There’s an old adage that is surprisingly nearly every aspect of the everyday grind: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. You stick with your same job because you know you can do it, you vacation to the same places because you know you can unwind there. It’s just comforting to settle in with what you know, because what you know never changes -it always remains warm, familiar and most importantly, enjoyable.
Hollywood, in its current era of rebooting practically every single movie franchise from the 20th century for another run, employs a mild alteration on such a phrase: if it ain’t broke, stick a facelift on it anyway and make some money. Oddly enough, if you consider the likes of Planet of the Apes and Dredd, it’s continuing to work. Less so though for some others - nobody needed another Elm Street movie for example. We also most definitely didn’t need yet another Ninja Turtles return either and the new Ghostbusters was already riding an acidic wave of dissent to its existence months before it even got released. And - count them - a total of four Transformers movies, with a fifth on the way, is probably about as asinine a historical legacy as Donald Trump’s upcoming presidency is to.. well, anything. But hey, who thinks of the necessities for a cultural medium when there’s yet more toys to make and more money to get rich off of?
Similarly, there absolutely was no need for a sequel to Independence Day, and certainly not one as ludicrous as Resurgence is. For all of its pristine CG and moments of hi-octane dogfighting and shootouts, it is a movie that is both predictable in nature and just plain stupid in delivery. It follows a plotline so telegraphed you’d think the re-animated corpse of Samuel Morse wrote the screenplay. It has a scene with Jeff Goldblum, Judd Hirsch and a group of terrified kids attempting to outrun a monstrous alien queen in a school bus and it still manages to be boring. Its predecessor was never exactly the most intelligent movie in the world but the 1996 effort was - and still is - an incredibly fun sci-fi epic. Resurgence meanwhile is just a regression on the ideals that its ancestor has provided for it, and ultimately winds up as the 2-hour movie equivalent of a tired, idea-starved Hollywood exec digging their own grave while mumbling to themselves, “We really shouldn’t have tried to fix it.”
At least it gets off to a reasonable start. Twenty years have passed since humanity repelled its first alien invasion and it has reaped the rewards of this victory primarily through the ultra-advanced technology they’ve managed to salvage from the spoils their attempted conquerors left behind. Anti-grav technology is a thing, as are the massive steps forward that mankind has taken into the Solar System: there’s a big ol’ defense base on the Moon now and it’s at this rather spiffy space camp full of ‘hoorah’ space jocks that our main protagonists reside.
Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth) is one of them - he currently spends his time there employed as a heavy lifter pilot working with his buddy Charlie (Travis Tope) on whatever kind of tasks that Earth Space Defense require of him. He's no longer an active military officer and there’s also a pretty good reason why - his potential career as a fighter squadron pilot was scuppered by his constant recklessness in the field. Specifically, it was this recklessness that nearly caused the death of his fellow flight academy graduate Dylan (Jessie T. Usher), who also happens to be the son of the famed yet now-deceased Stephen Hiller (Will Smith in the last movie). Since the incident the two could not have had greater diverging paths. Dylan serves the base’s prestiged Legacy Squadron and all the PR work that comes with it (i.e meeting the American president and leading 20th anniversary squadron flyovers celebrating humanity's original victory). Jake meanwhile gets the reward of a glorious menial labour job carrying things from one Moon dune to the next.
Also, there's the subtle coincidence that Jake’s fiance, Patty (Maika Monroe), is the daughter of former President Whitmore (Bill Pullman, returning). She mostly spends her time on Earth missing Jake (boo hoo) and attending to her now-sick father, who has clearly become mentally and physically weakened since the time of the last war - and for some inexplicable reason still incumbently dwells in the White House where current president, Elizabeth Lanford (Sela Ward), takes office.
So just like a lot of these reboots, there’s all these legacy connections - lots of offspring from the previous movie’s characters coming together again, like it was all fated to happen exactly 20 years on. Never mind that they don’t even bother to flesh out these characters to make them as interesting as their parents were, but more on that later.
Anyway, once the setup’s been established, aliens happen. Yup, in yet another bizarre coincidence that I’m fairly sure defies mathematical probability, it has taken exactly 20 years for the news of the first movie’s failed alien overlords to broadcast their message of defeat back to their brethren, and for said brethren to get pissed enough over it so they can come back to our Solar System for revenge. One can only wonder what kind of awful weaponry, what nefarious tactics they’ll use this time to teach us insolent humans a lesson. After all, Independence Day was all about how ludicrously inept and frail our civilization was under the shadow of a vastly superior alien race. Surely Resurgence’s nemeses would be even more terrifying and even more omnipotent than the last?
In Independence Day: Resurgence, they have a bigger mothership than the last one. And that’s pretty much it. This would probably be okay if Resurgence still gave a solid reason to invest in all of its banalities and derivity - but it doesn’t. It pitches itself in exactly the same way that its predecessor did, as an epic depiction of the human race’s desperate battle for the survival against insurmountable odds. The first one already told us how that ended though, and Resurgence doesn’t even bother to switch the same story from twenty years ago in any other direction or offer up any kind of surprise. Worse still, it drops all of the personal arcs - the subtle human touches and the side-plots that the original had - and replaces them all with a generic, unsatirical version of Starship Troopers that comes complete with a lot of hammy dialogue and needless cameos. And it tops it all off with lots and lots of stupid.
