Summer of Discontent

At the back end of 2015 film fans were justified in looking forward to the coming year as it appeared that 2016 was going to be full of one terrific movie after another. As I write this post we have had half the year and the sense of anticipation that brought us through the new year has been replaced with one of apathy as Hollywood has delivered more misses than it has hits.

Now obviously I am fully aware that hundreds of films are released every year so for the purposes of this argument I am of course making reference to the big studio movies with the multi million dollar budgets rather than the likes of independent productions, rom coms and the ilk. That said however I do want to begin my argument with Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight as whilst it has a relatively small budget ($44 million) it was eagerly anticipated by fans of the movie maker and casual audiences alike.

The Hateful Eight however was for me a disappointment as Tarantino disappeared into what was nothing more than self parody (this of course was not his intent), with some uncharacteristically poor dialogue, ridiculous set pieces (the vomiting scene for instance) and actors all apparently rehashing performances they have given in previous Tarantino flicks. In the same month we had The Revenant which whilst not the disappointment that The Hateful Eight was, just came across as dull (except for the bear attack) and for my money the wrong actor won an academy award for their performance in the film (Tom Hardy outshone DeCaprio everytime he was onscreen).

The 5th Wave and Point Break were terrible, which in the case of 5th Wave is even more depressing in as much as it could be the start of a franchise. However they both came out in the same month as the surprise smash of the year which came in the form of 20th Century Fox's Deadpool which delivered an R rated punch to the face of the superhero genre making an absolute shedload of money from a relatively tiny budget. For my thoughts on the that film you can read my spoiler review which I posted a few months ago. Zoolander 2 was also out in February but the less said about that the better.

London Has Fallen was ludicrous, Hail Caesar was bland Divergent Series: Allegiant was a by the numbers YA movie that was instantly forgettable and 10 Cloverfield Lane was not what we were expecting. All of which brought us to the next tentpole movie in the form of Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice which took plenty at the boxoffice but was not received well by audiences as it was an overblown mess that took all the fun out of what should have been the greatest superhero film in the history of cinema (again for a full breakdown check out my full review from March). Zootropolis shook things up by breaking through the $1 billion mark, The Huntsman Winters War tanked, The Jungle Book continued Disneys dominance as did Captain America Civil War which for my money is the best MCU movie made to date.

This leads us the next big film which was the one that I personally was looking forward to most as Days of Future Past is my favourite superhero film of all time so I had high hopes for X-Men Apocalypse, alas not unlike Batman vs Superman (although nowhere near as bad) Apocalypse was a big letdown and this was reflected in its lacklustre boxoffice takings. Disney finally hit the wall with Alice Through The Looking Glass and Warcraft was certainly not the hit that Universal were hoping for. All of which brings us to the latest big movie of the summer which is of course Independence Day Resurgence which is the sequel to 1996's original Independence Day.

20 years ago Roland Emmerich brought us Independence Day and it instantly became a classic of the alien/apocalypse genre as Aliens came to Earth to blow stuff up only to be thwarted by Will Smith (in the movie that really put him on the map) and Jeff Goldblum who was still living off the success of Jurassic Park.

Now here we are in 2016 and Emmerich is back in the directors chair for the return match between man and E.T. (and I'm not talking about the cute rubber puppet from Spielbergs beloved sci-fi masterpiece.

This time around we find Earth is a peaceful haven of joy as mankind has ceased all war in the aftermath of the first movies events, this of course would never happen but lets move on shall we. So what are the aliens upto? Well they have been biding their time and we see them watching a recording of President Bill Pullmans rousing speech from ID and it's fair to say they are not amused.

We also learn that in the last 20 years we have built ourselves a vast array of tech and weapons based on the gear left behind by the aliens and we have a vast array of defences set up in space to stop any potential future attacks, oh and we also have a base set up on the moon. Anyhow, after meeting Will Smiths son (Will Smith has apparently died whilst testing a new ship of some kind) who is the poster boy of the airforce, Liam Hemsworth (you know, the less talented of the Hemsworth brothers) who is the paint by numbers loose cannon who just so happens to be on the moon, Jeff Goldblum who is now some sort of go to guy in all matters alien, Jeff Goldblums dad who is touring a book he wrote about his experiences fighting the good fight and now ex-President Bill Pullman who has grown a beard and gone a bit crazy. Oh speaking of crazy we catch up with Data from Star Trek who has spent all the time between films in a coma, don't worry though as he'll soon be up and about.

An alien ship shows up on the moon and against Goldblums better judgement the new President opts to shoot it down as thats how mankind and in particular America rolls. Goldblum then teams up with Hemsworth and visits the crash site where they are rudely interrupted by a bloody great big ship which makes those we saw in the first film look like a mini cooper in comparison. The moon base gets blown up but of course our heroes escape back to Earth with just the part of the wreckage of the first ship they will need later in their adventures. The big ship arrives on Earth and smashes the crap out of everything, as Goldblum says, they love to take out the landmarks, Oh and before I forget I should just point out that as the giant ship approaches Earth we fire up our defence satellites in preperation of opening fire but as we countdown to firing the aliens just blow our whole system up which leaves you wondering why the hell we have to countdown before acting, especially as we encounter the same issues later on in the film.

