Did we need this movie? No. Did we want this movie? Kind of. The last time the film industry tried to do a sequel many years after the fact was probably Tron Legacy and while that was a decently fun and enjoyable film it had a lot going on in it and got really preachy with some dumb fun moments. Was it exactly worth the wait? Not fully, but it was an amazing spectacle. Let's be honest, the greatest things about both the original Tron and the original Independence Day was that they were both awesome spectacle. When the original ID4 came out we hadn't had anything in the vein of a sci-fi epic in a while, nothing on the scale of Star Wars at least and the next iteration of that wouldn't be for another four years. Imagine being a young movie goer when that film came out, it had aliens coming to take us out on a War of the Worlds like scale, it had some of the hottest up and coming actors at the time and cameos by actors who would become huge names in genre film for years to come, let's not forgot the patriotism it brought to the table. I certainly was all about our country uniting on our Independence Day against an alien threat, with the even bigger picture that the world united against it. 
If you were a fan of movies in general, old school sci-fi, war movies, patriotic movies, there was enough in this one film to make us all raise our fists in the air and cheer when that damn spaceship came down after Randy Quaid screamed his classic line, "In the words of my generation...UP...YOURS!" This was THE movie in the 90's. It was epic. Not an Oscar winner, but this was the end of an era where for 20 or so years we got epic blockbuster type films that we knew next to nothing about before they hit theaters. They weren't based on anything; they were just new and awesome. Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich were going to be the next George Lucas in our eyes, and Emmerich was super excited about that. Now they had three relatively big sci-fi films behind them, with Universal Soldier and Stargate behind them. Unfortunately they followed with a remake of Godzilla which was possibly one of the most disappointing and convoluted films ever made. The next decade was a slew of disaster films that just couldn't really capture anyone's imagination and in recent years they gave us big box office bombs. When we got our first news of the ID4 sequel I was completely taken aback. I had no idea where it came from, who would return and was surprised Devlin and Emmerich were both attached to it. When the first trailer hit I was skeptical of the movie in general but was pretty impressed with the concept of after our victory in 96' twenty years later the Earth is unified and we have completely enhanced our society and technology using the alien tech. What I saw was a great concept and now it was just a matter of the execution from two filmmakers that haven't made a film I cared for since the original ID4.
In Independence Day Resurgence, it is exactly 20 years after the initial attacks on Earth from the aliens. We have completely updated our technology and our planet is unified, celebrating our 20 year victory and preparing our fleet of space ready combat ships along with planetary artillery should another species ever invade. Much of the alien technology still remains on Earth and it seems Dr. Levinson as a survivor and specialist on the tech ventures out into the world to study it under the command of the Earth's leaders. For some reason the alien tech has been re-activated, the captured aliens held prisoner are celebrating something and a mysterious sphere enters Earth's orbit as a warning of things to come. A signal of President Whitmore's speech has made it to the darkest reaches of space, where a Queen has intercepted it. She decides to take her ship, which itself is half the size of a planet, to conquer Earth once and for all. However this time, we are ready.
One of the biggest things about this films is it doesn't waste any time getting you into the action, nor does it shy away from showing off how far our technology has come in filmmaking, giving us glory shots of space ships on both sides. The plot as I described above is as much as you get in the movie with a few surprises near the end. It very much wants to be the Aliens to Alien as far as sequels go, which is funny considering how big of an action film the original already is. I will say when we do get our action sequences they are epic, Emmerich has never been bad at setting up an action piece and it's not nonsensical Michael Bay action, there is definite weight to the scenes and a great sense of scale. We all knew the action would be epic but would the film be filled with great one liners and loveable characters that we had in the original? Nope.
When I first saw the trailer for this film my immediate thought was, "If Randy Quaid doesn't have a big ass statue in his honor then this movie can go to hell." Sadly it did not, but even without that I still thoroughly enjoyed the movie and its returning cast members. Sadly its new cast of characters is abysmal. Liam Hemsworth starts out as an okay character that seems like he could really be a great addition to the cast but is given some of the lamest dialogue and throwaway scenes in the film. Maika Monroe who plays Patricia Whitmore, now grown up from being the helpless President's daughter to a fighter pilot, is definitely not my favorite actress. Her acting in It Follows seemed so dry and careless and it carried a bit over to this film, she just seems stoned most of the time when I saw her on screen. She has some great moments in the film, but no real dialogue to cling on to. Jessie T. Usher plays Will Smith's son here, as Smith apparently died testing the first orbital space fighter, who seems to have a history with both Hemsworth and obviously Monroe but nothing that carries through the movie. I honestly don't think it's their faults but they just aren't given anything to work with. There's even a badass African War Lord who is set up and has one or two cool action scenes, but then gets a bunch of bad throw away joke lines. 
All that aside, we came back because of Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Vivica A. Fox, Judd Hirsch and Brent Spiner. Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum are legendary in of themselves, but Fox was probably one of my favorites from the original film as she took to the streets and survived massive carnage protecting her son and even picking up every survivor she could find along the way, she was a great female protagonist in a time where we didn't have many of those in action movies. I never thought I'd say this as he seemed like a throwaway character barely in the first film but Brent Spiner's Professor Okun steals the movie. They really flesh out his character in this one showing us just how much stuff he developed while studying the Area 51 crashed ship and how connected he now is with the aliens as well as other visitors that could come to our planet. He has the best dialogue and jokes as he is turned into an eccentric Doc Brown Mad scientist type in the sequel and I wish we had more of him in it because he was the best character. Word of warning, not all of our returning characters survive. One dies in a pretty badass way and the other in probably the lamest way that is supposed to illicit a feeling in one of the newer characters but just doesn't do anything plot wise. The biggest waste that could have probably been taken out of the movie was Judd Hirsch as Julius Levinson, he survives the first attack and travels around with a knock off version of Randy Quaids family that is boring filler for an action piece in the end. This was the only point in the movie where I was kind of mad because as I said I really wanted a hint at Randy Quaid as he was my favorite character from the first film and we just get a knock off version of his family. At this point it probably would've been more poignant if Julius had bumped into Quaid's family. You could've even joked about how successful they've become, but because of the attack they find themselves back in a trailer hitching across America like a bunch of rednecks, anything would've been better then the knock off family. 
Was this worth the wait? If you have been waiting since the release of the original then probably not, but as a huge fan of the original who never even fathomed getting a sequel then the concept of the film alone and the execution of the action sequences we're plenty for me to have a dumb good time at the movies. The characters are incredibly bland other then the returning characters and even then the only ones that matter are Godlblum, Pullman and Spiner. This movie had five different writers on the script including Devlin and Emmerich, two of them have no other writing credits to their name and the other had maybe two decent films to his name. I want to think the best parts were by Devlin and Emmerich and wished they'd just written it themselves. The ending itself is pretty awesome and it seems like Emmerich was trying to make up for his inability to produce a good Godzilla movie, because the final battle made me forgive him for Godzilla and you'll see why. This is a good jumping off point as the ending has a huge cliff hanger that could bring us into an amazing concept for a part three, I just hope Emmerich remembers to give us memorable characters to pair with his action sequences again, I especially hope Devlin and Emmerich fly solo for part three without other writers. Three motherships out of five for being a fun summer blockbuster!
