Independence Daysaster (2013)

Usually, a good portion of the movies I pick up for FTW week are, in some form or fashion, piggybacking off the hype and reputation of a much more famous, and much more higher budget contemporary movie. The Asylum movies in particular are infamous for this, coining the phrase: Mockbuster. Most of the time though, they are at least usually a little bit more subtle about it: Almighty Thor (MCU's Thor),  Martian Land (The Martian), Jurassic Island / or The Final Level (Jumanji), they don't usually just go, "alright fuck this." and give the movie a title so literal that it's fucking transparent what they're trying to trailerhitch to. Independence Daysaster. Take a guess. Have a wild guess what movie it is they are copycating here? Interestingly enough though, this movie dropped some 17 years after it's blockbuster namesake, maybe in an attempt to capture some of the buzz around the upcoming Independence Day sequels that had been announced that same year, but would genuinely not see the light of day until another 3 years after the debut of this movie? I don't know? Let's be honest, Independence Day is a pretty big movie and you could argue it put Rolland Emmerich on the map. Maybe the good people at *checks notes* CineTel films thought there would be enough of a market for it? It got picked up, or was commissioned, by Syfy so they were half right? I couldn't turn away from this one when I spotted the thumbnail. And I am genuinely looking forward to this in hope that it will be so terrible it will be great, but also because curiously the reviews of this movie from actual people who sat and watched it before me generally tend to be pretty positive?!

"It's gonna be a long day." says Fireman, and Brother of the US President; Pete Garsette (Ryan Merriman) and boy he has no idea, as it's the 4th July and as he keeps a watchful eye over the Presidents Son; Andrew (Keenan Tracey) Earth is suddenly attacked by huge numbers of metal spheres from the sky! As Andrew and his pals are evacuated by the Secret Service, Pete is making his way back to town when he runs into Celia (Emily Holmes) - a SETI employee stranded on the side of the road. Picking her up he soon discovers what's left of his town has been decimated by giant futuristic drills protruding from the ground! Meanwhile as absolute panic breaks out amongst White House staff, the President - en route by helicopter to meet his son - is attacked by the orbs and his helicopter blown out of the sky as similarly Pete and Celia are attacked by one of the giant drills and have to flee from the scene in a borrowed fire service truck. Meanwhile as the Secret Service escort Andrew, his girlfriend Eliza (Andrea Brooks) and their pal Nick (?) to Dickson Air Base, their convoy is attacked forcing the car from the road and only the 3 survive, pledging to make their way to the Air Base. Similarly Pete and Celia decide to make the same journey, discovering the wreckage of the Secret Service convoy along the way... before linking up with the kids further down the line. Meanwhile, this leads the Vice President, Dennis Brubaker (Garwin Sanford) to assume the worst and take command, much to the chagrin of Special Advisor Spears (Jill Teed), but having survived the crash, President Garsette (Tom Everett Scott) takes refuge at a farmhouse in an area unhit by attack, with what just so happens to be one of the most sophisticated hackers and pirate broadcasters available for hire on the internet... In an underground briefing VP Brubaker and Spears learn from General Moore (Michael Kopsa) that the aliens have invaded globally and have already wreaked havoc across the globe destroying governments and decimating key military installations. Brubaker orders the military to attack before addressing the nation on an emergency broadcast station, a broadcast picked up by President Garsette at the farmhouse who enlists the help of his new unnamed tech wizard to help him get in touch with the nearest military base. The initial attack against the aliens goes badly with them easily getting the upper hand and overcoming the US air force, but as they witness the attack from the ground, Pete and the team learn that one of the devices Celia is carrying; a "phono-emitter" is able to damage and destroy the alien crafts. Arriving at the air base, the team discover the place is deserted but before they can explore for long a giant machine emerges from beneath the ground, sucking Nick into a vortex and vaporising him with the others only barely able to make it away in time. Back at the bunker President Garsette, with some help from his new hacker friends manages to make a connection with VP Brubaker and the others but before he can assert his control on the situation his signal is cut off, and in haste, Brubaker orders a tactical nuclear strike against a mothership seen emerging from behind the moon. Meanwhile as they drive away from the airbase, Pete and the others decide to put themselves in danger for absolutely no reason at all by encountering and attacking one of the spheres, destroying it with the phono-emitter. Examining the wreckage, they determine the spheres are just drones, likely controlled by the mothership and that shutting that down will likely disable all the drones... and after adapting a power source they recover from the wreckage they are able to amply the blast from the phono-emitter to take out an entire squadron of spheres. As they devise a plan to somehow get the phono-emitter on the mothership, and as Pete and Andrew have a heart-to-heart, the team cross paths with President Garsette, who is travelling to a friend of his hacker friend's house in hopes to re-establish a connection with the VP. After a brief reunion, the two teams merge and begin work on upgrading the phono-emitter and devise a plan to get the emitter picked up by a sphere, that will carry it to the mothership. As they put the work in, VP Brubaker gives the command to nuke the mothership. Realising they are running out of time, and attracting the attention of the aliens, the team splits up again, planning to work on the road as they make their way to SETI HQ. Meanwhile as the nukes rush through space they are picked off one by one by the spheres and the assault fails. Inside the fire truck, as the 2 cars are constantly under attack from a sphere, Celia comes to a realisation and forces Pete to pull over before sprinting away into the field, drawing the attention of the sphere and causing it to converge on her in order to retrieve the power source. Killing her in the process. However the power source and the phono-emitter are now in the possession of a sphere and on it's way to the mothership. Back at the base, with the nuclear attack foiled, the aliens turn their attention to attacking and destroying the base with Brubaker, General Moore and Spears all killed in the attack. With HQ destroyed, the hackers make contact with a nuclear missile silo whilst Pete, Andrew and Eliza travel on to SETI HQ in order to transmit the signal to activate the emitter. With the President giving the order to make the strike, Pete and the others are all ready to transmit the signal when a sphere damages to electrical supply to the building, plunging it off grid. Improvising, Pete uses his truck to destroy the sphere by causing it to explode in a petrol fire, and retrieving the sphere's power source, jams it into the electrical supply to restore power just long enough for Andrew and Eliza to broadcast the signal. As the missiles are slowly picked off one by one, the signal fires out and just one nuke is able to make it's way through and impact with the mothership, destroying it instantly as the others on the ground celebrate in relief. BUT on the fringes of space more motherships and more spheres begin to creep into the scene...

