Last night I rewatched Independence Day, which is not a tradition but I have done once or twice before around the holiday; and out of morbid curiosity I also essentially "skimmed" through the 2016 sequel Resurgence. Man, is that film bad! It is bad for a lot of boring, everyday reasons, which aren't worth explaining. But it also just isn't hitting one of the key things that made the original good? To clarify, the original film is very stupid, and hammy, but it is still good! Hammy, stupid movies are a genre, right - they just have to do interesting stuff around the hammy, stupid frame. And one of the cool things Independence Day does is that it's opening ~30 minutes are this smorgasbord montage of 90's Peak Technology:
Even the less intensive scenes in this setup, like the President's White House sections, are him on the phone, watching TV news, etc. This whole arc culminates in this great moment where Jeff Goldblum's character, standing in the middle of his NYC TV station office, has every screen in the room, previously displaying a million different station feeds, all cutting at once to the President's emergency broadcast:
And then of course it zoom-transitions to the actual speech - a great shot, the directing in this film is quite good. But I think if you were explaining to Naive Joe Suit on the production committee that you want to spend a quarter of your location budget and run time on five different scenes of mainly bit characters reading signals data that is all telling us the same thing - Aliens Are Coming! - he would instantly veto you. Get to the point of the film!
Except this is the point of the film - this entire montage is a literal propaganda reel of the might and technological sophistication of 90's America. It is all of our power, genius, and collective effort, operating a panopticon of threat awareness and neutralization. These scenes are the same ones that open up with establishing shots of the Statue of Liberty and the National Mall, symbols of American Greatness. The film wants you to feel the strength and reach of the modern military apparatus that 90's America, hegemon of the world, had built.
And then of course, it all gets fucking blown up by aliens!
All of that might is completely useless against a far more technologically superior foe. Brick by brick, the cities die, bases get blown up, the nukes fail, and all of it done via the aliens hijacking our own satellites. Then our plucky protagonists strike back, not with more techno-dakka, but instead with human ingenuity; commandeering a crashed alien vessel to deliver a computer virus to turn their own systems against them, coordinated across the globe via old school, analogue morse code:
Yeah, Independence Day has themes! They aren't smart themes, it doesn't have anything to say about technology or whatever, but emotionally they work to make you feel the Disaster Movie of it all. The film puts a lot of time into painting a picture of real America; an actual place the audience can recognize, understand, be attached to, have stakes in, before it destroys it all.
And the sequel, of course, does none of that. It doesn't take place in real America - it is some sci-fi future global defense alliance reverse-engineered alien technology bullshit America. Every establishing shot is CGI, they have military bases on the moon, they launch fake weapons at fake aliens who blow up fake cities. I am not even bothering with screenshots. They would be pictures of some buildings from a computer - who cares? I was already blowing up computer cities with aliens in Sim City when I was a kid; what do I need you for movie?
The irony here is that the original Independence Day is the most 90's movie ever, by putting the actuality of 90's America on screen for you. And the sequel is the most 2010's movie ever... by showing you nothing real at all. Just CGI slop in service of a paint-by-numbers plot for a cash-in sequel with a requisite quota of callbacks to tickle your memory of a better film. I guess that counts as a theme?
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Also, to end on a tangent: every other scene in the sequel involves nods to China as the joint-lead on everything, supplying the moon base with space milk (not a comedic exaggeration!) and such because it was 2016 and back then Hollywood was still trying to appease the CCP-censors to capture China's domestic market share via patriotism fanservice. Honestly I am not even mad about this part? It is so intensely over-the-top that it kinda just works; like yeah okay this is part of the worldbuilding now, in this future China and the US have fully merged their militaries, cool. But it is just another way the film is so hopelessly of the 2010's!
