A sequel to a movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters. What was expected? Bigger robots fighting bigger monsters. The same thing with little tweaks - as most sequels do. What we got?
A product. A film generated by an AI. I wasn't there, but I assume it went something like this. The first meeting of the creators of this movie follows.
Ok, Google, what do modern kids like?
1. Robots (Transformers)
2. Scary cool monsters
3. Robots fighting monsters
4. Robots fighting robots
5. Memes from 2009 (Trololo sing) really? + memes from 2017 (the salt).
6. Horribly executed kid rebel subplots (Divergent, The Maze Runner, The Hunger games whatever)
7. Action
8. Forced drama?
9. Bad jokes?
Ok, let's take The Independence Day Resurgence's basic plot and fail miserably at everything. Done.
In other words, there is nothing in this movie besides action scenes. The plot lives on its own, there are no characters, and even their substitutes are completely disconnected from the dead plot. Nothing they do matter, it just follows typical cliches until the end. It even gets confusing at some point, but then you see the light at the end of the tunnel. It rushes the ending knowing that by this point nobody cares.
All the dialogue is cringe-worthy. Most of the actors are just having fun knowing that there's no need to get invested into anything here. Sadly, Scott Eastwood's face is stuck in one emotion and is unable to display anything else.
CGI crews did a good job, I guess. Looks fine. There's even one creative action scene involving buildings. Other than that the action is generic, even IMAX can't make it feel better. Maybe it would've been more impressive but the overabundance of CGI city destruction in modern blockbusters seriously lowers the threshold for getting impressed by CGI.
I'd compare this to a long video game cut-scene, but modern games have more character development and creative visuals in their cut-scenes. For instance, pretty much all Blizzard cut-scenes are visual masterpieces.
Final verdict: not entertaining on the big screen and a total waste of time for home viewing.
