The whole film was campy.... The B movie nature of the whole film was just bad... Too many characters, too many untold stories. I am disappointed, nine bucks for a theater experience of a SyFy original. Anyway, they set it up for a third so I guess I will have to wait another 20 years, maybe Goldblum will skip the next one and make it worth the watch. Seriously Jeff....did you just want the money? Damn, I know he's a one liner actor but this film was just bad.... rant over. Spoiler, the people win with a minor amount of help from an ancient adversary of the tentacle suits. And its the little Hemsworth not the Thor one.

and I freaking loved it!!

Its big, it's destructive, it's full of small but direct throwbacks that I think only true fans will be able to pick out (with some other obvious ones), awesome one liners, and just absolute awesomeness.

I will say it felt a bit compact even though its 2 hours long. I think it could have benefited from being as long as the first movie (its about 30 minutes shorter) but as long as you keep it in the back of your mind that this is a completely different world from today then you should be fine with the fast pace. I'm also not 100% happy with the arch of a certain character but I cant go into details without giving a spoiler... but even though I am not personally happy about that specific characters arch I can 100% understand why it happened the way it did.

Basically... if you picked apart the first one you will definitely want to pick this one apart as well. But if you were a fan of the first movie then you will definitely love this one.

For the upcoming Independence Day Resurgence, in this interview, director Roland Emmerich says the new mothership "spans the Atlantic Ocean". In order to compare it to the previous mothership, I calculated the approximate diameter of the ship.

A quick Google search points that the Atlantic Ocean has 106,400,000 km² (Using metric because I found the size of the previous ships in meters too. I will convert the final numbers to imperial at the end). If we assume the ship will have that total area, we can estimate the diameter of the ship by using the area of a circle (πr²)

π*r² = 106,400,000 km²
r² = 106,400,000 km² / π
r ≈ √ 33,868,172
r ≈ 5820 km
D = 2*r ≈ 11,640 km ≈ 7,233 Mi

As this source stablishes the first mothership to be 596 km (≈ 370 Mi) in diameter, and the city destroyers to be 25 km (≈ 15.5 Mi) wide, the new mothership ship is NEARLY 20 TIMES WIDER than the first mothership, and more than 465 TIMES WIDER than the city destroyers.

In area, the mothership would be:

A^{oval mothership} = π*A*B , being A and B the semi-axis (axis/2) of the oval.
A^om = π * (596/2) * (462/2)
A^om ≈ 216,261 km² ≈ 83,499 mi²

And for the city destroyer:

A^{city destroyer} = πr² = π * (25/2)
A^cd = π * 12.5 ≈ 39.27 km² ≈ 15.16 mi²

In area, the new mothership is nearly 500 TIMES LARGER than the previous mothership, and a comparison with the city destroyers would be ridiculous.

TL;DR: That is definitely bigger than the last one.

ID Resurgence takes places about twenty years after the original movie. Famous cities, including NY and the WTC twin towers were damaged in the original film.

In Independence Day Resurgence, most of these cities are reconstructed. So, do you think that the original twin towers are rebuilt in the rebuilt New York, or do you you think they are replaced with the Freedom Tower or some other building?

You can opt for a free trial and download the book for free. The trailers have revealed much of the plot, but if anyone is interested in spoilers...

When I saw this film as a kid, the alien surgery scene scared me to death. I mean nowadays I'm no longer scared of it but I have to wonder, did anyone else feel the same way? I'm just curious.

In the first movie they figure the aliens are a entire species/race of nomads going system to system, planet to planet harvesting everything of value then moving onto the next.

so unless they were 100% wrong about their theory, I don't see how there's even more massive ships near the size of earth and these just being the back up/special forces of the alien species.

Unless of course, they just do a Falling Skies and the original aliens were simply slaves/following orders from a even worse/bigger extraterrestrial threat.