How much stupid? Well, if this sequel following the exact same storyline wasn’t bad enough, how about reiterating the fact that the aliens haven’t learned anything from the first go-around? How about each major character losing a loved one at the exact same time in the movie? How about all of them responding to these losses in a manner that screams less of heart-wrenching grief, and more of, “Better sound like I’m trying, I’m getting paid for this”? How about President Whitmore suddenly (and with no explanation) losing his half-crippled physical afflictions and suddenly becoming as fit as a fighter pilot, ready to fly to war? How about characters making sacrifices to fly suicide missions by carrying nukes into alien warships (again), even though the story’s world has anti-grav robots to do that now?
Paragraph break - there's more! How about inexplicably inserting an African warlord into the proceedings for no reason at all? How about everything being so ridiculously overplayed emotively, and so shockingly under-thought logically, that the movie promptly stops making sense after about 30 minutes and explains the charade of folly that it devolves into with a sighed explanation of, “Because aliens”? I could go on but I try to keep these reviews under 2,000 words, and even with this final version I’ve managed to go about 200 over that.
Resurgence isn’t just an unworthy sequel to the original Independence Day, it’s the kind of sequel one would make if they’d only heard about the first movie over a phone call. And if the phone call was being made by an elephant and the receiver was a goat. It is a spiritual successor in name and setting alone and it baffles me just how incredibly director Roland Emmerich, who also presided over the first movie, dropped the ball on this one.
That is, if he was even given the ball to begin with. I imagine that the final product is really the result of a bunch of stakeholders looking at the screenplay before shouting, “Nah!” in unison and tossing it in the shredder. They then decide to brainstorm a different storyline - most likely over several champagne lunches and trips to the topless steakhouse down the street - that involves all the elements of Independence Day number one, a few mumbles about Pacific Rim, research into ways on how not to convey compelling drama and then - because fuck it, why not - rip-offs of characters from Beasts of No Nation (that’s the only way I can fathom why Deobia Oparei’s warlord character, Umbutu, shows up in this thing).
Throughout all the idiocy though, there are some glimmers of light and a little enjoyment to be had. The CG is pretty stellar, as good as any other current action movie can currently tout if not better, and it does do a lot in raising one’s level of attention. This is particularly the case during the eventual invasion scenes where this time London gets levelled in fantastically apocalyptic fashion. The ship-to-ship dogfights are also eye-catching and surprisingly well-directed for a film that largely seems to hinge on a sense of clueless guidance. Even if Resurgence’s world of an ultra-tech Earth feels like an unnatural future for the ending of the first movie to disappear into, there is great attention to detail for the multitude of alien ships and human fighter jets as well. Thematically, Resurgence might be an awful mess, but stylistically it has been built on some great visual design ideas that pay good tribute to its predecessor while doing so.
There are also some decent moments in the final act when the team of Jake, Charlie and Dylan - who are joined by Chinese squadron pilot Rain Lao (played by HK model-actress Angelababy) - take it to the alien mothership to kick extra-terrestrial arse from both ground and air. All of them are utterly bland individually; in particular, Dylan’s bad blood with Jake isn’t given the emotional depth that it’s due and neither Usher nor Hemsworth seem like they really give two shits about their roles. Rain meanwhile fulfils Hollywood’s standard Asian Chick stereotype - she’s pretty, she’s given a mere handful of short lines, and she’s practically worshipped by the other remaining white guy on the pilot team, Charlie (whom Travis Tope at least instils some workable comic value into). Still, when united as an alien-hunting unit, they insert some much-needed dynamism into the movie and keep it watchable for those moments. Unfortunately, these squad-oriented scenes are either constantly interrupted by whatever the film tactlessly decides to fling into the plot next, or are just too bloody short. They could have been the justification for the whole thing, but instead they’re just brief moments of good in a whole procession of bad.
Meanwhile, Jeff Goldblum returning as David Levinson is really just Jeff Goldblum and doesn’t feel like the same character of the first film. At least both he and Hirsch, who returns as his on-screen father Julius, appear to enjoy their roles despite the tornado of nonsense relentlessly spiralling around them. Same too Dr. Okun (Brent Spiner) and Russell Casse (Randy Quaid) who at least add some manic energy and a few adequate gags into the whole thing. But my goodness could I not be more clear when I say none of these things prevent Independence Day: Resurgence from being a dumb and let's face it, pointless reboot. If it isn’t a prime candidate for why America’s film industry needs to stop bloody relaunching every old movie from 80s and 90s then I am a monkey’s billionaire uncle. And if I was a billionaire uncle monkey, I’d also make sure Hollywood stopped trying to pull this shit, like maybe lobby for an act that prevented film companies from re-doing franchises they’re already making money off with Bluray sales anyway. Maybe I’d even bankroll a Dredd sequel instead. Or another Planet of the Apes movie - ‘cos you know, it might make my monkey nephew happy, or something?
Just do like Will Smith did: stay away from this film.
