Independence Day Resurgence opens on an alien spaceship. An alien is looking at a beeping signal of some kind and pushes a button to display a holographic image of the earth and then a sub-screen opens and plays a short clip from President Whitmore’s speech that roused the world to victory back in 1996.

At this point, 90 seconds in, I wondered: Where are we? Where did that TV footage come from? Can this alien understand English? Has it ever seen a human before? Why does the species that attacked us before keep file footage of Presidential speeches anyway?

Turns out these questions don’t matter because this scene is all a dream, taking place inside the mind of former President Whitmore. Only now, he has a crazy-man beard, and wears a bathrobe and takes meds. Which led to a new set of immediately confusing questions. Is he supposed to be crazy? Is he being treated for mental illness with these meds or is this just ‘movie crazy’ shorthand? Does he think he’s still the president? Later, when he flies a plane, these things will matter. Because if he is mentally ill he probably shouldn’t pilot an airplane. Maybe he isn’t crazy, though, maybe everyone else is crazy?

Thus continues the experience of watching Independence Day Resurgence. Every new scene introduces questions that will never be answered. There are details that seem significant to the plot but simply drift away. There are details that are completely insignificant. They, too, drift away. There’s technology-after 1996 humans used alien tech to advance earth’s technology exponentially- that appears fascinating and useful but doesn’t apparently do anything to serve the film. Guns are still guns and they shoot things. Planes are still planes and they fly people around. Okay. Eventually people will shoot guns from planes at things and whether they are old-school human tech or fancy new-alien tech, they still just fly and shoot until target dies.

So instead of talking about the finer elements Independence Day Resurgence, let’s talk briefly about the movie’s baby boomers. First, there’s a lot of them. Jeff Goldblum, Vivica A. Fox, Bill Pullman, Sela Ward, William Fichtner; class actors all, doing their best to protect the earth from a cataclysmic threat.

Second, the baby boomers got a lot of explaining to do. As I scanned Independence Day Resurgence for any thematic resonance or cultural value, I started to notice something: the boomers in this movie have a tendency to die and leave their kids in the shit. They may have united the entire world by defeating an inter-stellar alien attack back in the 90s, but the 90s are over.

Those boomers may have brought world peace-as we learn in a bizarre voice over about the time since 1996, there have been no conflicts on earth-but only because an even more dangerous enemy showed up and threatened total global extinction.

And in this movie, they seem to feel bad about the aliens. Like it’s their fault they came back. Like they might have left earth to die and they are responsible for it. What a concept.

If IDR has anything interesting to discover in its plot, its that there is an entire generation of orphans on earth-including two of the heroes-who’s parents were killed in the 1996 movie. Those kids are now the adults facing another attack, a remnant of the battle their parents fought and one that we all thought we had finally put behind us. But nope. There it is, creeping back, forcing the kids to deal with the lingering parental problems.

We see that in IDR because there are a lot of kids in this movie. And they are, generally, fucked. How else to describe their situation? Will life on earth continue? Probably. Are all these kids still set for life without their loved ones? Yes. It’s horrible, and though it doesn’t work at all to serve the emotional value of the film, it’s quite unusual from Roland Emmerich to feature these children. We get to spend some time with the next generation of orphans, left alone by the sudden disappearance of their parents.

I doubt Emmerich was intentionally calling attention to the legacy of the boomers. But that it cannot be avoided, even in a big dumb blockbuster about alien attacks, speaks to just how constant the boomer effect is. During one speech about how someone might not come back alive, a boomer says to his millennial daughter: “you have to stay and pick up the pieces.”

That such a sentiment is spoken in a terrible movie doesn’t make it any less true.

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