, was in a coma the whole time (meanwhile, Jeff's proud Jewish pop Judd Hirsch returns, driving a bus with a white trash family reminiscent of Randy Quaid's nomadic clan)... Spiner's babbling scenes with Goldblum deletes the scientific knowledge or importance of either, and no matter, with the aliens super-sized, everyone finds no reason in fighting what seems like a lost cause until the end, providing a perfect segue to the other big problem: This movie has absolutely no second act. While the intro is somewhat intriguing as various crews investigate the ghost ships from the prior attack, before you know it the good guys are sending up a mass of ships up for the final battle, which doesn't make the movie any shorter, or the experience any more entertaining.