20 years after their first attack devastated the human race, our alien enemy returns in Independence Day: Resurgence, and they’re pissed! It’s the end of the world as we know it…again. So do we still feel fine?
The original Independence Day is an action classic, and huge dose of bombastic fun. It had it all, a breakout performance from Will Smith (launching him into the stratosphere), Jeff Goldblum doing his manic nerdy thing, shocks, fighter plane dogfights, and one of the best speeches in blockbuster history. Needless to say, this movie had the weight of expectation on it coming 20 years after the fact (and probably 18 or so years after a sequel usually would have come after such a monster hit), and in truth my expectations for it were very low. But damned if I was wasn’t sucked right back into this world again, and willing to take every cheesy twist and turn with a smile on my face.
Make no mistake about it, the Independence Day movies are the equivalent of a large Double Quarter Pounder meal with extra cheese, and Resurgence follows the Roland Emmerich template to a tee. 20 years after the first alien attack, mankind has recovered, rebuilt, and retrofitted the alien technology to advance our society far further than we ever could have alone. The world’s countries are in unity (there hasn’t been a human conflict since), and we’ve come together to help arm the planet in case of another attack (complete with moon bases). And wouldn’t you just know it, a distress beacon has somehow been tripped from the last remaining alien craft and another, bigger alien spaceship touches down to say “Hey!”, and you know… kill us and stuff. Cue the mass devastation, loved ones ripped apart and reunited, stirring speechifying, zany secondary characters, and our heroes pulling off all kinds of ridiculous feats in order to save the human race.
A large portion of the cast that survived the first Independence Day returns, including Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Vivica A. Fox, Judd Hirsch and some of the more minor characters. The big omission is of course Smith, who turned down a lot of money to reprise his role, and so we get his son Dylan (Jessie T. Usher), and Liam Hemsworth as a new character to take on the leading men mantel. Try as he might (and he is actually the most charismatic that I’ve seen him), Hemsworth is no Smith, and Usher is just this side of bland so I can understand the need for two people instead of one leading man.
Goldblum, as much as he’s been a part of the promotion and publicity of the film, is criminally underused and sidelined so the young-guns can take centre stage. In fact that could be said for a lot of the legacy characters in general, the filmmakers are definitely trying to set up the new cast (probably for the already announced Independence Day 3), but without giving the old ones their due. This is to their detriment, because although the new cast is OK, there are some that are really grating and outstay their welcome by far.
My other beef with the film is that there isn’t quite enough build up to the carnage, in the race to make this sequel bigger and better, they lost some of the high stakes nature of the devastation. It’s been a year filled with world-devastating action, and while this was fresh in the 90s, it’s hard to care about the world coming to an end yet again when it happens with such regularity. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still heaps of stuff blowing up and there’s a great sequence involving the trashing of London, but there’s no one we care about in those situations so it kind of passes us by without a second thought.
I could nitpick all day, but all in all this is a big, dumb action movie, and with it’s tongue planted firmly in cheek, Resurgence manages to stay undeniably fun. This is definitely a movie for the fans, so if you didn’t like the first one, turn around… there’s nothing for you to see here.
INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE is in cinemas today.