Official Thread ▐░INDEPENDENCE DAY 2 - RESURGENCE ▒ They Are Coming Back▒ Resurging This Friday▐ ▓

Movie Review / 20 Jun 2016
Independence Day: Resurgence Review
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Big, dumb, fun.
By Lucy O'Brien Roland Emmerich, director of Independence Day: Resurgence, is unfairly labelled a ‘guilty pleasure’ director. His action films are generally cheesy and big and full of explosions, so we feel embarrassed by our fondness of them, and tend to relegate them into the murky waters of ‘good/bad’ viewing. Indeed, Independence Day: Resurgence is packed so full of cheese, explosions and too-convenient plot-twists it could sink a ship; yet it all adds up to a fun, old-fashioned disaster pic, made with such confidence and heart that it’s time we finally blast the guilt into the stratosphere where it belongs.

Emmerich is not rewriting his rule-book; he’s riffing on it with a bigger budget. We open with a bearded and pajama-clad (read: crazy) Thomas J. Whitmore (Bill Pullman), haunted by visions and his well-trod “we won’t go quietly into the night” speech that’s become the series’ calling card (Resurgence tries to replicate its chill-inducing patriotism multiple times but falls hilariously short). The aliens are returning, believes Whitmore, but this time they’ll be bigger, deadlier, and have to contend with double the cast.


Independence Day: Resurgence - "Fast Approach" Clip
01:11
Consequently, Resurgence is bursting at the seams with characters - nearly all the supporting cast get a bum deal in terms of screentime - but the leads are just as charming as they were the first time around. Like the original, this is an all-walks-of-life affair: Jeff Goldblum returns as the Jeff Goldblum-esque scientist and Judd Hirsch his comic relief Jewish dad, Charlotte Gainsbourg is the savvy French doctor, while Brent Spiner is also back as the dotty Brakish Okun, his luscious long grey hair stealing every scene he’s in.

In classic Independence Day fashion, the picture isn’t complete without a cocky hot shot wanting to prove himself, a role performed with effortless bad boy aplomb by Liam Hemsworth. Hemsworth is Jake Morrison, renegade pilot in The Earth Space Defense Force, a special defence program full of good looking Top Gun extras skilled at dogfighting and wielding advanced alien weaponry mastered since the last attack.

However, Morrison’s status quo is shaken upon the arrival of Dylan Dubrow-Hillier (Jessie Usher), the very serious son of decorated war veteran Steven Hillier (Will Smith, unavailable). The class tensions and competition here could have been explored with a little more finesse (“he’s royalty and we’re just orphans” quips Morrison’s equally good looking friend Charlie), but instead there’s a contrived back-story about Morrison endangering Hillier’s life in a past training session, which serves to provide a platform for a predictable rekindling of friendship once the aliens start attacking proper.


Independence Day: Resurgence - "United We Stand" Promo Video
01:28
But no matter, because once the devastation starts - on July 4th, of course - Resurgence makes sure that’s all you care about. Once again this is all about a giant mothership levelling cities, but this time the mothership is much, much bigger and the destruction more grandiose. Resurgence throws out disaster after disaster: there’s a tidal wave, a flood, and in the film’s most impressive effect, a gravitational pull that sees thousands of extras being lifted helplessly off the ground.

For a while Resurgence simply revels in this excess, and there’s a certain joy mined from watching overly-cocky Americans failing to stop the determined alien force time and time again. It’s all great looking stuff, too - this is a cohesive, lived-in world where alien technology is seamlessly interwoven with man-made efforts, and when the war starts proper, the spectacle is entirely believable.

The plot, in the meantime, gets gradually more implausible. Like its predecessor, this is a case of ‘swallow it or hate it’, but fortunately there are moments of humour and humanity that help the more ridiculous moments go down easy. When we learn that Earth’s fate hangs on the existence of a floating CGI orb, we also see Okun’s butt hang out the back of his hospital robes. As the Earth Space Defense Force squadron faces insurmountable odds in the guts of the mothership, Morrison punches an alien in the face for some reason. The characters in Resurgence don’t take themselves too seriously, and as a result we care about them in those big life or death, good-vs-evil moments.


