INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE (2016)

Twenty years after the original alien invasion, humanity has recovered and even made magnificent advancements based on the technology found among the wreckage of the downed alien ships.  Things take a turn for the worse when a wormhole opens up near the Moon and an alien spaceship pops out.  It doesn't look like the spaceships from the original invasion, but the humans don't care.  They shoot that sucker down (using a giant laser they've built on the Moon) almost instantly.  That wasn't a smart move because the spaceship belonged to some other aliens who hate the shit out of the original Earth invaders.  D'oh!

So now the original aliens show back up (in a spaceship that looks to be like 15% the size of Earth) and start bringing a new and improved ruckus.  The new and improved ruckus includes a huge "hive queen" alien that actually climbs out of a spaceship after it was shot down and starts running around all over the place.  That was kinda cool.  Unfortunately, the cool parts like that (and the gigantic new mothership landing) are outweighed by uncool shit like the "meh" cast of newcomers and the script that goes off the rail in the final act.

I didn't dislike INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE, in fact, it was entertaining from beginning to end, but I was just hoping for so much more.  Something original.  This story has the potential to be awesome, but instead the filmmakers take the safe PG-13 route with the extremely predictable story that relies too heavily on the pretty special effects and nostalgic feelings from the first film and not at all on creating believable characters that the audience would actually care about.  These people were all so boring and/or unlikable that I was almost rooting for the aliens.

Nice special effects, average pace, goofy ending, cringy dialogue, lots of missed potential, moon milk, a fast as fuck school bus, some guy saying "No one else dies today." then like a million people die immediately afterwards.  As far as guilty please movies goes, INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE is worth checking out.

If you need me, I'll be in my room reading Robert McCammon's awesome dual alien invasion novel, "The Border".

Part 1 - Independence Day (1996)

ARMAGEDDON (1998)

A massive asteroid, named Dottie, is headed directly for Earth and our only hope is that two super Space Shuttles can take a group of oil drilling badasses up into space, slingshot them around the moon and land on Dottie's ass so they can give her a nuclear enema that'll blow that bitch out of the sky. Yasujiro Ozu it's not.

Nope, it's Michael Bay. So check your brain at the door and get ready for some cheesy, goofy bullshit filled with helicopters flying in front of sunsets, explosions, slow motion overdose, frantic editing, rugged saintly-like tough guys, product placement, camera spin, Aerosmith power ballad overdose and some of the worse dialogue ever written. "Miss Stamper? Colonel Willie Sharp, United States Air Force, ma'am. Requesting permission to shake the hand of the daughter of the bravest man I've ever met." Ooowwwch! That line just gave me instant terminal butt cancer. Better go watch DEADLY PREY.

For a 90's disaster movie, ARMAGEDDON is about as big and dumb as it gets.  It's awesome! The disaster is "a global killer", the characters are bigger than life and the director has no shame. One of the biggest guilty pleasure movies of the 90's.

Little known (untrue) fact: In the unproduced ARMAGEDDON 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO, literally 1 second after everybody finished hugging each other that the end of the first film, everybody on Earth immediately went back to hating the living fuck out of each other for totally unimportant reasons like skin colour, money, genitals and imaginary creators.