Movie Review: Independence Day - Resurgence

Independence Day: Resurgence has five screenwriters. Makes you wonder how they'll split the Oscar.

Roland Emmerich, the writer-director with a tin ear for dialogue to rival Siri’s, has returned to sequelise his 1996 hit Independence Day.

For many, his resurgence will be as unwelcome as that of an alien horde seeking vengeance for a twenty-year-old grudge. Others have been waiting eagerly atop a skyscraper for this second chapter. Neither group can be reasoned with.

I speak to the Emmerich moderates when I say Independence Day: Resurgence is perfectly fine entertainment for time-killing punters; silly yet self-aware, and certainly the only modern blockbuster in which you’ll get to see Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Judd Hirsch and Brent Spiner as action heroes (that is, until Hollywood greenlights my pitch for a non-discriminatory, age-blind reboot of Predator).

The original’s star, Will Smith, was not as available as Spiner and company, meaning the role of roguish, wise-cracking alien-puncher goes here to Liam Hemsworth. He plays Jake, a disgraced pilot forced to do soul-crushing maintenance work on the moon, where the United Nations hosts the Earth Space Defence system.

See, after humankind foiled the aliens’ first invasion in ’96, all the nations of a newly-unified world called a détente, literally ended racism and peacefully established the ESD. (Resurgence hits cinemas the week of the Brexit vote, if you needed further reminding that this movie takes place in the realm of pure fantasy.) There – and in Area 51 - humans tinker with alien technology in the hopes of turning it against their attackers. But as they discover when the aliens do indeed resurge, the aliens had 20 years to prep and advance their technology too.

What the aliens don’t have on their side, however, is sarcastic space-fighters and stuttering weirdos, and it’s on their shoulders that the battle for humanity rests, apparently. Since Jake has the first thing covered, the second responsibility goes to Goldblum, happily reprising the part of Dr. David Levinson, once more relied upon to think up an ingenious way to dispatch of our enemies. You have to wonder what’s even left fighting for after the alien mothership picks up Dubai and dumps it on London (with the upturned Burj Khalifa piercing the London Eye). They repeat the same trick across Singapore, New York, Paris, et cetera. As Levinson says, “They like to get the landmarks.”

That’s one of the better cracks from the flick, co-written by Emmerich, Dean Devlin, Nicolas Wright, James Vanderbilt and James A. Woods (the latter of whom has a small role in the film, suggesting that, at a certain point, they just started handing the script round to extras for a punch-up). Resurgence fares best when fun is being poked into its many exposed plot holes. Elsewhere, clichés abound. Characters are told to “hold onto their seats” on two separate occasions, though, in fairness, that probably would have been good advice to the residents of Dubai.

The enthusiastic cast (including Charlotte Gainsbourg and William Fichtner) do their best with what they’ve been given, and indeed the goofy pair of Hemsworth and Goldblum do the most with it. Newcomers Maika Monroe (as the daughter of Pullman’s nutty former President) and Jesse Usher (as the son of Smith’s felled war hero) mostly just look relieved when they’re asked to stare silently at the carnage unfolding before them.

And what carnage! Despite it being a transparent distraction from a cobbled-together script and a shapeless, scrappily-edited final product, the visual eye candy is truly something to behold.

Of course, there’s a deeper, philosophical question to be asked about why we as a people enjoy watching our world demolished on the big screen. Emmerich would need a writing staff of 20 to even near that level of introspection. Maybe for ID3?

3/5

Rated M for science fiction themes and violence.