Independence Day: Resurgence Trailer 2
02:38
As Resurgence builds towards its conclusion, it kick-starts a giddy series of events that culminates in one of the most ridiculous finales in a sci-fi movie in recent years. This is Emmerich firing on all cylinders here, a director who believes nothing is too ostentatious, too implausible, too much, as long as it’s fun. And that’s Independence Day: Resurgence’s bottom line.

The Verdict
A silly, cheesy, spectacle-driven blockbuster with heart, Independence Day: Resurgence is a refreshing antidote to the grim and the serious sentiment we’ve seen trending in sci-fi flicks of recent years. While its plot is messy and it’s stuffed with too many characters, I dare you not to leave the theatre with a guilt-free smile on your face.

 

Independence Day 2 Has Decided To Exclude India From Their Movie Because Indians Are Too ‘Touchy’

Congratulations India!
Now we as a country have acquired a reputation for being too sesnitive and our disruptive habit of taking offence at anything and everything has made us notoriously famous, GLOBALLY.

How, do you ask? We’ve only been doing what we do in the India only, you say?

Well, the heat wave emanating from our ego has reached Hollywood and the makers of Independence Day : Resurgence, the sequel to the cult movie of 1996, have decided to exclude India out of their film because we Indians are too ‘touchy’.


They were quoted by Mumbai Mirror saying, “Well, Indians are too touchy. Keeping the sensitivities of all the religious groups and other activists in mind, the makers were asked to not shoot in India or portray any prominent monuments being damaged.”



The production house, 20th Century Fox put in a request for at least including an attack on the Taj Mahal in one of the movies posters, but that too was rejected.




A lot of other globally prominent monuments are shown being destroyed as the world ends. Like the Eiffel tower and the iconic Burj Khalifa.


And this not the case of just one film.



Adam Sandler’s movie, Pixels was asked to remove the disintegration of Taj Mahal from their movie.


Thy didn’t have anything on their minds besides it looking really cool in the destruction scenes of the movie. Until India took offence, though.



Are we proud now?

 

Roland Emmerich: ‘I like to say I was driven out of Germany by the critics’
As the globe-trashing director returns with a sequel to Independence Day, how did his brand of blockbuster become the norm?



Emmerich on the set of Independence Day: Resurgence. Photograph: Claudette Barius

Independence Day: Resurgence trailer gambles on revisit
Expectations are sent intergalactic by this doom-laden sequel teaser which showcases new faces alongside Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum
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Roland Emmerich may be the planet’s greatest demolition man. The German director reduced the White House into a pile of smoking ashes in 1996 in the most enduring image from alien-invasion epic Independence Day. Two years later, in his Godzilla remake, he flattened entire stretches of Manhattan. He froze and drowned most of America’s east coast in 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow and, in the catastrophe nightmare vision that was 2012 (released in 2009), he unleashed a series of earthquakes and volcanos that effectively ended the world.

Aware that he’d set himself a high bar in terms of operatically enormous cinematic destruction, Emmerich approached his new film, Independence Day: Resurgence (“A continuation of the story rather than a sequel,” he is quick to point out), hellbent on assaulting audiences with a brand of mayhem beyond their wildest expectations. “The spaceship, the mothership, is coming down to Earth and it’s even bigger than the old one,” says Emmerich, 60, speaking rapidly and exuberantly in an accent that shows little sign of the 25-odd years he’s been living and working in the USA. “So imagine a big object like this that has its own gravity and then what it does, it comes over Asia, sucks up Asia and then when it lands, it dumps Asia on Europe!”

“Wow” is my response, which prompts Emmerich to shed a little light on his process of creating chaos. “I have to get images in my head. I start to think a spaceship has to hover so it has to have legs, and when a leg is bigger than a whole city it becomes an object which is fascinating. I’ve always been fascinated by size, by impossible things which you cannot find in any movie.”

There are plenty of these “impossible things” in Independence Day: Resurgence, which contains many of the elements that made the original film a planet-straddling hit. Will Smith’s heroic pilot expired in the line of duty some time between the two movies but the majority of the original cast – Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Judd Hirsch, Vivica A Fox – are on hand to help a new generation (including Jessie Usher as Will Smith’s son and an inevitable Hemsworth, in this case Liam) combat a returning threat. “This is the story of a world that won a war as a total underdog,” says Emmerich of the followup’s premise. “And while they won, the aliens sent some kind of SOS signal out in deep space, so we know that one day they’ll come back. Imagine how the youth would feel. Everybody wants to be a pilot, everybody wants to be part of this defence against the aliens. Our two male leads are orphans, our other leads are the kids of famous war heroes. At the centre is this generational conflict. Have we promised our generation too much?”

