A giant bad alien spacecraft attacks the earth, equipped with impenetrable force-field, overwhelming technological superiority, and the ability to make opponents clutch their heads and go “aaaargh” or “Oh my God!”simply by appearing in the neighbourhood.
Plucky earthlings (mild spoiler alert – but you guessed this, right?) repel the attack, despite most of Europe, the US East Coast and other unimportant zones being destroyed by the impact of the giant spacecraft landing.
They are aided (mild spoiler alert – but you could have guessed this, surely?) by the bad aliens having the same kind of glaring vulnerability routinely overlooked by the Death Star Reconstruction Committee in the “Star Wars” franchise.
Yes, in the original “Independence Day” movie in 1996. Hardly anything has changed, except that most of the actors from the original movie have aged.
What else is there to say about this incredibly bad movie?
(i) the story is beyond non-existent: it makes no sense at all. Why do the bad aliens, using their overwhelming firepower, not liquidate humankind before they land? How do the protagonists keep functioning normally despite half the world being destroyed? Why has humankind wasted resources building gigantic weapons on the moon and in orbit without checking whether they will have any impact on possible invaders?
(ii) the dramatic tension is zero. How can we care about the outcome, when the aliens are so all-powerful and the human characters such a nakedly fits-all-movie-going-demographics bunch of black, white, Chinese and Jewish male and female, young and old people shoe-horned into the non-existent plot?
(iii) they hold back the plot twists until – the closing credits! Even the (mild spoiler alert) representative of a good alien civilisation who can not only talk English in a cute female voice but actually is an expert in training other (off-screen) good aliens to defeat the bad aliens… doesn’t reveal any useful techniques to the earthlings. What is this good alien doing in the movie? And why is it a boring white sphere? Whatever happened to the originality of the beach-ball alien in 1974’s Dark Star?
(viii) so are the bad aliens. When is someone going to invent some bad aliens which are different from the awesome work of H R Giger in the original Alien?
The inevitable result of the non-story, absence of tension, twists or humour, daft coincidences and paralysing illogicality is that the yawn-o-matic is operating at full tilt throughout the movie, beyond even the levels witnessed recently in the awful James Bond Spectre. Don’t waste your time.
For: plenty of not-particularly-innovative special effects of spaceships and fighting.
By Robert Pimm in Reviews on 25/06/2016 .
A nicely timed review, given the referendum result. Not sure you’re in the target demographic. I wonder what Chinese teenagers will make of it? They may be able to identify with the nepotism. Incidentally a disaster movie set in Mecca would be quite a thing, and I suspect we’re unlikely ever to see one – even though the scenario happens in real life every couple of years.