On the Abysmal, Excruciating Independence Day: Resurgence

Roland Emmerich’s sequel to his monumental 1996 disaster movie is a lifeless, low-stakes embarrassment to the genre.

The 1996 alien-invasion classic Independence Day may have been undoubtedly goofy, but it also reinvented the modern blockbuster, imbuing it with spectacle, fiendishly expensive shots of destruction, and well-delivered one-liners. For all its silliness, the movie has endured because it contains real menace, an impressive cast of charismatic stars, and a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. By contrast, its sequel Independence Day: Resurgence, which comes this weekend 20 years after the original’s release, barely registers as a cohesive film in any sense.

Instead, it’s 25 minutes of plot stretched into a two-hour film that somehow feels interminable—and it doesn’t even have the decency to blow up an American landmark along the way. It’s easy to bleat about the current dependence on sequels and the lack of compelling movie stars, but Independence Day: Resurgence offers the most serious evidence yet for that kind of hand-wringing. It’s a non-movie, an insult to the blockbuster genre, and should stand only as a perfect example of Hollywood’s more glaring deficiencies as an industry. Its 1996 progenitor might have been the beginning of a shift toward expensive CGI endeavors, but let Resurgence be the end, before summer tentpoles decline any further.

The director Roland Emmerich used to be a master of grand, fiery nonsense. To this day, his destruction of the White House and the Empire State Building in Independence Day is the pinnacle of disaster cinema, a summit he tried to reach again and again with films like Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012. Those films at least made a solid effort to bring something original to the apocalypse, from a new ice age to colossal tidal waves engulfing the world’s highest mountains. Resurgence doesn’t want to repeat the national landmark-exploding tricks of its predecessor (there’s even a sight gag involving the White House getting spared from destruction), so it opts for a baffling mess of doom: an ocean-sized alien spaceship that somehow picks up Asia with its gravitational field and dumps it onto Europe. The scene is as confusing to behold as it is difficult to imagine.

But to back up: Resurgence is set 20 years after Independence Day, in a society vastly different from our own, augmented with alien technology harvested by the many city-sized motherships that crash-landed on Earth during the first invasion. It’s a suitably bonkers idea, and the some of the film’s early imagery can be fun to wrap your head around. There’s a rebuilt, antique-y White House and Capitol Building surrounded by flying cars and sci-fi skyscrapers; a moon base doing deep-space defense research and trying to keep the planet safe; and a gaudy oil painting of Will Smith in his U.S. Air Force jacket to serve as a reminder of just what the film’s missing this time around.

Steven Hiller, Smith’s character from the first film, is gone, having perished in a test flight (a frankly rude way to dispatch him), but his son Dylan (Jessie Usher) is there in his stead, as is the former First Daughter Patricia Whitmore (now played by Maika Monroe), along with her love interest Jake Morrison (the reliably bland Liam Hemsworth). Returning from their 1996 adventure are the former President Thomas Whitmore (Bill Pullman), now bearded and plagued with visions of alien invasion; David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum), now in charge of Earth’s extra-terrestrial defense; and his tetchy father Julius (Judd Hirsch), who in the intervening two decades has written a book and moved to a houseboat.

The performances range from bemused (Goldblum maintains a sarcastic air throughout) to barely there, particularly in the case of the film’s younger stars. There’s only a feeble effort to invest the latter with some backstory—Dylan is haunted by his father’s death, Jake is a hothead driven by the loss of his parents in the 1996 attacks, and Patricia is torn between a life of politics and piloting alien fighter jets. Smith’s performance in Independence Day was electric and marked the birth of the kind of movie star Hollywood is lucky to get once in a generation. (Just imagine someone else punching an alien, lighting a cigar, and triumphantly saying “Welcome to Earth.”) His replacements unfortunately don’t get anything like the same type of memorable material to work with.

Earth has turned into a hybrid-alien superpower in the last 20 years, but of course, that doesn’t matter once the aliens come back to finish what they started. “That’s definitely bigger than the last one,” Goldblum deadpans upon seeing the 3,000-mile-wide mothership that attaches itself to the planet like some giant limpet. “What goes up, must come down,” he sighs as the remnants of Beijing are dumped upon London. “They like to go for the landmarks,” he snorts as London’s Tower Bridge is engulfed in an inferno.

Independence Day had a genuine sense of threat—it orchestrated the nightmarish destruction of Washington, New York, and Los Angeles properly, giving the event some heft and making it seem almost impossible to recover from. In Resurgence, half the Earth is wiped out, and it barely seems like a blip in the road. From the start, the audience is led to believe there’s some deus ex machina around the corner, and so the story feels low-stakes—it never truly entertains the possibility that the villains could triumph in the end.

The climactic battle involves a colossal alien queen slithering along some Utah salt flats while Judd Hirsch tools around in a school bus with some plucky teens, which would sound fun if the whole exercise weren’t so insultingly perfunctory. By the time the film wraps things up and makes feeble promises of more alien-battling nonsense in a forthcoming sequel, it’s obvious Emmerich has just been stalling for two hours. That’s Resurgence in a nutshell: a film with 20 years of build-up that seems to exist only to cash a few paychecks, and hopes viewers won’t realize there isn’t a single new idea in the entire picture.