Again I say “Wow” but, at the same time, I’m faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, I’m ready to buy an advance ticket for ID: Resurgence straight from Emmerich. On the other hand, I can’t help but think that the vision of intergalactic conflict he’s describing with such enthusiasm pales in comparison to the real-life destruction he has already wreaked on Hollywood.



An alien attack in Independence Day: Resurgence. Photograph: Claudette Barius
Independence Day was the highest-grossing film of 1996. The year’s box-office runners-up included Mission: Impossible, Twister and The Rock. It was clearly a big year for blockbusters. But 1996 was also the year of Scream, Fargo, Trainspotting and Jerry Maguire; 2016 is devoid of that kind of variety. These days, movies come in two sizes: gargantuan and microbudget, with little room for anything in between. That’s not to say audiences don’t have wide tastes and diverse appetites any more, but pretty much all they’re being served by big studios are sequels, remakes and blockbusters of the type pioneered by Roland Emmerich.


It would be ungracious to demand the director admit personal culpability over the homogenised state of movies, especially when I’m sitting in front of him vibrating with excitement over his description of his new film. But I do wonder whether the state of his industry causes him any concern. “It’s a little bit like what happens in every other industry,” he shrugs. “When you look at the clothing industry, where are the little boutiques? Yeah, they are still there but in very small numbers. Everything else is big franchises, like Gap. Every fashion brand has to become a franchise or they will not survive.”

Gap had to close a quarter of its North American stores last year in order to stay afloat. Is it possible studios force-feeding audiences endless mega-budget versions of the same movies they saw the previous year might face a similar fate? “At some point, it could collapse,” he concedes. “It did once in the 60s. All the studio productions failed one after the other, then a small movie like Easy Rider was the biggest hit of the year. That could happen again. But I’m doubtful. I think what will happen is that we will have other forms of entertainment. Virtual reality will be absolutely big. The gaming industry has already eaten away so much of the young male audience. In movies, it’s only going to be the big tentpole pictures and hopefully some good pictures for the Oscars and that’s it, that’s all you’ll get.”

While Emmerich agrees that this is a depressing scenario, not only does he not see himself as one of the architects of this future, he actively identifies as a flag-waver for personal film-making. “I’m a big believer in original ideas. I tell this to every kid who comes to me and says they want to be a film-maker: I say: ‘Do what you want to do and don’t let yourself be talked into anything.’ In my case, it was making big science fiction films with big special effects. Right from the beginning, I was dreaming about that. My love was George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Coppola. I was like the black sheep of everybody. In film school it was like…” – he adopts the withering disdain of a Teutonic semiotician – “‘That guy wants to make commercial films.’”




Jeff Goldblum returns as David Levinson. Photograph: Allstar
Emmerich is filled with similar disdain at the notion that his films have anything in common with the superhero genre currently crowding multiplexes. “When you look at my movies it’s always the regular Joe Schmo that’s the unlikely hero. A lot of Marvel movies, they show people in funny suits running around. I don’t like people in capes. I find it silly when someone dons a superhero suit and flies. I don’t understand it. I grew up in Germany, that’s probably why.”

I ask how his success is regarded in his homeland. “I always like to say I was driven out of Germany by the critics. At the very beginning of my career, I got very good reviews. I did four films in Germany and my last two [1987’s Ghost Chase and 1990’s Moon 44] got scathing reviews. They were too American for them and I shot them in English. Then I came back with Independence Day and they couldn’t say what they had been saying. They used to be like: ‘The guy wants to make American movies but he’s not good enough and that’s why he’s still in Germany.’” Cackling at the memory of his ultimate revenge, Emmerich continues, “I was successful in Hollywood and when I came back to Germany, they all had to eat their words.”




