The 4th of July is right around the corner, so…

What’s It About? Twenty years after repelling an alien attack, the defenders of Earth must contend with a second, even larger invasion force.

STRAIGHT UP: We waited twenty years for this. My god. 0.5/5

What I Liked

The CGI looked nice – So, uh, at least there’s that.

What I Disliked

Nostalgia that doesn’t work – The movie is filled with callbacks and returning characters from the previous Independence Day, but the attempt to mine nostalgia falls flat because the audience either doesn’t remember that stuff – it’s been 20 years, after all – or wasn’t even born when the first film was released.

Forced humor – Everyone onscreen looks old enough to be my dad, and they make jokes like your dad after he’s had one too many and decides he wants to look “hip” in front of the kids. Painfully, desperately unfunny material – not that the regular dialogue is much better.

Horrible editing – The scene jumps, especially in the early going, are so sloppy and confusing that it feels like watching three different movies at once. At all times, the narrative feels like a patchwork assembly rather than a smooth, flowing story.

Character issues – There are so many characters in Resurgence, and the film switches so haphazardly between them that it’s impossible to be invested in anyone’s story. Conventional wisdom for disaster movies says to focus on a small group of characters, to bring out the human element of a world-shaping tragedy. But sure, let’s give 15 minutes of screen time to Judd Hirsch so we can watch him drive a school bus.

Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Levinson – He’s the man of the hour and the one everybody came to see, but Goldblum delivers a terrible performance here. His befuddled expression and confused monotone suggest that he acted every scene while coming off a hangover. Maybe I can’t blame him for that, since his character is reduced to a non-role here.

By-numbers storytelling – The plot twists and expanded material in this film all come straight from the Big Book of Sci-Fi Action Tropes. I’m almost impressed at how much the screenplay writers didn’t give a shit.

Lack of action – There’s a shocking amount of exposition here, which means action scenes are surprisingly few and far between. None of them are especially good, though – there’s a dogfight that looks like marbles in a blender, a few zero-tension firefights, and a final battle against the alien queen set in the Utah salt flats, to ensure that nothing surprising or visually interesting gets in the way.

An axe to grind – The writers seem to have a vendetta against Will Smith, who declined to reprise his role as Capt. Hiller from the first film. It’s explicitly mentioned that Hiller died in a fiery crash on a test flight before the events of Resurgence, a brutal end for a borderline-iconic character. Smith gets the last laugh, though – even After Earth wasn’t as much of an embarrassing fiasco as this film.

Hardly any aliens – Maybe the one thing this film could’ve done was throw out a whole bunch of CGI aliens so we could watch them blow stuff up real good, but we don’t even get that. There are aliens onscreen for maybe 5 minutes total before the climax, or one-third as much time as we spend watching Judd Hirsch drive a school bus.

CLOSING THOUGHT: As a functional piece of entertainment, Independence Day: Resurgence is broken beyond repair. It’s the most incompetent major-studio release I’ve seen in many years. If you thought this would be a fun, harmless movie to watch with friends and family this weekend, you were wrong – avoid this one at all costs.

If you’d like to see a movie that succeeds where this one tries and fails – one that’s grounded in human optimism, where a coalition of global defenders unite to defeat a cataclysmic alien threat, and an American hero stands tall in the end – I suggest you watch Pacific Rim.