Director: Roland Emmerich.
Starring: Liam Hemsworth, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Maika Monroe, Jesse T. Usher, Sela Ward, William Fichtner, Judd Hirsch, Brent Spiner, Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Roland Emmerich returns for his first sequel with pretty much the same team that brought us the first invasion with Dean Devlin again writing the script for this sequel, which he original threw in the bin shortly after the success of the first. Well, I can't imagine how bad that script was to be binned if this was the winning formula. Susan Sarandon turned it down because it was uninteresting and didn't make sense. I think there was a lot of over excitement from the film makers on this one that isn't appreciated by many.
Very much like the first it's super clichéd but the first was forgivable with this one being annoying and defies all probable outcomes. We have more chance of aliens attacking Earth than bumping into your Dad, driving a school bus across the salt plains after your recent trip to the moon and back.
There's plenty of plot-holes and things that just don't make sense. It's out of scale in both size and time. There's blatant inconsistencies which makes me think they rushed it, carelessly. Bill Pullman's president goes from being a crippling wreck with walking stick to being clean shaven and walking bolt upright. Their attempt to cleverly twist the story was so poor and silly lending to an inevitable trilogy. Again, it all happens so quickly, and what is that thing? Possibly designed to look like an Apple product? Wall-E already done that.
It's rushed and hashed together losing the dramatic awe of the first film. It lacks the impressive action and the dogfights feel more like a messy rework of eighties video-games. I seriously have seen better fights from dated cartoons than in this. There's really nothing to shout about this, nothing we haven't seen before. People die, key people die but no-one really cares, there's absolutely no emotional investment where there's suppose to be.
The sets feel cheap, and might have something to do with the U.S. Military retracting their assistant of allowing them to film on bases. And you might expect more from CGI powerhouse Emmerich, but it's just not believable. Not all of the FX are bad, but I'm surprised how little devastation a mothership did, especially being the size of the Atlantic Ocean. Yes, it picks up one city and drops it on another, but that's it. I'm pretty sure I saw the matrix coding on one of their consoles.
Five of the original cast return, namely Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman and Star Trek's Data, Brent Spiner. Liam Hemsworth heads up being a pilot hot shot and feels like he should be Top Gun II. Emmerich's regular, Harald Kloser takes over from David Arnold for the score and it lacks a recognised theme and soon gets lost among the action scenes.
It's not bad because they killed off Will Smith's character without any explanation. May have been a better twist having Liam Hemsworth character being the cause of his death instead of wing clipping the step-son. It's just bad, tasteless and dumb. The real reason for the death of Captain Hiller is the $50 million price tag that came attached to the high flyer.
It's just larger and sillier, not as good as the first but, kids of today might just love it and talk about this one for years. Especially for when we take the fight to them! Overall it's very weak and a poor show considering the budget and being from someone who likes to blow landmarks up, only thing blown up was the proportion of things.
I think their mistake was forgetting their target audience, or not having a good balance (at all) between being a stand alone film and being a sequel. If the target audience was on the whole aimed towards the fans of the original, did they forget the first was twenty years ago and those fans have also aged twenty years. I'm saying the film may have needed to grown up a bit. But if it for fresh fans, then it's not a stand alone film which, I can understand would be very hard to do.
What is good to come from this is that I have been inspired to write a blog on alien invasions. Watch this 'space' for more.
Running Time: 4
The Cast: 4
Performance: 4
Direction: 2
Story: 2
Script: 2
Creativity: 2
Soundtrack: 3
Job Description: 5
The Extra Bonus Point: 0
28% 3/10
