Independence Day: Resurgence

I'm not going to go over the whole story, as I'll leave surprises for anyone who wants to see the film, but still wants some spoiler-y thoughts on it. I did like the movie, it was a fun ride and I enjoyed it well enough. The problem is, it sort of keeps some characters from the previous film just for them to be there, while it doesn't do enough to establish some of the new characters.

Liam Hemsworth's Jake is a decent main character, but he his archtype is basically the main character. We know he's brash and can be stupid, and he's dating the President's daughter, but otherwise that's about it. Jessie T. Usher as Dylan Hiller is a decent replacement for Will Smith, but he surprisingly isn't in the movie a ton, and is mostly a foil to Hemsworth. The other pilots are ok, ranging from under-developed to way too comedic.

Goldblum is still good, if a little too tongue-in-cheek this time. Pullman is pretty good, although he mostly comes off as crazy until he suddenly isn't. Judd Hirsch is good as David's father, but he isn't necessary to the film at all. Brett Spiner is.... well Okun is pretty much the same but there was kind of that less is more thing in the first film.

I will say this, although it's mostly in Area 51, and onboard the Harvester ship, there's some alien ground action I was extremely happy about. Even with the budget of the original film, we saw very little of the aliens. Here, we get to see them in all their exo-suit glory.

When the movie is good, it's really good. Sadly it has a lot of down time that isn't as interesting as the slower scenes in the original. There's also not a lot to the battle scenes. The main fighter attack sequence doesn't go on for very long, and afterwards it's a lot of set-up for the finale, which isn't reliant on fighter jets as most are destroyed in the initial attack.

So my two main problems. 1) The Alien Queen. This is just such an overdone alien trope, and I really wanted something better. Stop the Queen, stop the aliens. And literally, when that Queen dies, the ship takes off. No real reason why it didn't just fall dormant like the original ships and aliens.

2) The OTHER Alien. So big spoilers here, but there's another alien in this film. It's big ball, and is some race that downloaded their beings into technology long ago and has been fighting the Harvester aliens. These beings also created a refuge planet for species attacked by the Harvesters to teach them to use new technology and weapons to fight. I know we're already in sci-fi territory here, but this just didn't work for me. And the cliffhanger this thing brings to the ending made me roll my eyes hard.