Erm... I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy this one... ! Despite the stupid as fuck name, and despite the obvious plagiarising of it's famous namesakes premise, this was, mostly otherwise, a pretty enjoyable movie! Yeah I know, I'm surprised too. I mean it wasn't without it's faults and there was an incredibly large amount of suspension of disbelief required here in order to get by, but I felt like there was genuine effort and genuine attention put into this one here to actually make it a watchable and enjoyable movie! I'd be disappointed if I hadn't actually enjoyed it. I thought it was going to be a crock of shit.

So let's start with the negatives first; like I said there is a heavy degree of suspension of disbelief here and it's very cliché. The President just so happens to find his way to a farmhouse containing cutting edge technological hackers. Said hackers are capable of navigating around every plot hole the movie throws at them: they break into Government building communication lines, control nuclear missile silos, the full works. The President's Son and his girlfriend just so happen to be geniuses capable of operating SETI technology. A random SETI employee just so happens to have developed a weapon accidentally that's capable of defeating the aliens. Very, very heavy suspensions of disbelief required here to take all of that on board and not be turned off by it.

Secondly, whilst the acting is decent enough for the most part, it does stray into cheesy territory on quite a few occasions. There is a lot of patriotic bullshit going down; emotive speeches, clichés about being American e.t.c lots of trailer bait. And whilst Ryan Merriman and Tom Everett Scott are decent enough in their respective roles they are very vanilla male leads with not great amounts of character depth. Of all the characters I was most impressed by Andrea Brooks as Eliza and Emily Holmes as Celia who both showed just a little bit more beyond being the female focal points in this movie and managed to bring a bit of expression to their respective roles.

And thirdly the plot, storyline, plot development is all very formulaic and predictable. I feel like the movie does enough to keep it interesting and does throw in the odd curveball, especially with the last 10 odd minutes, but it still follows a path very much well trodden: alien invasion, little known Achilles heel turns out to be their downfall. You've seen it in probably 5,6 odd movies with this same format before now and it brings nothing fresh to table here. It's a very familiar alien invasion story and not much new and fresh is explored beyond what has already been done before.

But the above points notwithstanding, I still found this movie enjoyable. And it was engaging. You kinda knew all along where it was going and what it was building to, but the pacing of the movie jumps straight into the action literally 10 minutes in and doesn't really stop until the end. At no point did I feel it really dropped off, and even the slightly more lapsed scenes with dialogue between the characters are kept short so as to not kill the pace of the movie. It sticks to just tube feeding you the action stuff and not bogging it down with things like character development and pointless exposition which is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on what sort of attitude you have going into this I guess.

And for a TV movie, I thought the special effects were really decent. The spheres and the drills looked real and convincing enough to me. I'd seen the basic idea; levitating spherical craft with buzzsaws down the middle in a movie somewhere before, and I don't think it was the original Independence Day. I can't remember, but it was a similar alien invasion style movie. So I sorta had this nagging feeling at the back of my mind that the spheres were not a 100% original idea but they still looked pretty good for a low budget movie. Similarly the cinematography was mostly fine with there being only a couple of examples where they had to take a slightly more awkward way of shooting something to cut down on post prod special effects, and for the most part it was all pretty professionally done.

Most of the time, you know what to expect going in with these kind of movies, and similarly to what I said with Poseidon the other week, you don't switch on an alien invasion movie for the complex exploration of an intelligent idea (most of the time...). You want the explosions, you want the set pieces, you want the bits about the alien technology and this movie gives you all of that, opting instead to cut back on the other stuff. The script gets corny in patches throughout and the acting dances around being quite vanilla most of the time, but at no point does it really dip below a... tolerable standard, and at no point does the movie fall into the completely ridiculous and borderline terrible standard. This was an enjoyable, easy enough watch of a movie that didn't need great amounts of concentration and consideration whilst at the same time, maintaining enough interesting things going on to keep your attention span. 2 out of 5.