INDEPENDENCE DAY RESURGENCE - It's Not That Bad!

[John Johnson]

[AndyDursin]

Goldblum top billing? They don't bother making a big deal out of anyone else in the cast.

I do think the absence of Will Smith is going to hurt the film, but I can only imagine he wanted some kind of major dough that wasn't going to make it worth the trouble.

[AndyDursin]

Its also not a particularly good trailer either.

[Monterey Jack]

Despite all of the money it made, does anyone really have any nostalgic affection for Independence Day? Maybe for those who were in their early teens at the time, but it's not an especially memorable film, evidenced by the fact it took TWO DECADES to see a sequel realized (and probably only due to the fact that early/mid-90's nostalgia is "in" right now...how else can you explain a big-screen reboot of freaking Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers? ). I haven't watched it since it hit laserdisc in late '96, and don't really care one way or another about the sequel.

[AndyDursin]

Lukas and I went to see it in Warwick on opening night...it was fun with an audience but its not a great movie by any means. It is surprising they never made a sequel before this given the insane money it generated, But everyone went on their separate paths and Fox probably didn't want to go down the road of making it without either Smith or Emmerich (or both). But times change and with Emmerich cooling off it looks like the right time for him and Devlin to cash in on making them...and don't forget this is supposedly Part 1 of 3.

That said it doesn't look promising with a group of bland youngsters and the old vets poking about...but at least Judd Hirsch is still alive!

As for being excited ...I'm not...but frankly it's just a big corporation looking to cash in on an old property. Just like Disney is doing with Star Wars. Its not necessary but its happening and my guess is it will do pretty well despite Smiths absence

[Eric Paddon]

Honestly, to me the reason why "Independence Day" doesn't date well can be summed up in a simple phrase-9/11. In 1996, we found it fascinating to see an F/X movie "realistically" destroying famous American landmarks. But after 9/11, to me it made the whole conceit of why the film was even successful to begin with distasteful on all levels (yet the filmmakers kept right on making more disaster porn movies of that type). I have no nostalgia for any of those late 90s movies whatsoever, and on the rare occasions when I have revisited them I can't avoid the self-consciousness about why I don't find them much fun.

[Monterey Jack]

Honestly, to me the reason why "Independence Day" doesn't date well can be summed up in a simple phrase-9/11. In 1996, we found it fascinating to see an F/X movie "realistically" destroying famous American landmarks. But after 9/11, to me it made the whole conceit of why the film was even successful to begin with distasteful on all levels (yet the filmmakers kept right on making more disaster porn movies of that type).

This is an excellent point...in the immediate wake of 9/11, movie studios scrambled to remove shots of the WTC from older movie posters and Hollywood insiders wondered if we'd ever see a toppling skyscraper depicted in a movie again, and yet only FIVE YEARS later, we got two major 9/11 movies released and apparently audiences' lust for Disaster Porn remains unsated, with Superman and the Avengers knocking a new city flat in each movie. In fact, we see this kind of wholesale devastation even MORE. Personally, I've had my fill of this kind of stuff, no matter how technically adept it might be presented. I found it more exciting watching Ant-Man fighting the bad guy inside of a little girl's bedroom than seeing the Avengers dropping an entire city from orbit. No one gives a crap about collateral damage in summer movies anymore.

[AndyDursin]

The trailer for this film certainly gives off a very bad vibe with its "Remember the War of 1996" tag at the very end (at least on the Youtube link). Seems tone deaf to me, as most of Emmerich's later "disaster porn" films felt.

When it comes to ID4 though, unlike a lot of Emmerich's subsequent work with these "disaster porn" movies, I never found it distasteful. Most viewers didn't take the film seriously (or all that seriously), it was a silly crowd-pleasing summer sci-fi film -- not a Christopher Nolan or Zack Snyder joint. The movie had a sense of humor and while it wasn't "Mars Attacks," it also wasn't a dreary "2012" or "Day After Tomorrow" type effort either. I distinctly remember people laughing and cheering when the White House exploded! Obviously it's not that funny in the context of a post-9/11 world, but at the time? Most people thought it was amusing. The world was a different place in 1996 and that scene had a totally different context than it did a scant five years later.

For me, why ID4 hasn't aged well has less to do with "disaster porn" than it does the fact that the movie has a lot of shortcomings: paperthin stereotypical characters and a story that really just recycles other, better genre films. And it's extremely lightweight -- I mean, Randy Quaid piloting his plane into the ship? The level of writing is scarcely better than GODZILLA, which came out two years later and everyone hated it for the same kinds of broad, almost comical characters -- yet that same audience went crazy for ID4. Why critics held up the latter while condemning the former has been puzzling to me when they are very much the same kind of film.

My gut feeling is that ID4 was always just a "movie of its time" and the right film for its era -- Smith coming into his own as a feature film star, Goldblum coming off "Jurassic Park," the "Stargate" guys hitting their peak with a summer blockbuster that tapped into the zeitgeist of the mid '90s...it was fun, but it was never much more than that, and I highly doubt it plays as well without a big audience getting involved with it. That was really a huge part of its appeal -- people cheering, applauding, laughing at some of the lines...minus that, its flaws are transparent.

[Eric Paddon]

Andy, I agree we all thought it was cool at the time and I am willing to cut ID4 some slack to a degree that I would not cut them for what they churned out post-9/11 when they really should have known better. It's just that for me to realize there was a time when I saw a movie *because* of that does make me feel ill-at-ease today in the way that other people get so bent out of shape by humor from an earlier era that doesn't pass their PC-smell tests of today. By contrast, old-school disaster films like "Towering Inferno" have the presence of Hollywood Golden Age actors and terrific music scores to elevate them above what ID4 gave us so I don't get that same feeling of self-consciousness that the late 90s films give me.

