I know there are a lot more important things going on that I probably should be writing about, but sometimes you just need to take a break and enjoy the guilty pleasure of making fun of a god-awful movie. This wasn't really something I planned to do this week, but I happened to come across the start of "Independence Day: Resurgence" ( which I'll refer to as "ID2" from now on ) while channel surfing late last Saturday night ( actually early Sunday morning ), and it was such a train wreck that I just couldn't look away.
Needless to say, this post is going to be full of spoilers for both the 2016 and 1996 Independence Day ( ID ) movies, so if haven't watched these movies, you should stop reading now.
OK, from this point on I'm going to assume all of you reading this have watched both Independence Day movies. This post is going to be mostly about the new Independence Day movie ( It's fresh in my mind, and I don't have the time and energy right now to enumerate all the ridiculous flaws in the original ), but I can't write a post about Independence Day movies without pointing out the most implausible part of the original. In a movie that had alien invaders, nuke-proof energy shields, death rays strong enough to destroy an entire city ( but not the tunnel alcove Vivica A. Fox was hiding in ), alien/human mind control, Will Smith punching out an alien, president fighter pilots, and trailer park fighter pilots, the most implausible thing was that Jeff Goldblum was able to plug a Macbook into an alien ship and use it to load a computer virus into the alien's computer system. In 1996 a Mac couldn't even interface with a PC, much less alien technology. Are we to believe that a USB port is truly universal?
OK - end of rant about the 1996 "Independence Day". Let's move on to the new one.
My favorite thing about this movie might be the way the filmmakers decided to react to Will Smith's wise decision to have nothing to do with this sequel ( When a man who cashed a paycheck for starring in "After Earth" decides he doesn't want to be a part of your movie, maybe you should consider re-writing your script ). Early in the movie, there is a scene in which we see a painting of Will Smith and the back of an African American man in a military uniform who has roughly the same height and build as Will Smith. We see the man ( still shot from the back ) walk into a room and meet President Sela Ward. When President Sela Ward addresses him using the last name of Will Smith's "Independence Day" character, I'll admit that I ever-so-briefly wondered if Will Smith had done a cameo. However, it is soon revealed that the mystery military man is Will Smith's son ( Note: Not Jaden - though I've just realized that this movie could have been so much more wonderfully bad if Jaden had been given that role ), and President Sela Ward tells him something like "your father was a great man". Was? Really - "was"? They killed off Will Smith? They killed Will Smith off-screen? That's ...
That's ....
That's fuckin' awesome!
That's so fuckin' awesome!
"You don't want to be in our movie, Will Smith? You think you're too good for us? Well, fuck you Will Smith, fuck you! We just killed your fuckin' ass! Have fun making 'Suicide Squad' you dipshit!"
( BTW, Will Smith's instincts for picking movies are so bad these days that he turned down an awful Independence Day movie so he could star in one of the worst movies of all time. I don't feel like reliving "Suicide Squad" in any way, except to say that while the Independence Day movies are so bad they make me laugh, "Suicide Squad was so bad it made me angry. )
Anyway, so Will Smith is dead and they got some young actor to take his place and do all the things Will Smith would have done if he had decided to do the movie. From this point forward, I'm to refer to the young actor's character as "Fake Will Smith".
As long as I'm introducing you to Fake Will Smith, I might as well introduce you to the other new young stars of ID2.
Liam Hemsworh plays Liam Hemsworth. Apparently Liam and Fake Will Smith have some kind of a beef - enough of a beef that Fake Will Smith feels compelled to punch Liam in the face the first time they cross paths in the movie. As in all movies where two guys punch in each other in the beginning, it's clear that they are going to be best friends by the end.
Well, maybe not best friends in this example - because Liam's best friend in ID2 is some dude who is considerably smaller and less Hemworthy than Liam. I'm going to call him "Dorky Guy" for the rest of this post, not because the actor who plays this character is at all dorky in real life, but because just about anyone would be considered the "dorky guy" ( or girl ) when standing next to a Hemsworth.
Anyway, we soon learn that Dorky Guy is smitten with a female pilot from China. I don't have to worry about giving Dorky Guy's crush an unusual name for this post, because the actress who plays her already has an unusual name. She goes by the stage name "Angelababy". There is nothing about the name "Angelabady" that isn't equal parts ridiculous and awesome. "Angelababy" sounds like something a guy from my old neighborhood might say when greeting his girlfriend.
