Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Independence Day: Resurgence

When Roland Emmerich brought audiences this alien invasion disaster epic in 1996, audiences were enthralled making it the year’s number one film and bringing in an inflation-adjusted $594 million. While blockbusters had been a solid staple of the 1980s and 1990s, Independence Day turned what was a trend towards quality writing within a production into one where sheer spectacle was more important.

Like the Irwin Allen disaster films of the 1970s, Emmerich understands how to engage the audience with nifty effects that support massive destruction. He doesn’t quite know how to write fully developed characters, but even without much depth, the audience still cares about their successes and failures. That’s how the original film made its mark. Independence Day: Resurgence employs many of those techniques, but this time with decidedly mixed results.

This is the type of film Emmerich excels at, so it’s got all the requisite elements to be an exciting adventure. Most of the time it works as such. Unfortunately, his penchant for weak characters, corny and sappy dialogue, and vast leaps of scientific logic have soured what could have been a more conventional blockbuster. This is a film that ratchets up the excitement while dialing back the narrative quality, at least compared to prior efforts. Emmerich might be better suited to a screenplay that he hasn’t written, especially if the screenplay understand how to make human emotion more than a series of throw-away scenes that move on before the audience realizes they are supposed to be more that lightly affected.