I don't like fireworks. Never did. I didn't want to waste my time watching them, so instead I decided to go and see "Independence Day: Resurgence." I've never regretted a decision more in my life.

Wow. You ever sit in a class room, and while the teacher is talking you just kind of zone out, and then about ten minutes later you jump back to reality and realize you're supposed to be paying attention? This happened to me multiple times during this movie. There were points where I actually forgot I was watching a film, and I'm not joking.

The tag line is "We had twenty years to prepare. So did they." But did they? Because after watching this movie I really couldn't tell. In fact, the aliens seemed weaker. Sure, they had a few force fields, a few clever bait and switches, but is that really all they came up with after twenty years? No wonder no one in the movie seemed afraid of them. People actually seemed pretty calm, even though the aliens wiped out London and China immediately after entering the Earth's atmosphere, just by flying over them. But that doesn't seem to bother anyone. The Earth is going to end in a few minutes? Didn't seem to matter to anybody in this film, because no one showed any emotion, and anger, any sadness, any grief, any hysteria, or any fear relating to this, and because of this, there was no sense of tension or fear for the viewer either. And this throws the tone off, also. I understand that these movies are supposed to be guilty pleasure fun, but at least have the tone be a little darker and a little more serious. This film was so lighthearted that it was actually off-putting.

This movie never really felt like it got started either. I mean, you get your giant CGI explosion fest when the alien ship first enters the Earth's atmosphere, with cities literally being torn out of the ground, but then the action never gets any bigger or better than that. My jaw literally dropped while watching the destruction during this scene, and I was ready for the action to intensify and grow. But it didn't. It got slower. They put the climax in the first 45 minutes of the movie, and then just spend the rest of the running time focusing on the falling action.

The action was also incoherent, with a million things happening on the screen at one time. It was hard to follow and looked very generic, and while it wasn't necessarily boring, it wasn't exciting in the slightest. And the CGI wasn't even that good either; there were points where watching this movie was like watching gameplay of an off-brand science fiction video game that was released in the middle of winter to appeal to the parents of small children who have no idea that the game they're buying is a cheap knockoff of a triple A title.

And speaking of CGI, the universe that was built in the film didn't seem believable at all. I didn't see an improved and more protected Earth that used futuristic alien technology to their advantage. I saw a paint bucket of CGI vomit thrown on the screen, with Roland Emmerich stuffing it down our throats while saying "Believe it! This is reality!"

I should've watched the fireworks instead.

Twenty years ago, the summer blockbuster movie season was changed forever. Independence Day's tale of human perseverance in the face of an overwhelming alien invasion became one of the highest grossing films of the 1990s thanks to a combination of memorable characters and iconic special effect sequences. It was also a film that felt quite standalone with a definite beginning, middle and end to it. Yet Rolland Emmerich and Dean Devlin (who scripted it as well as respectively directing and producing it) came back for more. Moving forward two decades in time, the film promised to build on the first by showing a rebuilt world taking on the threat of renewed invasion. Needless to say, expectations were high. Did it live up to them?

The short answer: not at all.

Independence Day: Resurgence often feels like it's simply re- treading over old ground, only on a much bigger scale. Many of the iconic moments of the first film are done here from shots of the lunar surface, aerial battles, infiltrating an alien space ship, the destruction of landmarks and much more. Even the film's big threat is really just a much larger version of the ships from the first film (this time an even more improbable 3,000 miles in diameter). Or take the ending when combines the ending of the original film with the duo's first project post ID4. Though the film finds the occasions where it subverts those moments (such as with the original film's most iconic scene),Emmerich and Devlin don't seem to have brought much new to the table here.

What they bring instead is the attitude that "bigger is better". From the rebuilt cities we glimpse in the opening moments to the over-sized alien ship, all the film can seem to do is take what came before and give it to us again on a larger scale. Yet despite the two decades that have passed and all the apparent advances in special effects, those featured here are less impressive and less convincing than their 1996 counterparts. Whereas the first film relied on the physical as well as CGI, this film seems to make almost extensive use of CGI throughout including with the aliens themselves. Gone is the sense of reality and physicality that made the first film's effects so effective, replaced by a kind of CGI blandness that could make this film fit in with any other number of would-be disaster epics that came in the wake of the original film. It's as if Emmerich and Devlin forgot what made their earlier work so memorable.

That extends to much of the rest of the film as well. Whereas the original film was populated by memorable characters with witty dialogue, this film lacks that completely. We're given a handful of characters from the original film twenty years on, primarily in the form of Jeff Goldblum's David Levinson as well as Bill Pullman's former President Whitmore and Brent Spiner as Doctor Okun, plus cameos from others who really don't add much of anything to the film (most especially Vivica A. Fox) though none of them feel like their anything but caricatures of their original selves. The new cast of characters are scarcely memorable from the recast roles of Dylan Hill and Patricia Whitmore (played by Jessie Usher and Maika Monroe) to Liam Hemsworth's pilot Jake to Sela Ward's President Lanford and William Fichtner's General Adams, all of whom are written so bland that no actor in the world could have found a way to make them more memorable. Like Emmerich's White House Down three years ago, he managed to put an impressive cast into an otherwise unmemorable film.

Indeed, the word "unmemorable" describes the end result of Independence Day: Resurgence. Despite its pedigree, the return of both the original filmmakers and some members of its original cast, not to mention twenty years of advances in special effects technology the end result is a film that isn't half as good or half as memorable as the original. Instead it's a bland piece of work, filled with what should be eye-catching special effects that instead remind of us of just how much better the original film was.

All of which leads me to ask a question. Rolland, Dean: you had twenty years to prepare. Was this really the best you could come up with?

How stupid do the script writers think the viewing audience is?

If the movie were made for four year olds, it would be an insult to their intelligence....

Great first 10 minutes or so then we are expected to leave logic and believability behind...

Making no sense doesn't seem to bother the director and producers...

The sphere can set up a planet to teach all other civilizations how to defend against the bad aliens...and it's credentials for doing so? Their planet got wiped out by said aliens and even the lower intelligence earthlings, using replicated, imitated weapons ripped from the bad aliens can shoot it down over the moon...yeah...great teachers they'll be...

The Queen can survive a fusion bomb blast but her shield falls under minor weapon fires...

The Queen can control all the alien ships but yeah, let the two hero's craft shoot at her for fun before taking over control...

And having all her fighters surround her...I guess to offer her protection...but they just kept flying round and round like an amusement park ride when the two rogue fighters decide to attack her...

An ex president's daughter who no longer flies can just commandeer a fighter...to fly alongside her father, who couldn't walk properly in the beginning of the film but can still fly a new age jet...all the air forces around the world obviously overdoing their pilot screening a tad...

The list goes on and on...I can't be bothered to write them all down or I might be writing an entire new script or story line...

I want my time and money back...as well as compensation for ruining my fond memory of the first film...