I was 9 when I first saw Roland Emmerich’s indisputable masterpiece Independence Day. I was immediately smitten by its winning combination of groundbreaking special effects and rollicking alien action, not to mention the cast: Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum, a pre-mental breakdown Randy Quaid, a sleepy Bill Pullman and Harry FREAKING Connick, Jr.?! Baby, you got a stew goin'!
My obsession with Independence Day defied all reason and logic. Its gaping plot holes and derivative nature didn’t matter to my 9-year-old brain; I was in love. I was so in love, in fact, that when I finally got the film on VHS, I would wake up at 4 a.m. so I could watch it before I had to go to school. Roland Emmerich’s spectacle-centric sensibilities had never been (and would never be again) so perfectly executed. To this day, the film holds a place in my heart, even as I acknowledge its abundant absurdities.
Now, coming at least 15 years too late, we have a sequel. Independence Day: Resurgence is the latest attempt to bank off a wildly successful product of the 90s. It is just as idiotic as I expected, containing frequently hysterical moments of baffling stupidity, but it lacks the original’s simpler pleasures. It buries itself with nonsensical plotting, a dull new cast and an overabundance of terrible CGI and green screen work. While the original Independence Day will never be lauded for its deep character development or intricate plotting, it gave us characters we could invest in and a straightforward story we could understand. The stakes felt genuine because we had a human connection to them. Resurgence has none of this. Its many plot points are jumbled and senseless; its characters are there to stare and shoot at the CGI mayhem. There isn’t a single moment of genuine excitement to be found in this mess.
20 years have passed since humanity emerged triumphant against a massive alien invasion. But the people of Earth haven’t just been sitting around on their asses over the past two decades. Utilizing the alien technology left behind in the first invasion, they’ve improved their own tenfold, developing more advanced weaponry and transportation in anticipation of future attacks. This unfamiliar setting is only one of Resurgence's many problems. Earth is practically unrecognizable, feeling just as alien as the actual aliens. When the aliens attacked in the original film, the audience had something they could recognize and latch onto. Those provocative images of 15-mile wide spaceships over national landmarks remain unforgettable and provided both scale and a genuine sense of danger. Everything about this fancy new Earth looks like it was created by a special effects team in a computer.
After a hefty chunk of boring exposition which awkwardly explains everything that's changed on Earth in the past 20 years, the aliens finally invade, sporting bigger spaceships, bigger weapons and bigger explosions. Leading the defense is Captain Steven Hiller’s stepson Dylan, played by Jessie T. Usher. Dylan has followed in his stepfather’s footsteps, becoming a combat pilot and is clearly intended to be the Will Smith stand-in. Sadly, Usher exhibits none of the charisma Smith had in spades and it only serves to make the gap left in Smith's absence all the more apparent. The other new leads, Liam Hemsworth and Maika Monroe, don’t fare much better. Hemsworth does everything he can to make his part work, strutting his leading man smile and muscles as often as he can, but he has absolutely nothing to work with; Monroe spends most of her time looking vapid and/or upset. None of them come close to meeting the level of the original cast, which isn't so much their fault as it is the fault of the dreadful screenplay, which was written by no less than FIVE writers, including Emmerich himself, his creative partner Dean Devlin and James Vanderbilt.
Speaking of the original cast, Jeff Goldblum returns with his stumbling, scatterbrained delivery which makes him impossible not to love. Bill Pullman is absolutely hysterical reprising his role as ex-president Thomas Whitmore, whose alien-induced nightmares have turned him into a crazy person with a truly fantastic beard. Other returning cast members, such as Vivica A. Fox and Judd Hirsch, function as nothing more than extended cameos. Even Brent Spiner’s wide-eyed, crazy-haired scientist Dr. Okun is back with a much expanded role. (“But, I thought he died in the first Independence Day,” you say. “Screw you,” says Roland Emmerich.) As Dr. Okun, Spiner is Resurgence’s Jar-Jar Binks, stumbling about and delivering painful one-liners at the most inappropriate times. The rest of the returning cast manages to get through the thing with some semblance of dignity still intact, but Spiner’s performance is just plain embarrassing.
So, while Independence Day: Resurgence is by no means a good film, I’ll give it props for being an unabashed display of overwhelming stupidity. It inspired in me both raucous fits of laughter and bouts of intense bafflement. But by replacing its predecessor’s unpretentious charms with an onslaught of meaningless computer-generated action and convoluted plotting, it loses that film’s sense of simple, goofy fun. You’re laughing at it this time around, not with it, and that makes all the difference.
FINAL RATING: 1.5/5
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