Independence Day 2: The Cole Slaw Goes Bad
Frankly, the only really thing going for it is they waited 20 years for a sequel, although part of the reason of doing one now reeks of desperation by Emerich and Fox for a big hit.
Miller showed that waiting decades can pay off with Mad Max Fury Road, but nothing about Mad Max smelled like desperation by Miller. Just a master deciding that the time was right to return to his masterwork.
Yeah, Mad Max is an amazing film school study about a director and his themes and passion and how to do a sequel that’s just superb. You can tell he lives in that world. Independence Day? I doubt they have been holed up in their rolls drinking scotch and working on a new movie for the last 10 years.
So, like, is it me, or Bill Pullman looks like he aged 40 years, but Judd Hirsch looks exactly the same!!!
Also, AV Club comments win the day.
Rolls Canhardly • 8 hours ago
I hope the aliens installed Norton, or this is going to be a real short movie.
66 • Reply•Share ›
Benevenstanciano Rolls Canhardly • 7 hours ago
The aliens switched to Linux, actually, and by the way they will not fucking shut up about it.
94 • Reply•Share ›
While the trailer didn’t do much for me, I don’t find this so unbelievable. It’s pretty crazy what our population can do if all of our efforts were channeled towards one goal. Even a decimated human population should be able to do incredible tasks, if focused. Heck, a decimated earth still leaves you with 700 million people, which is vastly more than the US population. If you take the youth of those 700M and remove most international competition and non-essential pursuits, you could build a massive military and scientific complex in 20 years. It wouldn’t be easy, but it doesn’t seem impossible.
Naw, I wouldn’t go that far. Child actors often are the weak link in the chain, but with the right pick and the right director you can have some really great performances, e.g. Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild or Maisie Williams in Game of Thrones. Williams was a great pick, unlike the guy playing her brother who (IMO!) delivers the kind of performance that one usually associates with child actors. You could call that a … stark contrast. (Haw… haw…)
The child actors in ID4–which had its fair share of teenagers and younger children–were bad across the board. The older actors, at least, had a good time (Smith, Goldblum, Hirsch) or got to ham it up in a way that made it entertaining.
Not just you. I was thinking “How can this be taking place 20 years later when Judd Hirsch hasn’t aged any?” when I suddenly realized it is 20 years later.
Then again, Jeff Goldblum has apparently gone from being a cable installer to head of Earth’s scientific preparation team, so that’s something.
I’ve got a half-chub about it being even bigger (curious to see how they handle the CGI), but that’s about it.
He did crack their code. In the ID universe, that would be equivalent to someone doing cold fusion in ours.
And, to be fair, ID4 had established that the Goldblum character was really overqualified for the work he was doing and was wasting his talents; he simply seemed to lack the ambition for anything bigger and more demanding.
How ironic…
My god, you guys were right, Judd Hirsch hasn’t aged! I bet he somehow stole some of Bill Pullman’s life force, because damn.
I guess they asked Will Smith if he would say “earf” in this one and he said no. Because he didn’t say it in the first one, see.
I was going to post that too. Yeah, the collective mind memory of that line is flawed, watch the scene again. It is pretty clearly “Earth”
Also, I loved the original, and it was the first DVD I purchased by myself. I was 11 when it came out, and way into fighter jets.
Will Smith as the President (of all of Earth, I guess?) would have made me much more interested.
I like the idea of more sci-fi in a action movie. With jets that can fly in space and large plasma canons.
I feel bad for the aliens, … after wiping their expedition force, they are not ready for us. Probably humanity will invade that big ship and take it over from inside, and turn to Space Piracy, using the ship to attack other peaceful aliens ships.
I’m mostly just intrigued by what appears to be their new battle plan: “Plunge a ship the size of the moon into the atmosphere in a roiling tide of fire and death until the humans surrender. Or we hit the ground. One of the two!”
Maybe this time their main weaponry wont render their miles-wide ships vulnerable to technology thousands of years behind them.
It would be like if you brought a tank to fight cavemen, but to fire it’s main weapon, the crew had to get out of it and stand around for 10 minutes in the open. I mean their shields shrugged of fucking nukes, but then the whole ship can be destroyed by a wayward air-to-air missile once it tries to fire.
“The aliens are back, but this time they brought a commander who isn’t an idiot.”
THUD THUD
Alien Commander: “Do not fire main weapon until we’ve cleared the enemy aircraft from the area.”
THUD THUD
Alien Commander: “Do not link the entire fleet’s defense system to one computer that has no firewall and is compatible with their primitive technology.”
THUD THUD
Heh. I don’t know, it was implausible but not completely unbelievable. Unlike the first season of Voyager where they go to the new quadrant and find a race of people (the potato people, because their space ships looked like potatoes!) who have warp drive, and yet they are dying of thirst because they don’t know enough chemistry to be able to synthesize water from Hydrogen and Oxygen. Warp drive! How do you get there without knowledge of Chemistry?
At least with iD4, it was more of a case of “it never occurred to the aliens to protect their network because on their planet, there are no malicious programmers”.