[Eric W.]

I'll co-sign what you both have said. These way after the fact/too late sequels are just as bad as the sea of reboots and prequels for me. I expect more of what I've nicknamed the "Millenial malaise" to be in this as well.


The sense of "lets making something fun and entertaining and cut loose and have a good time" with nothing else behind is increasingly scarce.



From IMDB:

Music by
Harald Kloser ... composer
Thomas Wanker ... composer

That's a joke. They couldn't even bring back David Arnold for this?

At least he might have come in with something with some energy, spunk, and hint of some themes so now I know I don't stand much of a chance of getting a decent soundtrack out of this.

Arnold's music was a big asset to the first ID4 but of course I'm under no illusions about where we are at today when it comes to the value of good music for anything like this.

[Monterey Jack]

From IMDB:

Music by
Harald Kloser ... composer
Thomas Wanker ... composer

That's a joke. They couldn't even bring back David Arnold for this?

This is a pretty great example of what's wrong with today's film music...the Emmerich/Devlin team went from Arnold to JOHN WILLIAMS, but every score for one of their films post-The Patriot has been written by some absolute nobody like Kloser or Wanker (heh-heh-heh...Wanker ). David Fincher is another example of a filmmaker who used to have musical taste in choosing real composers (Elliot Goldenthal, Howard Shore, David Shire, Alexandre Desplat), but every post-Benjamin Button score for his films has been Trent Reznor cueing up his vacuum cleaner choir. It seems like only Steven Spielberg gives a damn about real music these days...even not being able to use Williams on Bridge Of Spies, he got a fine substitute effort out of Thomas Newman.

[AndyDursin]

A shame but not unexpected. Clearly Arnold and Emmerich/Devlin had a major falling out...though Arnold sounded diplomatic at least when he talked about THE PATRIOT a few years ago:

Now we’re coming to the sensitive one I’ve got to ask you about, THE PATRIOT. Now, the stories that you see floating around on the net were that, by all accounts, you were going to do THE PATRIOT…

Yeah, I’d written the whole score.

Now, my understanding is that you submitted some demos early in the process and basically for whatever reasons the demos didn’t quite hit with Dean or Roland or the studio, and then somewhere in the process they said, “We’re going to go get John Williams”. Is that pretty much the way it happened, from your perspective?

It was very unusual, because the way that film was developing, Dean phoned me when they got the script, a long time ago, and he was screaming on the phone, saying “This is it! This is the one! This is the one we’ve been waiting for! You’re on!” They were quite a ways into shooting and I think they were getting to the point where they were getting into over-budget difficulties, and I started getting phone calls from Dean and Roland where they were saying “do you still want to do this film?” And I was going, yeah, of course I do! And then another phone call a few weeks later, “Well, we’re going to have to hear some demos first…”

I’d done three movies with them and I’ve never done that before! So I said, okay… I’d also heard, before I’d even written anything, that the studio had put out inquiries to John Williams and James Horner, independently of Dean and Roland. One of the producers had worked with John on SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, so he’s going, “look, we can get John Williams – why do you want to stay with Arnold when you can get John Williams?”

I think they were under a lot of budgetary pressure. I think the studio was very keen on getting someone with obviously such a huge marquee value as John, ho tends not to put his name to things that aren’t first rate, and as far as I’m concerned very rarely ails to deliver something quite astonishing. So I felt, I’ve got nothing to lose, so I might as well send them his demo that I did. I think it was one of the best thing’s I’d ever written. And virtually immediately I hat a phone call from Dean, saying “look, we haven’t really connected with it, so we’re going to go with John Williams.” I mean, you don’t get a demo and on the same day call up John Williams and have him agree to do the film at the drop of a hat. Obviously, some other things had been going on, and I wasn’t particularly surprised. I was a little disappointed, perhaps, in the way that it was handled, but to be passed up for him certainly isn’t an insult!

Have you talked to Dean and Roland subsequently to his?

Well, they’re not really doing anything together anymore. They’ve got this ARAC ATTACK thing, but Dean’s kind of split from Centropolis, so perhaps in the heart of all that there were other things going on as well. I have spoken to Dean and there’s absolutely a problem. I’d work with him or Roland again at the drop of a hat. In the space of all that happening I’ve cored five movies so I’m very happy.

http://www.runmovies.eu/?p=7901

[DavidBanner]

My primary recollection of Independence Day is that it's one of the funniest parody movies I've ever seen. Nothing in it is meant to be taken even remotely seriously. I don't really know what they could do for a sequel, in that they played out all the jokes they really could in the format of a sci-fi disaster movie a la War of the Worlds. And we have to keep in mind that the filmmakers aren't exactly the Ritz, are they? You have a producer whose best work was as a bit actor in My Bodyguard, and a director who doesn't seem to know how to tell more than one story - and a bombastic version of that to boot.

I'll give them that they're usually good at promotions - the Godzilla billboard campaign was one of the funniest and most memorable I've ever seen. But this trailer just felt, well, boring. Can't imagine there are that many people hanging around waiting to see yet another movie that blows up every conceivable landmark.

[John Johnson]

[AndyDursin]

This looks increasingly desperate and lame, like any one of Bay's TRANSFORMERS movies. And the washed-out cinematography and glum tone don't resemble the earlier film at all.

Certainly won't be getting my money.