Why is this movie so bad?

Good and Bad are subjective so I just don't argue about the goodness or badness of a movie. I really enjoyed this movie. This is a B grade science fiction movie with great special effects. There are many movies from the 50s that are like this and people love them...but for some reason this place people just love to hate things! I real;ly enjoyed this movie!!

I felt they cut a lot of important scenes and kept too much unnecessary stuff (Julian and the Kids).

Unless you read the prequel novel "Independence Day Crucible" like I did, this movie can get confusing with all the new characters being introduced.

Passengers will refrain from killing my soul! ~Bus Driver Stu Benedict

I was willing to give this film a shot despite all the bad buzz because sometimes I like films that the internet hates. I also tend to think the internet decides to hate things automatically, so I was ready to enjoy this as I enjoyed the original.

Turns out it was worse than the buzz even let on.

All of the points about how bad it is have been covered but I'd like to elaborate.

For a film that tries to up the ante of the first in massive ways...somehow the scale and stakes feel much, much smaller. This is due to PISS POOR writing. The first movie is big and silly. But through that it actually had a firm grasp of build-up, suspense, and character. It's melodramatic and silly...but it earnestly creates characters you like and don't want to see die. The large cast felt purposeful. Here, the writers just threw a bunch of characters in to try and mindlessly emulate the scope of the first one without capturing the likability and charm. Every character in Resurgence was either boring or flat out annoying. The humor was cringeworthy as well. And I'm not exaggerating or using a worn out phrase for effect-I actually, physically cringed at all of the terrible quips and one-liners in the film. It was shockingly lame. No one cast member seemed to care for their role. Not one. Jeff Goldblum, a man I adore, even seemed to phone it in.

The pacing of Resurgence is just unwieldy in the extreme. It lacked focus until the last 15 or so minutes, when it became only mildly enjoyable for me because I have a soft spot for giant rampaging monsters. I also found the Queen rampage to be the only visually dynamic action set piece of the film.

I actually blanked out of the film from time to time. No joke. I literally just spaced out and just stared at the screen it was so boring, disjointed and cringey. I watch bad movies from time to time. It can't be helped. But I honestly can't remember the last time I mentally checked out of a film so completely.

I think a big problem is filmmakers seem to think sequels need to be bigger to be better than the original. So they literally make the spaceships bigger, make the alien a giant, make the city destructions larger, the battles have bigger explosions, etc. But they do all this at the expense of character development and a coherent storyline.

The first movie was suspenseful, funny, scary, exciting, sad, and awesome. The sequel was just big and boring.

Mostly because the story is a jumbled mess. If it seems like the screenplay was written by a committee, that's because it was. There were five (5) writers involved. I'm assuming they wrote down a bunch of standard plot clichés on pieces of paper, put them in a hat, pulled them out at random and glued the pieces together.

The first movie was trash with all America's stupider traits writ large. But it was quite fun.

This was forgettable trash.

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It's not "Sci-Fi", it's "SF"!

"Calvinism is a very liberal religious ethos." - Truekiwijoker

It's bad because it poorly written, everything stems from the script. Don't let that stop you from enjoying it though, most people dont but I'm glad some people can get some joy out of this movie otherwise it's 165 million totally wasted.

For me, the reason it didn't work was because the main idea didn't work. Yes the aliens came back (that was obviously fine) but the writers had to have a reason why the humans win because the movie would be a downer if they didn't. So they have some people having visions which helps the humans win at key moments. Which didn't make any sense and was never explained. They just had visions which they never did during the first movie, which was very contrived. Also there is the weird orb that very helpfully shows up that the aliens fear because the orb teaches people and other aliens how to combat the evil aliens (wtf???). And then they bizarrely have the queen go for that. Why? She was winning the war and nearly getting to earths core, she was heavily fortified within her ship and with her own private shield. Why would she care about the orb? It was just bizarre and made no sense (and the helpful alien was also hugely convenient and contrived). Then then the last sentence of the movie is this horrible "lets go and kick some alien ass" nonsense which sort of made me think, who is the bad guy again? Because it's one thing to defend yourself from an attack, it's one thing to go out looking for aliens to kill.

They should have just waited to come up with better reasons why the humans win instead of the nonsense they came up with.

"I will not be strong armed by threats against my laundry"