re: Independence Day - Resurgence 40%RT Discussions and (SPOILERS) thread

Saw this today. I liked it a lot.

I think a lot of people need to go back and re-watch the original film because the new one is almost just like it beat for beat.

The original film had one million characters and took forever to get going. The dialogue and storyline were cliche and cheesy as hell, but back in 1996 there wasn't anything else like it. Seeing the white house get blown up was classic cinema. Now, there are films with greater levels of destruction released every year. It was just released at the perfect time and got a lot more credit than it deserved purely from nostalgia.

A couple things I did think were kind of dumb though. Shooting the giant alien space ball [the nice aliens] just because "frick it, Aliens!" made no sense whatsoever, and if the alien machine thing had the knowledge to destroy the bad aliens, why does one shot from weaker human weaponry take it out?

Secondly, it feels like at some point the writers realized the guy they cast to play Will Smith's son sucked so they gave almost all his lines/scenes to Liam Hemsworth, but couldn't get rid of him so they just him tag along for the whole film. Completely pointless character, but even without Will Smith, this film retains the comedy of the original film which was a concern I had from the trailers.

Also, what happened to Jeff Goldblum's wife from the original film? It's implied he has the hots for the british scientist chick, but it's never explained what happened to his wife when it looked like they were getting back together near the end of the original film.