"Hey, Angela baby, get over here!"
( BTW, Angelababy was clearly included in this movie to increase ticket sales in mainland China, which is part a disturbing trend of Asian characters in American movies being almost exclusively foreigners. Sure, Angelababy, Gong Li, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Jackie Chan, Ken Watanabe, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, and Irrfan Khan can get plenty of rolls in Hollywood, but if you are an Asian American actor or actress, you had better hope they keep making "Harold and Kumar" movies. )
With the exception of Will Smith, just about every major character who was still alive at the end of the first ID returned for ID2 ( Well, Vivica A. Fox only returned for a minute or so before they killed her off. "Yeah, fuck you Will Smith! We're going to kill off your wife too!" ). They even brought back Brent Spiner, who I figured was dead after that alien used him like a ventriloquist dummy in the first ID. It turns out that Brent Spiner wasn't dead, but had just been in a coma for 20 years. I guess, I could buy that he spent the last 20 years in a coma, but what I could not buy was the following ...
1) When Brent Spiner wakes up from his 20-year coma in a hospital bed, the first thing he does is ask for his glasses, which are quickly handed to him by his boyfriend. From what I could tell, his boyfriend grabs the glasses from the night stand next to the bed and hands them to him. The boyfriends grabs the glasses so fast that I don't think there is any way the glasses could have been in a glasses case ( I'm also almost certain he grabbed the glasses with one hand, which would have been almost impossible to do if the glasses were in a case. ). This bothered me, because it makes no sense that a pair of glasses would be sitting right next to a person who had been in coma for 20 years. Did his boyfriend optimistically leave the glasses there 20 years ago? Were they just sitting there undisturbed for 20 years? If so, wouldn't the glasses be as dusty as all fuck by now? Was the boyfriend cleaning the glasses periodically, and if so, why wouldn't he just keep them safe ( and clean ) in a case? So many questions ...
**** EDIT *****
I originally had two items here, both of which I realize were incorrect, because I just watched the movie a second time. So, if you've read this before, I'm sorry about all the BS I wrote earlier about some of the Brent Spiner coma stuff. I think the only issue I really have about the coma stuff is the glasses. **** EDIT *****
Anyway, I think I've complained about the Brent Spiner coma stuff enough. Here are all my other issues with ID2 in no particular order:
- When Jeff Goldblum was in Africa with that warlord guy, he almost fell into a giant hole in the ground, but was saved at last second when Warlord Guy warned him that he was about to step into the giant hole. Why the fuck didn't Warlord Guy warn Jeff Goldblum about the giant hole before they started walking towards it in the dark? Why the hell isn't there a fence around that thing? How many kids do you think fell into that hole in the preceding 20 years? Don't you think somebody would have thought to put a fence around that hole after just one kid fell in? ( BTW, I couldn't help but notice that 2016 Jeff Goldblum looks almost exactly like 1996 Jeff Goldblum. You could say the same thing about Judd Hisrch. What the hell are those guys eating? )
- Speaking of holes ...
- Somebody needs to tell these scientifically illiterate screenwriters that a sonar system designed to image the ocean floor a few miles down cannot be used to look roughly 1800 miles underneath the Earth's crust to the edge of its molten outer core. Also, there is no precisely defined boundary between the solid mantel layer of the the Earth and the liquid outer core. It's not as if you could have a precise to-the-second countdown of when the hole being drilled by the aliens would reach the molten core of the Earth. Also, if aliens drilled a hole in the Earth roughly 1799.5 miles down to the edge of the Earth's molten core, it's not as if everything would be OK just because the hole wasn't half a mile deeper.
- While I'm on subject of how much ID2 makes a mockery of science, let's consider the following 3 issues I had with how the mothership was depicted.
