Hey Baby, it’s the Fourth of July

Independence Day: Resurgence (2016) didn’t get very good reviews, but what the heck, it’s the Fourth of July, so we put it on. I honestly can’t tell you much about what happened in it, but we enjoyed the heck out of it.

Basically, it’s twenty years after the first film. Humankind is more united than ever before and have been adapting alien tech for our own defense. Then, an alien ship appears, and we kill it. Yay! Then, its daddy shows up - a ship the size of Europe. It squats on Earth and starts drilling down to the core to suck the life out of the planet. Then we get a McGuffin, and that lets us kill the alien queen and drive them away. Yay!

Two things:

1. The cast is great. We get Jeff Goldblum, Brent Spiner, Judd Herschel and Bill Pullman from the last movie, plus Liam Hemsworth in place of Will Smith. Action faves William Fichner and Robert Loggia are on hand (both generals). Charlotte Gainsborough and Angelababy don’t get enough to do, but are certainly present. And everyone brings the gravitas or sense of fun that they are there for.
2. The effects are way cool. The ships appearing through some kind of interdimensional nanotech thing made me go “wow” (maybe because I was expecting something more boring). The scenes under the giant space ship, where the sky is replaced by lighted windows is kind of mind-boggling - even when it’s treated very matter-of-factly: “Well, at least you got some light in here.”

I’ll leave it there. We may have slept through parts of this, or at least weren’t always paying a lot of attention to the plot. But it was overall fun, with great effects and a lot of things blowing up, And that may just be enough.