Goldblum discovers the presence of a huge Godzilla sized Queen alien which he theorises they will need to destroy in order to stop the attack whilst his dad survives a tsunami which is so ludicrous that it makes the one saved by The Rock in San Andreas look like a ripple in a pond, he is then found by four kids who have lost their parents and therefore are primed to be the obligatory children in peril that we are supposed to care about. This is then compounded further when the five of them find a school bus full of children who they take along for the ride.

So Data wakes up and everyone gets together at area 51 after the new President and her staff are wiped out elsewhere. Will Smith Jr, Hemsworth and friends head out on a mission to destroy the Queen and her ship but lo and behold its a trap don't you know and they end up trapped onboard a smaller ship that takes off the huge ship and heads off towards area 51. Now why would Queenie be going there I hear you cry? The answer is simple. You see Data has opened the wreckage from the moon and a large white orb has appeared and informed those in attendance that she is the last of her species after her race was wiped out by the evil alien Queen and her minions despite their fight lasting thousands of years. She has come to Earth to take as many of us to a safe planet as possible but now the Queen knows shes here we are screwed and its game over.

Not so fast says Goldblum as he comes up with another cunning plan, though time us of the essence as the aliens are drilling through to the Earths core in order to put us out of our misery once and for all. Its going to involve a suicide mission however for which Bill Pullman volunteers against his daughters wishes, you can tell he is serious because he shaves off his crazy beard. Whilst all of this is going down Goldblums dad shows up with the bus full of kids in order to put them in harms way and to allow Goldblum to heroically drive them to safety as they are chased by Queenzilla. So Bill blows up Queenies ship but shes got shields don't you know so it was really a pointless waste of life. Queenzilla then goes on a rampage and looks to be kicking ass and taking names until a combination of Bills daughter and the returning Smith Jr and friends take her down and win one for the good guys.

The film closes with Data telling everyone he has spoken to the orb and she can give us the know how to build interstellar travel which means we can go and take the fight to the aliens and kick their asses (and that is a quote more or less from the actual movie) which of course means dun dun dun SEQUEL!!! Well that was obviously the plan but ID Resurgence has been taking a hammering from audiences since its release scoring just 32% on Rotten Tomatoes (although this is still better than Batman vs Superman did) and only pulling in $11 million more than its £165 million budget thus far at the boxoffice so maybe plans will change (we can only hope).

What can I say about ID Resurgence? It is about as far removed from the 1996 classic as you can possibly get. The film has no soul and nobody gives a performance that you will care about. The obvious omission is of course Will Smith and you don't realise how much he carried the original until you see this sequel without him. None of the new characters have any personality whatsoever and those actors that are returning for another go around are either bland or put in stupid situations to the extent that you really couldn't care less about any of them.

As for the effects. Well of course they're good but then in this day and age we see the planet being destroyed on a regular basis in such movies as Transformers and the aforementioned X-Men Apocalype so it doesn't feel special here in the same way as it did 20 years ago. The Queen alien looks stupid and as for the whole white orb alien I'm not really sure what to say as the concept is dumb but it somehow looks dumber than you would imagine something of this nature could.

The creative team behind this film also do their best to shove every cliche they can muster down our throats. I've already mentioned Hemsworths loose cannon and Will Jrs living up to his fathers name as well as introducing a whole bus full of children. I did however neglect to mention one particular scene where the giant alien ship lands and destroys a hospital which just so happens to be the one in which Will Jrs mum works. He of course gets there just in time to see a mother and her new born baby be saved from the rooftop before watching his mum plunge to her death, this of course giving him a) reason to hate the aliens even more and b) a connection through which to bond with Hemsworth with whom he had been having issues beforehand.

As a standalone alien apocalypse movie this is a mess and is honestly not very good. As a sequel to a great film like ID however it looks even worse and you have to wonder on what level anyone involved thought this worked.

In scoring this film I have to compare it to the other film that I really despised this year which of course was Batman vs Superman, a film that I scored 3 out of 10 on initial viewing only to lower my score to 1 out of 10 the more I thought about how bad it was. So is ID resurgence as bad as Batman vs Superman? No but it is pretty close and therefore I am going to give it a score of 2 out of 10 as it deserves higher than Synders abomination but no more than 1 more point.

So we are now in July and as we look ahead to the rest of the year we can take hope from the likes of Suicide Squad, Dr Strange, Star Wars Rogue Squadron and on a personal note a live action Akira which I am looking forward to. Before that however we have to live through the absolute travesty of a film that will be Paul Feigs Ghostbusters reboot but I've said all I can possibly say about that already on both our weekly show (which you can find on this very website or on our World of Stu Youtube channel) and our facebook page.

I really hope that the films I have mentioned as upcoming fit into the hit category rather than the miss but even then this could still be considered a bad year based purely on the stigma attached to both Batman vs Superman and ID Resurgence. Only time will tell.