Early in the film, Levinson visits the giant spaceship hidden in the desert, which was hitherto unknown to the international community. The entire world is at peace, except for, apparently, a region in Saharan Africa ruled by a warlord, Dikembe Umbutu (Deobia Oparei), who successfully fought and won a guerilla war against the leftover aliens in his region. There’s still a US President, but she has to, you know, confer with other world leaders on big screens once again, Emmerich balances his interests in both American patriotism and progressive politics. In the aftermath of that war against the extraterrestrial invaders, humanity has set aside its petty differences and come together in a shiny vision of humanitarian universalism. Everyone, that is, except for a crazed, bearded former-President Whitmore (Bill Pullman), who’s tormented by nightmares portending the aliens’ return, and David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum), who has spent the years since the War of ’96 working for the UN, trying to prepare for the inevitable second wave. No apologies.) Nevertheless, for the first act of Resurgence, earthlings keep scratching their heads and wondering what’s happening. (I’ve always enjoyed the rainy first half of Emmerich’s Godzilla a fair bit. Sadly, Independence Day: Resurgence avoids the long, suspenseful, inexorable buildup that characterizes Emmerich’s other SF disaster films ( Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012), and which I consider the best feature of his films. When the actually invasion comes, after about half an hour of setup, it’s unsurprisingly the 20-year anniversary of “the War of ’96.” A signal flickers: they’ve been alerted to the fate of the first expedition to earth and are sending reinforcements. While the meta-commentary is more overt (and more interesting) in Jurassic World, Independence Day: Resurgence frequently holds up the memory of the original film, reminding us of that film as if to prove its own reason for existence.įor example, as the film opens, snippets of President Whitmore’s famous rousing speech from the original film echo through space as the camera zooms in through galaxies and nebulae to the alien homeworld. Like Jurassic World, Independence Day: Resurgence is a sorta-sequel, sorta-reboot, capable of standing alone yet fixated on its connections with its predecessor. I had heard rumours about a sequel since the original’s release, but I guess it makes sense to see it now, amid the wave of Nineties nostalgia, and following the huge success of Jurassic World. Now it’s 20 years later and Hollywood is rebooting anything and everything. Independence Day remains one of the cultural (not artistic) high-points of 1990s Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. The film even functions, via the two main characters (Will Smith’s fighter pilot and Jeff Goldblum’s computer expert), as a kind of buddy action-comedy, each character representing different influences on the film. Independence Day combined the militarism, jingoism, and braggadocio of Top Gun with UFO lore and the scientific veneer and tech preoccupations of Michael Crichton.
The original Independence Day is smarter than most people give it credit for being: it deftly revived the science-fiction disaster flick of the 1950s by affixing contemporary blockbuster elements and executing top-notch special-effects spectacle. While I wouldn’t describe Resurgence as the abyss of 21st-century blockbuster filmmaking most critics and many viewers have branded it, it’s also not a satisfying sequel to its 1996 mega-hit predecessor. It’s so gleefully foolish and profusely clichéd that I’m half-convinced director Roland Emmerich was trying for camp whatever the aim, it had me in fits of laughter a few times. Independence Day: Resurgence is undeniably stupid, but I had fun watching it.
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