Spoiler warning: This piece mentions many specific plot points from Independence Day: Resurgence, including character death.



One of the big plotlines — and deadlines — in Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day: Resurgence involves a bunch of aliens drilling a hole through the Earth’s mantle to get at its molten core. This comes up a lot: Important Science Guy (Jeff Goldblum’s character, returning from the original 1996 Independence Day) shouts “they’re after our molten core!” as if he were in an ’80s commercial, trying to protect his precious breakfast cereal from a wacky cartoon character. In the film, the planet’s gooey center is often referred to solely and ridiculously as “the molten core,” as if that were a common human expression, or as if the film is trying to sneak in native advertising for Hershey’s Molten Core Lava Cakes™.



But when the aliens do go after the molten core, audiences get one establishing special-effects shot of a giant energy-beam hitting the ocean, and then they don’t see those aliens again until the threat is ended. What do they get instead? A bunch of scruffy men on a scruffy salvage boat, periodically looking out of a porthole and reacting, presumably to some really impressive offscreen special effects: “Boy, this is bad! Those aliens sure are getting close to our molten core!” This is no-budget indie filmmaking 101: If you can’t afford an explosion, or a house burning down, or aliens drilling into the molten core of the planet, you shine a bright, flickering light on the characters’ faces and show them responding to imaginary horrors. But Emmerich didn’t make a shoestring movie, he made a $165 million blockbuster. So why does it feel like there’s a scene or two accidentally missing in that sequence, or like Emmerich ran out of money and decided to scrap part of the storyboard?