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Two brothers get together to re-evaluate their lives and dreams, but it soon become apparent that they have more differences than similarities, and perhaps would have been better off not hooking up at all.

This is a movie that makes you work. There are no easy clichés to grab hold of. Nicholson shows that he can act the pants off most others, playing a sundied, self-examining radio host, a million miles from the 'Nicholsom' we're used to.

Dern gives an astounding performance as perhaps one of the most obnoxious characters to ever grace the screen - a self-obsessed businessman and would-be millionaire, if he wasn't to busy taking drugs and abusing women.

Ellen Bursten is utterly convincing and heartbreaking performance as one of his neglected hangers one, and just as one is thinking the film is burning itself out, steals the show with an memorable explosion of emotion.

Julie Anne Robinson, the young of the two women hanging around Dern, is equally impressive. A promising actress with three films to her credit, she sadly died of smoke-inhalation during apartment fir at her home on Eugene, Oregon, 13 April 1975.

It's Nicholson one ultimately remembers most from this film, even though he is really an observer thorough whose eyes we witness the self-destructive habits of the others.

Really glad I saw this, happening upon it when browsing through a batch of 70's movies that cane into my possession. No car chases, gun fights or sex scenes (well, one brief one), but a rare ensemble performance, a real gem.

I've titled this puzzling and muddled, because it's always 'puzzling' to me how, given the resources they have at hand, some directors manage to produce something of such poor quality. 'Muddled' because the screenplay jumps from theme to theme and scene to scene with no obvious logic.

The film starts creditably enough with some basic character building - suitably gung-ho or sensitive crewmen, the respective American and Japanese captains with their professional concerns and personal issues, and there's a generic love story thrown in. It is difficult to go much further without plot-giveaways, but from then on the film descends into something resembling a collection of out-takes from Titanic, Pearl Harbour, Moby Dick: 2010 and The Hunt for Red October.

The recreation of the Indianapolis is impressive, 'photo-relistic' initially, but the money or enthusiasm for quality CGI seems to have rapidly run out, because thereafter the ships and sharks move about obviously too fast, too slow or with peculiar quirky motion. The Indianapolis's angles as it is sinking change repeatedly, one moment it has tutned almost upright in the water, the next it is at barely 30 degrees from the horizontal.

The actors, including Cage, give reasonably competent performances, but as another reviewer has already said, the whole caboodle would have fared better as a TV movie without big-screen pretensions. So, sorry everyone, while it has a promising opening, the quality of the production then drops rapidly.

First, do not mistake this for the 2016 sequel to the original Independence Day. "Independents' Day" (the cheeky title alone deserves an extra point) is made by The Asylum, a company which specializes in grabbing as many sales as it can from people mistaking their productions for upcoming blockbusters, or from people such as myself who don't mind watching these things occasionally as a change from all the over-hyped, big-budget productions about. Production values are very much in dollars rather than billions of dollars. However, that doesn't mean the result is necessarily bad.

The actors take their roles seriously, albeit they're not exactly A-list, being either complete unknowns or daytime soap extras. Occasionally The Asylum do pull in a recognizable face, but there's none in this film.

The special effects are actually not bad - better than many TV productions I've seen, and the story-line is quite imaginative, although the screenplay lets things down a bit. That's a shame, as with a bit more attention to the latter the whole production could be raised a notch or two.

In this film, some large(ish) spaceships arrive on earth and instead of immediately destroying everything offer to relocate earth's population to avoid a costly battle, even offering rewards in the form of cures for various diseases if humankind cooperates. The female vice-president of America finds it's up to her to work out what's really going on and find a way to prevent the aliens' from taking possession the planet.

I definitely wouldn't recommend wasting $10 on this - wait a couple of months until it appears in the $1 bin. It's good to pass a bored 1½ hours when there's nothing else to do, or save it for a day when your in bed with chickenpox. Also, as another reviewer has pointed out, The Asylum productions are blissfully free from the expletives and sexism that appear in almost everything these days, for which I'm truly grateful.