1) When we first see the mothership near the moon, it seems to be roughly disc-shaped, and we are told it has a 3000 mile diameter. The top half of the ship is shaped like a shallow dome, but the bottom half of the ship seems roughly flat. With that in mind, it wouldn't be possible for the surface of the bottom of the mothership to be at roughly cloud-level in middle of the Atlantic Ocean, while also being at cloud level well in both London and the US east coast. Unless you are a flat-earther, it is absolutely impossible to conceive of that. If you can't visualize why it makes no sense, hold a dime next to a ping pong ball and see how much further the edges of the dime are from the ping pong ball than the center of the dime. In the same way, the edges of the ship should be much further from the surface of the earth that the part of the ship over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. If want to know precisely how much further, approximate the radius of the Earth as 4000 miles ( roughly correct ) and consider a circle with the equation X^2 + Y^2 = 4000^2 ( where "^" represents "raised to the power of ) with the point (X=0, Y=0) at the center of the Earth. I won't bother to do all the math here ( but I will note the easiest way to solve this problem involves the Pythagorean Theorem ), but if you consider the center of the spaceship to be at point (X=0, Y=4000) and one edge of the spaceship to be at (X=1500, Y=4000 ), the length of a line drawn from point ( X=1500, Y=4000 ) perpendicular to the surface of the circle ( this would be the altitude ( in miles ) of the ship over London if we assumed the middle of the ship was touching the surface of the Atlantic Ocean 1500 miles away ) would be about 272 miles. So, if we assume the part of the skip drilling the hole in the middle of the Atlantic was a few miles above the surface of the water, the edge of the ship would have been about 275 miles above London. I know something as big as the mothership would have still been visible from 275 miles away in London, but I'm pretty sure the edge of that mothership was cutting through the clouds and barely clearing the ups of landmarks when it approached London. I guess the ship could have been designed to curve dynamically to match the surface of the earth, so I might be able to give filmmakers a pass based on that, but they never actually showed the ship changing shape. The again, I could be completely wrong about the curvature of the ship. Perhaps they did show the ship with a gentle curve at the bottom when it was next to the moon, but what are the odds that the aliens designed the ship to match the curvature of the Earth. It seems like a lot of trouble to go to when you might need to use the ship to attack other planets as well.
2) "The ship has its own gravity" : While that line was scientifically accurate, just about every way they portrayed that gravity was not. It's certainly true that a disc 3000 miles across and roughly 600 miles thick would exert a lot gravity, but that would pale in comparison to the 8000 mile wide sphere of the Earth. For that reason, it's kind of ridiculous to think that the mothership could have pulled all that stuff ( buildings, boats, etc. ) in London up into the air while the Earth was pulling down on all that stuff. Yes, the mothership was depicted as being lot closer to London ( a few miles ( I'll assume for now that the mothership actually could curve to match the curvature of the earth ) ) than the center off the Earth ( about 4000 miles ), but it was not like all of the mass of the ship was right over London. The mass of the the ship was spread over 3000 miles, and the gravity from most of that mass would have been pulling the stuff in London sideways rather than up. I'm not sure exactly what the direction of the gravitation force vector would have been ( It's not a simple calculation, because the further the matter in the ship gets from London the more it pulls sideways on London, but the gravitation force from that matter also has a smaller influence on London the further away it is from London. ), but I would guess the vector of the gravitational force would be more up than sideways. However, it's clear the the gravity exerted on London by the ship would be far less than the gravitational force exerted by the Earth on London ( especially because the ship seems to have a lot of empty space inside ( based on the adventures of Fake Will Smith, Liam Hemsworth, Dorky Guy, and Angelabady inside the ship ). The inside of the ship certainly looked a lot less dense than the inside of the Earth. ). Now, I know some of you may be saying that the alien ship has some technology that artificially generates an extremely strong gravitation field, and that super strong artificial gravity is pulling all that stuff in London into the sky. Well, the only problem with that theory is Newton's Third Law. If the is ship is exerting a large enough gravitation force to lift stuff off the Earth, it also must be exerting a large gravitational force on the Earth. This means ( based on Newton's Third Law ) that the Earth must be exerting an equal and opposite force of attraction on the mothership. That force would make the mothership crash into the earth. If you're saying "but the ship has anti-gravity" explain to me how the ship could be putting out a gravitational force ( that would have to pull it towards the earth ) and an anti-gravity force ( that would have to push it away from the earth ) without those two forces canceling each other out. I don't care how advanced the aliens are supposed to be - they can't break the laws of Physics ( or the laws of common sense - if you think gravity and anti-gravity could work at the same time, see if you can blow air out of a straw and suck air into a straw at the same time ).
