Man. This one. I figured it would be kinda 50/50, given the exceptional cheese of the first one offset by its eyerolling plotpoint cockeries. It ramps up both, to both its credit and detriment, depending on what parts you may or may not like. After the final scenes rolled out, I’m like, Shit. I don’t know how to even approach this without spoilers. This is the challenge I face, so stick with me as I dance delicately by with thinly veiled euphemisms and downright disappointments, while realizing and admitting they pulled off another well-produced feat here. Seven years gave them more developed CGI to play with, and they do Maximum Effort in that regard to pull this off.
It looks like the not-Palin President of the first movie escapes to some high-tech bunker in Antarctica as the nuclear bombs drop, revealing she also might not be quite human. Moon Nazis decimated but not gone. 2041 shows the few refugees who escaped post-nuclear Earth living with them in the partially destroyed moon base. And we discover a very different level of political hi-jinx playing out.
Like its predecessor, this does have a lot of fun with the absurd premise, and takes it to a whole new level of conspiralogical and theological insanities. It comes down to if you can get past the new level of eyerolling cockeries injected, like mocking institutions left and right because the Patriarchy or some shit? They do make some huge fun of Apple and Steve Jobs with their iPhone ecosystem shenanigans, so in that they won me back from the brink of just shitballing this movie entirely. Plus the Russian Guy character is okay. They stayed current with the technologies and serve up a lot more decent CGI that doesn’t look like they were rendered and matted by a TRS-80. Once again, Subtle this is not. At least they didn’t go the flat-earth route just to go full retard. But they didn’t go full retard. Probably because they were saving some for the next movie. Which, considering the company went full bankrupt because of this, probably won’t happen. I think their “messaging” is kinda played out, and their audience confirmed it.
