It was a incoherent hot mess of a movie with massive plot holes, and a lot has been, and can be, said about that. Here, I want to focus on one part of this train-wreck I feel best epitomizes the issue with the movie: the hole the aliens were drilling into the Earth.
The whole reason for the movie was not revenge, as one might expect seeing as how Earth managed to annihilate the previous attempts at colonization. The first wave of aliens even sent out a distress signal to which these new aliens were responding. Once these new aliens arrived (same species, different ship), they set to work mining the planet for it's molten core. This wasn't a war ship, though it was equipped with lots of little fighter ships (for suppressing protesters, I would assume); this was a construction crew, like all of those running around the midwest constructing fracking wells (who also wish they had fighter ships to suppress protesters). There might be some clever eco-criticism here, but the film doesn't fully explore the issue. Instead, it sits back on the age old sci-fi trope: aliens bad; people good. The film gave only passing consideration to why they were there, and instead just went around killing without asking any questions. In fact, they even attacked the alien that came to help--and which will feature prominently in the next filmic installment.
The construction crew sets about mining the planet by drilling a hole in the ocean a mile wide. This hole will extend to the molten core of the planet, which the ship was meant to extract...somehow. Like the first movie, this gave the action a timer, as the intrepid humans had a limited amount of time to kill the queen before, as several characters noted, "the end of life as we know it." The hole is a mile wide in the middle of the ocean (they didn't specifically say which one, but the legs of the drilling space ship set down on the East Coast of the US and London, so likely it was the Atlantic). The drill gets to within two minutes of cracking the mantel and extracting the molten core, which suggests it was pretty damn close. The images from the radar screen on the salvage ship which happened to be in the ocean nearby (close enough to see the mile wide hole and the lazer drill, but not too close to be affected by it...somehow) suggested that there were mere feet between the tip of the lazer and the molten core. Mankind succeeds, and the aliens leave without filling in this hole. Of all the plot holes in the movie, this is the one that seems most unforgivable.
At first, I thought that a mile wide, 4000 mile deep hole would drain the oceans, but after crunching the numbers (thanks, Internet), it turns out the approximately 3200 cubic miles of water which would inevitably drain into that hole would only account for a small fraction of the 800 million cubic miles of water on the surface of the planet (.0004% to be exact, which would likely not even shift the coast line that significantly). It's possible (read: likely) that I did the math wrong, but my take away from an afternoon's research is that a hole that big wouldn't affect the water level too much because the ocean is fucking massive.
A bigger issue, and one that Oklahoma is certain to attest to, is that tampering with the crust of the planet will lead to cataclysmic earth quakes. Granted, the hole itself wouldn't affect the overall surface area. According to the internet, there are roughly 197 million square miles on the surface of the earth, and digging out about 3.5 of those would likely go unnoticed (there have been massive holes dug around the world, and the Earth continues to spin, though it should be noted that none of the man-made holes goes nearly as deep: the current record is about seven miles). However, filling much smaller holes with water has caused innumerable issues around the US. The use and disposal of fracking waste water has been tied to the steep increase in the number and intensity of earthquakes around the US, and the amounts of water and the hole being dug are paltry when compared to this massive hole dug by the aliens. Getting the exact data on size of holes and quantities of water used are beyond the reach of the simple Google searches I did, but it can be assumed the volumes are significantly less and the results have been fairly conclusive. Pumping extra water into the earth is not a good idea. In the movie, that water would be dumped into multiple layers of the earth. It would be instantly irradiated (as much of the fracking waste water is), full of all sorts of toxic heavy metals, and would likely dissipate the heat trapped towards the core. If nothing else, it would certainly destroy our water supply, raising the temperature of the oceans and melting what is left of the dwindling glaciers. It's also possible that such a fissure that deep and wide would allow the massive amount of pressure at the center of the earth to have a weak spot to push against, and whole planet would fracture.
In short, stopping the aliens just before they achieved their goal would likely not leave us with a livable planet. It is very possible that the Independence Day franchise is playing a long game of eco-criticism, and that this movie will leave unexplored the consequences of such a drilling expedition so that it can use them as a catalyst for further space exploration and a mass exodus off the planet. Like actual mankind's efforts to halt global warming, our efforts to live on a mostly ruined planet would prove untenable. The trio of films, then, would be one long metaphor about the horrors of delving too greedily and too deep, like the dwarves in Moria.
More likely, the writers here simply didn't think too hard about the physics of their movie. A certain amount of suspended disbelief is required for sci-fi films, and I certainly don't begrudge the writers refusing to acknowledge the absurdity of a laser drill or how a ship that massive would have affected the gravity of the planet. That said, they should think about how such technology would work within the confines of the real world it inhabits. Look at the first Star Trek reboot: the hole they dug was much smaller, but immediately the planet being mined was destroyed (Futurama looked at the same issue with similar results). Independence Day: Resurgence was just not thought through very carefully, and instead hoped the big explosions and massive (often overcrowded) action sequences, after which the human race stands bruised, but not beaten, would distract from the inherent absurdity of the plot.
Unfortunately, such lapses in realism can become distracting. Untied loose ends like this pull attention away from what the movie did do well, which was have a lot of aliens flying around the planet fighting. Like a chip in a wall, once one flaw is spotted, others start to become more evident. Then the whole delicate house of cards tumbles down. This was the issue here: the movie hoped no one would notice how unconsidered the conceit is.
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