Even Bill Pullman wouldn't have found anything about this independence worth celebrating.
An aspect of all bad movies, B-grade, theatrically
released, television or otherwise, commonly viewed as a potential saving grace
is that of whether or not the people involved with it enjoyed making it.
Your mileage may vary on whether or not watching
people having fun saves a poor product but there’s something undeniably
infectious about seeing others have a fun time that you yourself may have been
a part of if you were working on a similar project. At the end of the day
though, that kind of emotional transference is not a suitable replacement for
genuine competence and effort.
While I’m not sure just how much the folks behind
this particularly embarrassing “Independence Day” knockoff were having a blast
doing random things in front of a camera for a couple of days, “Independence
Wars: Insurgence” is such an irritatingly dull watch that all their enjoyment
would have done is add to my own irritation.
As previously stated, if it weren’t obvious enough,
the film attempted to capitalize on the success of “Independence Day:
Resurgence” by depicting a bunch of bland millennial human shaped blocks of
wood attempting to survive an alien invasion in a world populated by less
people than you cram into a mini-mall, while the one generic news station
offers updates on the military doing nothing to stop the alien ships that
evidently turn people into zombies.
There’s a lot of wrong to unpack in this black hole
of fun but the first and foremost should be that my aforementioned claim of “ID4
Resurgence” being successful is a blatant falsehood; the film was of course a
critical flop and one of the higher profile box office disappointments of the
summer. So what we’re left with is a bad B-movie trying to ride the coattails
of an expensive mediocre B-movie, that didn’t have any lift for said coattails
to ride on.
This isn’t even the only one. My initial plan for
this week was to expose the insanity of the mockbuster concept by covering 3
knockoffs of “ID4: Resurgence” released this year alone. I was ultimately
dissuaded from such because it slowly dawned on me that the home release of one
of Summer 2016’s most hollow releases wasn’t enough cause for “celebration,”
one of the other films on that docket was produced by “The Asylum,” whom I am
vehemently opposed to and this first film sucked so much life out of me that I
just couldn’t be bothered to follow up on watching what would virtually be the
same garbage 3 times in a row.
That’s not to say that there aren’t a few nuggets of
gold beneath the repelling performances of this cast of non-actors. Every once
in a while, the right moment of overacting, the right piece of dialogue, the
right cut away to the terrible CGI spaceship and stock footage used to simulate
combat against a music-less backdrop will combine to form a few laugh out loud
moments that can reach “Birdemic” levels of unintentional brilliance in a movie
that is mercifully short.
Unfortunately the lack of coherent and competent production
in the rest of the film hampers that enjoyment quickly. This is clearly the
work of a bunch of college aged kids with cameras and way too much time on
their hands shooting for the same spots in the zeitgeist as the best of the
worst cheaply made crap available in the internet age. But the lack of adhering
to even the basics of film production make it more irritating insipid than dumb
fun.
Forgetting about acting, editing and camerawork even
for a moment, this is a production so cheap, inept, and lazy that they couldn’t
even remove the white noise from the recording microphones or even out the
sound levels. Yet it somehow has legitimate DVD distribution.
“Independence Wars: Insurgence” barely even managed
to land on my scoreboard. Were it not for a few genuine laughs and that I try
to judge these films on the viewing experience itself rather than what I think
of it after a viewing, this would be scraping at the door of Nega-Shat
territory.
I’ve seen college camera production class shorts
with better value and more entertainment than this.
1 Shat out of 4
Bottom Line: The lone Shat that I award this film based on the laughs that I did get may be too generous.
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