Liam Hemsworth as Jake Morrison. Photograph: Claudette Barius
The occasions when Emmerich departed from the realm of epic film-making, however, were less triumphant. Anonymous, from 21011, based on the supposition that the works of Shakespeare by were penned by a nobleman under a pseudonym, drew little interest. His 2015 film Stonewall ignited the ire of LGBT rights groups, incensed that this depiction of the 1969 Stonewall riots was seen from the point of view of a white male, relegating black and Latino activists to background figures. The critics were equally outraged. “Stonewall is perhaps even worse than some feared it would be,” seethed Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson. “More offensive, more whitewashed, even more hackishly made.” Emmerich sighs at the memory of his passion project’s reception. “My movie was exactly what they said it wasn’t. It was politically correct. It had black, transgender people in there. We just got killed by one voice on the internet who saw a trailer and said, this is whitewashing Stonewall. Stonewall was a white event, let’s be honest. But nobody wanted to hear that any more.” (Reports and photographs from Stonewall in fact indicate that the riots were started by gay, straight, trans, white, black and Latino protesters.)


Roland Emmerich: gay rights drama Stonewall needed 'straight-acting' hero
As an openly gay director, can Emmerich envision casting a gay or trans lead character in a giant action blockbuster? “Sure, why not? Right now I have a gay couple in [Independence Day: Resurgence]. It’s time for it. It would be very interesting to see if the studios go for it. You have to write a script they all want to have. I do this a lot. I write these movies myself, I finance them myself and then I send them to every studio at once. We call this an auction. We give them a budget and I will direct it. It’s pretty clear what these films are and, naturally, there are always two or three studios who need tentpole movies, so they bid for it and you get quite amazing freedom to make these movies exactly [how] you want. That’s what has to happen for a movie like that. And if one is successful then it’s not a taboo any more.”

Could the Independence Day 3 I saw listed on the Internet Movie Database be a test case? “You read wrong,” he interrupts, assuring me that no such project exists. After a second, he relents. “The thing is set up for it, though. These movies always have to be franchisable. This one sets up the young generation. At the end of the movie, there’s a little kick that says maybe this could happen again. But I’m not even thinking about it…” The glint in his eye says otherwise. Roland Emmerich is already thinking about new ways to destroy the world.

Independence Day: Resurgence is in cinemas from Thursday 23 June

 

Another Dull Week - Sultan Awaited
Thursday 23 June 2016 11.30 IST
Box Office India Trade Network
6



The penultimate week of the year will see five new Hindi films with 7 Hours To Go, A Scandall, Junooniyat, Raman Raghav 2.0 and Shorgul buts its unlikely any of these will make much any impact unless the word of mouth is very strong. The Hollywood release Independence Day 2 will take the honors though probably not the level of films like Fast & Furious 7, The Avengers and The Jungle Book.



Udta Punjab will probably lead as far as Hindi films go as the film has done well in the North and even in week two it should run well in these markets.



The wait is now for Sultan to get the second half of the year off to a flyer and smash initial box office records. There have been over 100 Hindi releases already in the first six months and barring Baaghi none have really opened. Most films did not open and the few that did manage to get some crowd initially, it was still below from what was expected from the film.



This has meant a poor results in the first half of 2016 as with films struggling it harder to sustain with every passing year, the initial gains ever more importance and that has just not happened in the first half of the year. The second half has better releases as usual but films will have to open better if higher numbers are to be seen.

 

#IndependenceDayResurgence heading to around $17M range for opening day FRI. Wknd may end up in low to mid 40s.

 

@Tinju JISHNU

 

Koora Wom Aanalle..

 

yenthakumo yentho

 

Padam kandirunnu..!Roland Emmerich ithavana theerthum nirashapeduthi..!Itharam filmsil ninnu nammal minimum pratheekshikunnath entha..?2 Hrs of mayhem with heavy effects..!Athu polum kitiyilla...!96il irangiya Original ethrayo pathinmadangu better..!Ithil onnumilla..!Padathile charactersinodonnum namuk onnum thonnunnilla..Enthinu Earthine valicheduthitu polum onnum thonnunnilla...!Chumma ingane irikaam..!Kure characters...Avarkellam vendi enthokeyo kaati kootunnu..Will Smithinte sthanathu vannavanmar ok nalla bhesh aayitund..