3) The scale of the ship was all over the place in this movie. The mothership is supposed to be 3000 miles wide, but in the scene where our heroes are flying over the upper surface of the mothership to attack the queen ( the full-sized mothership, not the part that separates later in the movie ) we can see our heroes' planes, the outer edge of the ship and the middle of the ship all in the same shot. If the ship is really 3000 miles wide, the edge of the ship would be 1500 miles from the middle of the ship. If the ship was really curving to match the contour of the earth, there the is no way you could see both the edge of the ship and the middle of the ship from the vantage point of a plane flying a few miles over the surface of the ship. That would be like being able to see both Chicago and Los Angeles from a plane flying over Denver. Also, the mothership seems to be at least a few hundred miles thick ( I'm guessing about 600 miles from the bottom of the ship to the top of the ship ), so our heroes' planes that are flying over the ship are in space - far higher than the Space Shuttle or the International Space Station. I guess those planes could still fly in the vacuum of space using alien technology, but there were blues skies in the background of the scene, suggesting thart the planes attacking the mothership are flying through the atmosphere. This implies that mothership is only a few miles thick, but if that was the case the mothership would have looked like an extremely thin crepe rather than the discus shape we see in every other scene.
- Who thought is was a good idea to have mentally unstable ex-president ( who could barely get out of bed a day or so earlier ) fly a critical mission with the fate of the Earth at stake. They really didn't have any better options? Really?
- Remember when that alien robot sphere was turned on, and the queen alien was able to detect its signature? Remember how the humans had an isolation chamber ( built by humans based on technology from the evil aliens ) that was able to mask the signature of the sphere? Remember how that alien sphere was supposed to have knowledge of technology that went far beyond that of the humans or the evil aliens? Well, if human/evil-alien technology could mask the sphere's signature in the isolation chamber, why didn't that ultra-advance alien sphere have technology to mask its own signature?
- Near the end of the movie when the alien queen was attacking on foot, the queen took over control of all her ships, including the two that had been hijacked by Fake Will Smith (FWS) , Liam Hemsworth (FH) , Dorky Guy (DG) , and Angelababy (AB). It looked like our heroes were helpless until they found some super engines on the highjacked ships that the queen didn't have control of and activated those engines manually. Does that make any sense to you? Why would the queen have control over every part of the ship, except the engines that were only for "flying in space"? Don't you think she would have told her alien engineers "Give me the ability to override the controls of every part of my fighting spaceships, and I mean every part!", rather than saying "Give me the ability to override the controls of every part of my fighting spaceships, except for engines that are used for flying in space. I don't think there is any point of me being able to override the space functions of my spaceships."
- After firing those super space engines and flying high up into the air above the queen, FWS, LH, DG, and AB are in trouble again because their engines are burnt out and they have no power at all. As their highjacked ships start falling like rocks towards the queen the FWS/LH/DG/AB crew starts firing all their weapons at the queen to take her out. At that point I'm thinking "Well, that's a good hero moment. They are all going to die in a horrible crash, but at least they are going out kamikaze style to kill the queen." Then, all of a sudden their ships start to fly parallel to the ground and FWS/LH/DG/AB all survive a crash landing. What the fuck? Their spaceships had no working engines, and I didn't see an wing flaps ( or even wings ) on those alien spaceship. Without power, there is no way they could changed direction by 90 degrees and glided to safety. I know you need Liam Hemworth alive for ID3, but c'mon!
OK, I'm saving the best ( and worst ) for last. Over and over again in this movie it is implied that the most powerful bomb the humans have is a "cold fusion" bomb. This is ridiculous on one level and extremely ridiculous on another level. First of all, the entire idea of "cold fusion" was discredited in the late 80's. I guess one of the ID2 screenwriters heard the word "cold fusion" in a news report back in the 80's and thought it would be a cool-sounding technology put in a science-fiction bomb. So, that's ridiculous, but what's even more ridiculous is that even if cold fusion worked, it could't be used to power a bomb. "Cold fusion" is, by definition, supposed to be cold. It was supposed to be a form a fusion that did not produce large amounts of heat or the explosive energy normally associated with a fusion reaction. If you want to design a bomb that uses fusion, you don't want to use "cold fusion", you want to use "hot fusion". You don't need fancy alien technology to produce "hot fusion"; you just need a Hydrogen bomb, which humans have had since the early 1950s.
Yeah, so ID2 was awful and ridiculous, and amazingly, it may have surpassed the original ID in sheer stupidity.
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I just can't wait for ID3!
Rich
