The trailer for this looks pretty good, but after more than a decade of comic book film launches, relaunches, rerelaunches, do-overs, Mulligans, repudiations, preprequels, disavowals of prequels, and spinoffs, almost any 90s sci-fi sequel is going to look good.
Very promising cast, soured somewhat by Will Smith's absence, but seeing Goldblum, Pullman, Spiner, and Hirsch there sure brought back a lot of feels. (Will Smith, if you're wondering, could not find the time to do the film).
Those who remember the time when the original came out will recall that that was effectively the apotheosis of explosive summer blockbusters of the 1990s, for better or worse. The original was an influential film from a storytelling and special effects standpoint and it debuted during a very favorable time for such films -- there were just a handful of others like Armageddon (1998) that tried to achieve a similar degree of loud spectacle and destruction.
The summer of 1996, culturally, was also an important time for sci-fi as a whole. It was the 30th anniversary of Star Trek, DS9 and Voyager were still on the air, The X-Files was a cultural phenomenon, the Mars Pathfinder probe was launched, NASA announced that it saw some shtuff on a meteorite that could be somethin'.
Trailer:
