INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE (Roland Emmerich). 120 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens Friday (June 24). See listing. Rating: NN
Independence Day may not have been great cinema, but it was a spirited, fun summer movie, offering the vicarious thrill of scrappy heroes surviving planetary carnage to rally and defeat a faceless alien horde. Twenty years later, writer/director Roland Emmerich and writer/producer Dean Devlin are back – and so are those aliens – with Independence Day: Resurgence, a sequel that proves the first movie really didn’t need following up in the first place.
It’s 2016 and the united peoples of Earth are readying a big celebration to mark the 20th anniversary of repelling the alien force. We’re told that there have been no major conflicts since humanity banded together against the invaders, and the adoption of alien technology has led to incredible scientific advances: airplanes and helicopters have nifty anti-gravity drives instead of engines, and video chat makes it possible for hunky, authority-defying Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth) to talk to his fiancée, Patricia Whitmore (Maika Monroe), from the Space Defense Base on the moon.
This being a Roland Emmerich disaster movie, it’s not long before their relationship is threatened by more than just anxiety about buying a house. The aliens return, raining down massive destruction with a ship the size of the Atlantic Ocean and a new plan that involves drilling to the centre of the Earth and stealing our “molten core.” Apparently this is their thing now, rather than eradicating planetary populations and gobbling up their resources as we’d originally been told.
But this is no time for continuity! As cities explode, our motley crew of heroes – including Jeff Goldblum’s wary scientist David Levinson, Jessie T. Usher’s Dylan Hiller (the son of Will Smith’s deceased pilot Steven Hiller) and Bill Pullman’s ex-president Whitmore (yep, Patricia’s dad) – must scramble back to Area 51 to regroup and strike back. So Emmerich and Devlin commence a beat-for-beat remake of the original movie, which just serves to remind us how firmly this franchise is stuck in the 90s.
The first Independence Day, built on the bones of 50s sci-fi movies, had a certain retro charm, and Emmerich and Devlin’s trust in government and the military was almost charming in the Clinton era.
It’s a different world now, but Independence Day: Resurgence can’t acknowledge that. The sequel plugs along as if nothing has changed, from the structures of power to whatever shtick Judd Hirsch is still doing as David’s nudgey father, now living in Florida and hawking a book about how he saved the world that time.
Come to think of it, Hirsch’s return embodies the failings of Independence Day: Resurgence nicely. He’s obnoxiously reprising a character literally no one would have missed had the sequel left him out. But Emmerich and Devlin are so determined to recapture whatever magic formula they lucked into the first time around that Papa Levinson simply cannot be omitted. In fact, he has to be paired with a carload of orphaned kids designed to make us remember the family Randy Quaid’s character dragged around with him in the first picture.
It was right about then that I started thinking about Jurassic World, and how Colin Trevorrow managed to resuscitate a dormant blockbuster for a new era by actively engaging with the parts of it that were frayed or obsolete. Like it or not, that film told its own story, acknowledging the audience’s nostalgia and the passage of time while letting the narrative evolve in new directions.
Independence Day: Resurgence isn’t interested in doing that. It wants things to be the way they were in 1996, but louder and more explosive. The first film’s penchant for practical effects now seems like a charming affectation this one is all digital bombast, all the time, especially in IMAX 3D. But the lack of new ideas is really what pulls it down. Emmerich has never been a particularly inventive filmmaker, but he used to have a knack for packaging old ideas in intriguing ways.
Resurgence is nothing but old stuff that should have been left, along with those aliens, in the fondly remembered past.
