Review: Independence Day: Resurgence
A millefeuille of blandness compared to the fist-pumping energy of its predecessor, Independence Day: Resurgence picks up 20 years after the events of the first film. Vanquishing the aliens has fostered a world where peace and togetherness have flourished. The United Nations have created the Earth Space Defense (ESD) as an early warning system against any future attacks and have fused the alien and human technologies to further shore up the planet's defenses.
Yet there's a disturbance in the force. Former U.S. President Thomas Whitmore (Bill Pullman) has been plagued with visions of alien symbols. So have African warlord Dikembe Umbutu (Deobia Oparei) and Dr. Brakish Okun (Brent Spiner), the latter of which has just awakened from a coma after 20 years. A mysterious ship approaches the ESD's Moon defense headquarters - current president Elizabeth Lanford (Sela Ward) orders an attack despite protests from ESD Director David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum), who believes that this ship belongs to another alien species than the one that invaded Earth all those years ago. Indeed, the ship is but a prelude to the appearance of a mothership 3000 miles in diameter that is intent on intergalactic domination.
"They like to get the landmarks," Levinson murmurs and returning director Roland Emmerich obligingly offers up the usual cornucopia of disaster porn. Buildings are lifted up and ripped apart, their rubble swirling amidst airplanes and bodies; tsunami-like waves snap bridges and skyscrapers into a million little pieces. Down goes the London Eye, down goes Tower Bridge, down goes the White House...flag (yes, the avalanche of debris was considerate enough to only damage the White House flag and not smash the White House to smithereens as per the first go-around). There's some mumbo jumbo about the mothership wanting to get at the Earth's core, which leads into claptrap about what needs doing to defeat the alien queen. "They've had 20 years to prepare," Levinson intones, though he of all people should know by now that though humans, especially Americans, are good at kicking alien ass.
There are people we're meant to care about or at least keep track of. In addition to the characters that anchored the first film, there are some of their progeny. Whitmore's daughter Patricia (Maika Monroe) is a former pilot turned presidential aide who cares after her father when she's not telling boyfriend renegade ESD pilot Jake (Liam Hemsworth) to keep himself safe and repair the broken friendship between himself and Dylan (Jesse T. Usher), the son of the heroic fighter pilot played by Will Smith in the original film. There are secondary characters like Jake's partner Charlie (Travis Tope), who becomes smitten with another fighter pilot, Rain (singer-actress Angelababy), and Floyd Rosenberg (Nicolas Wright), a nervous Nellie and a dead ringer for John Oliver. Levinson's father Julius (Judd Hirsch) also returns, this time to unknowingly drive a busload of kids and one adorable dog into a zone intended as a trap for the alien queen. This section of the film yields the film's best images as the alien queen, its tentacles flowing behind her, chases after the bus and summons her hive to protect her. Emmerich's eye for scale is on full display here, but even this sequence may not be enough to justify the existence of Resurgence or its potential continuation of the franchise.
If Smith's absence is sorely missed, it's not necessarily due to Smith being essential to this sequel but rather that no other actor in Resurgence steps up to inject the film with the same level of energy and charisma. There's a reason Smith became a global superstar with Independence Day - the film was pure cheese but he sold it and he made you believe in it. Emmerich may have been banking on Hemsworth to do the same, but something dilutes in Hemsworth when he's employing an American accent (observe him in the Australian film The Dressmaker where his displays a rugged and appealing charm nowhere to be found in any of his American-accented roles). Hemsworth has moments where he might make the cardboard character someone worth watching, but they are few and far between and often cut off by Emmerich focusing on another character or set of characters. The editing is akin to surfing channels - here's Julius with the kids, here's a fighter plane dodging falling debris, here's Patricia with tears welling in her eyes, here's another set of people being wiped out by the alien queen. The connective tissue is anaemic at best, and even the spectacle seems ho-hum. The only remarkable thing about the whole affair is the numerous depths of flatness and insipidness the filmmakers manage to plumb.
Independence Day: Resurgence
Directed by: Roland Emmerich
Written by: Nicolas Wright, James A. Woods, Dean Devlin, Roland Emmerich, James Vanderbilt
Starring: Liam Hemsworth, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Maika Monroe, Jesse T. Usher, Sela Ward, Travis Tope, William Fichtner, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Judd Hirsch, Brent Spiner, Vivica A. Fox, Angelababy, Deobia Oparei, Patrick St. Esprit, Robert Loggia, Joey King, Chin Han
