Reviews

...are all words that can never be used to describe this film.

This movie lacks any of the qualities of a good film, but does contain several qualities of a bad hooker- cheap, lazy, covered in make up, desperate for money, and on the whole rather tragic.

There is nothing exciting about this film. It literally repeats as much from the original film as possible, right down to actually remaking some of the exact same shots and sequences! The plot too is almost exactly the same as the first film, except there is an incredibly facile and over-used deus ex machina that swoops in and saves the day in the end.

The characters are 90% cliché and the rest is just hinged on a prayer that the actor's good looks will make you like them enough to keep watching as they spout off redundant and tortured Hollywood tropes with agonising frequency.

But, for me, this was not the worst part. The worst part was the utterly inappropriate injection of Hollywood's political opinions into the plot, in the following ways:

1. The president sounds suspiciously like Hillary Clinton.

2. There are female characters that exist seemingly just to fill a quota of female actors as they offer absolutely nothing to the plot.

3. The US army is made up of a rainbow of colours and creeds to reflect the fact that in the Utopian future (under Hillary Clinton) there is true equality!

Hilariously, however, for all of its condescending politicising, it STILL somehow manages to be incredibly racist! The African allies are depicted as a kind of 'hooga-booga!' screaming primitive tribe, who despite possessing alien technology in a supposedly unified world, still carry machetes and have a sort of 'animal' understanding of the aliens.

And it also makes a subtle but incredibly insulting jab at Jews too- for when the aliens are about to slaughter our imitation Hillary, she bravely declares 'there will be no peace', which is of course a reference to the rhetoric of Palestine towards Israeli settlement-building. And with that single sentence therefore strongly implies that the monstrous aliens who want to steal the earth basically equate to Israeli Jews. Which is as offensive as it is ignorant.

Personally I'm very tired of Hollywood's insipid narcissism in thinking it can lecture everyone on moral absolutism because it has money. I wish Emmerich had put more effort into making a half-decent film and less effort into trying to offer the public a cheap blow-job of a movie in return for cash.

It says what it thinks you want to hear, shows you what it thinks you want to see, and yet somehow this film manages to be the exact opposite of appealing.

You've heard about those old 'snake oil' salesmen in the Old West right? Well it seems one of them decided to make a movie. And much like the garbage bottles of ointments and tonics those old con-men made a living from, this movie too is at best worthless and at worst harmful.

The movie begins by vigorously stating that the whole thing is based on actual events and real archive footage. The only problem is that very quickly it appears that the so called 'real' footage is somehow not quite right. It kind of hits you in increments... First these poor alien victims seem to be acting up. Then there's all the make-up they seem to be wearing. Then there's the edited camera angles during their interviews. Then there's the over the top captioning to the effect of 'this footage is really real', even down to the point when someone is screaming it reads...'screams'. And then finally there's the police cam footage of some local lunatic killing his family and then blowing his brains out and suddenly it becomes painfully obvious... it's all lies.

Frankly I was relieved that the efforts of the editor and director in faking all this footage had been so woefully poor. I was glad I didn't live in a world where hysterical and obviously disturbed individuals are further harmed by well meaning but totally incompetent therapists (I know, don't say it!). But after this came the anger at the realisation that once you glean, as you quickly will, that it's all a load of smoke and mirrors the movie is not good enough anymore to actually stand on its own feet. It seems it was solely dependent on the audience's believing in it for any of its appeal. Without that it's just all melodramatic screaming, nonsense scripting and cliché madness.

But it's worse than that, it's irresponsible. Without getting personal, any rational individual will understand that alien abduction is about as likely as a duck quacking the complete works of Shakespeare in Morse code. (No really, there are statistical analyses of the probability of alien abduction and let's just say it's a number with so many zeros you can't fit them on a calculator). So it's safe to say that people who actually do believe that they've been abducted or visited by aliens are probably in need of emotional help or else suffering from the terrifying and unfortunate symptoms of sleep paralysis. So what effect is this kind of trickery going to have on them?

Perhaps the director thought this would be a more radical version of the Blair Witch project? Only the problem is, whereas few people are traumatised by a real life belief in having been attacked by an undead witch in the forest, many people actually do believe in aliens and some of those people are clearly unstable.

By consequence of its shameless fraudulence this movie thus has some explaining to do to the young and impressionable, those who don't have a firm grip on reality and those who are in need of therapy. And also to everyone else who watches it, because movies should be good enough to be entertaining without having to rely on manipulation and lies damn it!