Seeing the Independence Day Sequel is an Easily Preventable Mistake

I am fascinated by certain things in movies regardless of other cinematic merits. Spaceships. Aliens. Ray guns. Cities being blown up. Mysterious conspiracies. Brent Spiner.

The original Independence Day met all of these criteria and more my 19-year-old self hadn't even thought of. It was the first movie I spent my hard-earned money seeing multiple times. Yes, in retrospect (maybe even while watching it), the movie is flat-out ridiculous. The plot holes are large enough to fly one of the floating death frisbees through with plenty of shoulder room to spare. The speech from Bill Pullman (President Whitmore) is more than a little cringe inducing and Randy Quaid's character annoyed the hell out of me.

But that movie did have considerable heart for all of its silliness. And, perhaps because of the limitations of budget and special effects, the movie suggested way more than it actually showed. We never got an unobstructed view of the aliens or their mother ship or much of their society. The movie was 100% better because of that. I rewatch movies that leave places for imagination.

I think that's precisely where the sequel Independence Day: Recrudescence (possibly mistaken title) falls down the hardest for me. The characterizations are basically as thin and superficial as the original and the ending is way, way too pat (almost to the point of self-parody) but the part that took me out of the movie the fastest was simply the sense that we were seeing all there was to see. A whole new alien species is introduced early on and we basically learn all we need to know about them by the half-way point in the movie. There was some fun stuff about how earth has adapted the alien's technology for its own purpose but the sense of a lived-in reality for the characters is undermined by scenes where soldiers point to glowing infrared dots and say stuff like, "each one of these dots is an alien."

'Aliens' -- really?!?

Not Greys? Or Squids? or Slimy Bastards?

Let me expand upon that because of all the ludricuous things this movie asks us to swallow this is the one that really bothered me. According to the movie, in 1996, a huge swatch of the planet was destroyed, a substantial portion of the population disintegrated, and yet two decades later people are still calling them 'aliens?' And then when another alien race shows up, they call them aliens too? Have the creators of this movie ever met actual human beings? There is literally no way we would call the saucer people 'aliens' after all of that carnage.

Anyway, this is one of those movies that I am condemned to watch even if it scored far, far lower on Rotten Tomatoes. You are not me and I hope you draw more lessons from the past than the humans in this movie did.

Do not watch this movie, especially in the theaters. If you absolutely have to watch cities get blown up and aliens get punched in the mouth, just watch the original movie. I guarantee you will have a better time.

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation. Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...

A Reaction to Peter Watts' "Echopraxia"

Peter Watts’ Echopraxia is a side-sequel to his previous hard sf horror novel Blindsight . Daniel Bruks, a biologist in the Eastern Oregonian desert, gets stuck in the middle of a war between a fugitive vampire and a cult of rewired post-humans called Bicamerals, ultimately kidnapped by them as they head towards the sun. The goal of post-human and vampire alike is to investigate a possible alien intelligence gaining strength there, to determine if it poses a threat, or offers a weapon for the two sides as they struggle for advantage. Bruks' goal is simple survival. Reading Watts is a simultaneously bracing and discouraging experience. Bracing because his depiction of the future and the oddities who inhabit it continue to get better and better, his plots more complicated and more involving, his characters less like sock-puppets for his ideas and more like actual human beings (or whatevers). Discouraging because Watts uses his considerable gifts, artistic and academic, ...

The Dorsia Brevia Solution

While "Green Mars," didn't include nearly as much mind-blowing speculative awesomeness as the first book in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, it did include one set-piece that I enjoyed very much: The Dorsa Brevia Declaration. As mentioned in my review earlier this week, the plot of Green Mars focuses on the approach of a second Martian revolution. The first revolution, as described in Red Mars, was a spasm of senseless violence, mayhem, and targeted assassination, accomplishing little besides the deaths of many, many important characters in the story. As would-be revolutionaries gather in an enormous lava tube named Dorsa Brevia, the central question is how would any future revolution escape the fate of the first. The process, which I'll describe below, was very familiar to me. During the course of my path to teaching history in Middle School, I worked at an afterschool program named Citizen Schools based in Boston. Citizen Schools had its ups and down...

Ancient Logic

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