2. If You're Going To Riff On Independence Day, At Least Hire Jeff Goldblum
Man, this movie borrows a lot from Independence Day - whole shots and plot points. Of course, Independence Day wasn't terribly original, either: it's not like Will Smith and company are a bunch of low-level criminals pulling one last heist during a worldwide alien attack, who discover when the heist goes wrong that one of them is Keyser Söze... a criminal mastermind who is in league with the aliens. At the end of the film, Bill Pullman drops his coffee cup when he realizes that Brent Spiner was Söze all along - and that whole "Release me..." bit was just an act... one that merely required a bit of smoke, cheap theatrics, and one alien probe inserted into the place where alien probes naturally go. You know, with the addition of that Ewok destruction I talked about earlier, I think I just summed up the best movie ever. Anyway, why use Independence Day as your template for an alien invasion? There are better ideas out there. The actual aliens are about the same size and dimension as humans, and built the kaiju to invade and strip-mine other planets. And it's just about the stupidest alien invasion ever, might I add. 'Cause while these aliens have the same basic plan as ID4's aliens, the kaiju aliens send one giant monster through their portal to Earth every six months, giving humanity the opportunity to come up with a way to actually, you know, beat them. Humanity's final plan to sneak a bomb onto their mother ship/homeworld plays out exactly like it did in Independence Day. Down to the final close-up on an alien as the nuke is about to go off, with the alien having a look on his face that seems to say, "Hey, Bob! Doesn't that look like one of the humans? And he's got some kind of... bomb or something. Yeah, yeah, that's a bomb. Wait... Oh fu-" Once the kaiju are revealed as the bio-engineered equivalent of the Jaegars, I was really hoping for something more out of del Toro than an "aliens coming to earth for our natural resources" riff. Especially once we find out that one of the kaiju is pregnant. I was hoping for something a bit more out of left-field, like maybe the kaiju are trying to escape their creators so they can find a place to have their kids in peace. I don't know, maybe I'm asking too much - but I kept wanting this movie to have a little more on its mind. Also, can giant monster clones get pregnant?