Cranky T-Rex's Blog

The made a sequel to Independence Day.  Apparently Emmerich was actually paid to write a sequel immediately after it came out, but he thought the script sucked so he gave the money back and shelved it.  So did it take him 20 years to finally come up with a phenomenal script that he didn't want to stick in a drawer, or is this movie just another shameless cash grab?  Here's what I thought:

In 1996, that would've been a tragedy. Whether it’s A Nightmare Before Christmas on Halloween, Saving Private Ryan on Memorial Day, or Die Hard at Christmas, we've all got our favorite holiday movie traditions. For the 4th of July, there’s no better movie to watch than the aptly titled Independence Day . Conveniently abbreviated “ID4” by an incredible marketing campaign that helped push it to the top of the 1996 box office, it’s a funny, exciting, patriotic disaster romp that I love to watch every time America’s birthday rolls around and one of my top 10 all time favorite movies. Looking back at it, Independence Day is remarkably tame compared to the destruction porn of today, as well as writer/director Roland Emmerich's later efforts. Instead of two hours of loosely connected edifice obliteration like we see nowadays, ID4 wraps up most of the disaster stuff by the end of the first act. By changing it up like that, the action doesn't get overwhelming to the...