First, do not mistake this for the 2016 sequel to the original Independence Day. "Independents' Day" (the cheeky title alone deserves an extra point) is made by The Asylum, a company which specializes in grabbing as many sales as it can from people mistaking their productions for upcoming blockbusters, or from people such as myself who don't mind watching these things occasionally as a change from all the over-hyped, big-budget productions about. Production values are very much in dollars rather than billions of dollars. However, that doesn't mean the result is necessarily bad.
The actors take their roles seriously, albeit they're not exactly A-list, being either complete unknowns or daytime soap extras. Occasionally The Asylum do pull in a recognizable face, but there's none in this film.
The special effects are actually not bad - better than many TV productions I've seen, and the story-line is quite imaginative, although the screenplay lets things down a bit. That's a shame, as with a bit more attention to the latter the whole production could be raised a notch or two.
In this film, some large(ish) spaceships arrive on earth and instead of immediately destroying everything offer to relocate earth's population to avoid a costly battle, even offering rewards in the form of cures for various diseases if humankind cooperates. The female vice-president of America finds it's up to her to work out what's really going on and find a way to prevent the aliens' from taking possession the planet.
I definitely wouldn't recommend wasting $10 on this - wait a couple of months until it appears in the $1 bin. It's good to pass a bored 1½ hours when there's nothing else to do, or save it for a day when your in bed with chickenpox. Also, as another reviewer has pointed out, The Asylum productions are blissfully free from the expletives and sexism that appear in almost everything these days, for which I'm truly grateful.
