Independence Day: Resurgence

Released: June 2016

Director: Roland Emmerich

Rated PG-13

Run Time: 120 Minutes

Distributor: Fox Studios

Composer: Harald Kloser

Cast:
Jeff Goldblum: David Levinson
Liam Hemsworth: Jake Morrison
Jessie T. Usher: Dylan Hiller
Bill Pullman: President Whitmore
Maika Monroe: Patricia Whitmore
Sela Ward: President Lanford
William Fichtner: General Adams
Judd Hirsch: Julius Levinson
Brent Spiner: Dr. Brakish Okun
Vivica A. Fox: Jasmine Hiller

1996 saw a number of films ranging from decent to bad-ass.  The Rock, Dragonheart, Twister, Mission Impossible, Jerry Maguire, and Eraser were some of the biggest movies to be released that year.  But none of those movies made nearly as much money as Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day.  ID4 was the highest-grossing film of 1996 with a gross income of over $800,000,000.  It broke records, and it won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects.  I was barely a teenage when the movie came out.  It was great.  I had so much fun with that movie.  20 years later, I’m still a huge fan of Independence Day.  Why?  I’ll answer that question a little later in this post.  Most people, myself included, assumed that Independence Day was a one-and-done movie, with no sight of a sequel.  It didn’t really need one.  Well, 20 years later, we have ourselves an honest-to-God sequel: Independence Day: Resurgence.

Many things have changed since the War of ’96.  The world has become united in a common cause.  Alien tech has been combined with human technology, and as a result there is a base on the moon, and there are outposts throughout the Solar System to watch for any sign of alien intruders.  David Levinson has become the Director of the new Earth Defense Force, which employs alien-improved weaponry.  There has been peace throughout the globe for nearly 20 years.  The son of Captain Steven Hiller, Dylan, is a captain himself in the EDF and is being sent to the moon for a televised celebration flight when an outpost near Saturn goes dark.  Before long, an impossibly massive alien ship arrives to claim Earth for its own.  The story in the first Independence Day wasn’t anything original, but the way it was executed was phenomenal.  It had its serious moments, but it was also peppered with a lot of humor and other light and emotional moments.  The story in Resurgence is essentially the same, with another massive mother-ship causing havoc around the globe.  When it comes to coincidences, this movie is chock-full of them.  It’s ridiculously convenient when some of these characters and objects just show up in the nick of time.  Cliche is a word I’ll be using a lot here.  Make no mistake, the first movie had plenty of cliches, but the film knew it and had fun with it.  Resurgence seems to take itself a little too seriously.  Oh, there’s some pretty funny moments, but there’s no real sense of urgency here.  It takes about 30 minutes before things start getting wrecked.

While it was certainly inevitable that we would see new characters, we also got to see some of the main characters’ children grow up.  Patricia Whitmore and Dylan Hiller show up as military officers.  We also have members of the old guard show up.  Jeff Goldblum returns in fine form as David Levinson, with Bill Pullman as former President Whitmore.  He seems like a grizzled old man that appears to be off his rocker.  Vivica A. Fox has essentially an extended cameo as Dylan’s mother, Jasmine.  Brent Spiner returns as the eccentric Dr. Brakish Okun, who has apparently been in a coma for the past 20 years, due to alien telepathy.  William Fichtner is one of the new faces as General Adams, and he’s pretty good.  It’s always fun to see Fichtner in a movie.  Sela Ward plays the new President Lanford, and she doesn’t do a damn thing.  If there’s a problem with the casting, it’s with the complete lack of Will Smith.  Will Smith was one of the reasons why the first Independence Day worked so well.  When he was on screen, he commanded it.  Yeah, he was very funny a lot of times, but when he needed to be tough, he was very convincing.  He’s not here, and according to some marketing gimmick, his character was apparently killed during a test flight.  They didn’t really mention that in the movie.  I understand that Will Smith didn’t come back, because he demanded a sizable paycheck.  They didn’t want to pay, so they killed him off.  Very nice.  The complete lack of Will Smith actually hurts this film in the long run.  He was kinda the glue that held the whole thing together in the first movie.  Judd Hirsch shows up and not a whole lot happens with him, other than trying to outrun that giant ship in the screenshot above.  The movie throws a lot of new characters at you in the span of two hours.  The acting is fine, but the characterization is not that good.  The chemistry between these people is almost non-existent.  The characters have none of the charm that they did in the previous film and it shows.

So…the characters and the story took a bit of a dive, how about the action?  It takes a good 30 minutes before the good stuff starts to happen, but when it starts, it doesn’t stop at all.  Not even to let you breathe.  You know what?  I’m fine with that.  With a two-hour movie, it needs to grab your attention, and it does when that huge alien ship starts flying over the moon.  The action and the visual effects are out of this world.  If there’s one thing that Roland Emmerich can really do, it’s to destroy the world.  When the alien ship shows up on Earth, it has its own gravity, so it picks up cities and drops them on others.  It’s a sight to behold.  With the humans using alien technology, they actually don’t have to worry about getting around the shields this time.  The action is nuts.  The dogfights are fantastic, even though it seems to throw a lot at you.  We do actually get to see the aliens themselves in action at a few points in the film.  That was really, really cool to see.  The designs of the aliens haven’t changed, but thanks to modern CG technology, they move a lot better and seem more organic.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved the way they did the creatures in the first movie, but these feel a bit more threatening, because they can move and fight.  The alien queen herself was a fairly interesting design.  So, yeah, the visuals are stunning.  However, there really isn’t anything here that screams “iconic.”  In the first movie, you had the alien ship blowing up the White House, and that became a marketing tool.  We don’t have anything like that in here.

For all the crap that I’m throwing at this film, it might seem like I possibly hate it, but I don’t.  In fact, I really enjoyed it.  I love movies like these.  It definitely isn’t as good as the first movie, but it does to try to up the ante quite a bit with bigger action sequences.  But those action sequences don’t mean a thing if you don’t have the heart behind it, and that’s what this movie lacks the most:  Heart.  There’s also the fact that the movie is deliberately setting up for a much larger sequel.  I really don’t like sequel-baiting like this.  It happened with Warcraft, and I didn’t like it then.  The first film worked, because it was a self-contained film.  It had a beginning, middle, and end.  Independence Day: Resurgence is essentially a set-up for a much larger and grander conflict.  I have no problems with movies setting up for sequels, if they do it properly.  Here, it was pretty blatant.  That being said, I’m hoping this movie does well, because I want to see an Independence Day 3.  I really do.  With what I hope they have planned, ID4-3 could be a massive sci-fi epic the likes of which we haven’t seen since Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.  My final recommendation for Independence Day: Resurgence is this:  If you liked the first movie as much as I did, you may like this as well, just don’t set your expectations to high.  It won’t meet them, unfortunately.  With that in mind, it is still a solid sci-fi actioner that should be seen on the big screen.

Before I give my final score, I would like to point out that I caught this film in a double feature with the original Independence Day.  I hadn’t seen the first movie in theaters for 20 years, so seeing it again on the big screen was like being a kid again.  It was phenomenal and held up nicely.  It was a ton of fun and I’m grateful that I managed to see it on the big screen again.  I’ve been a fan of the original film since it came out and that’s not likely to change.  The sequel and it’s possible follow-up are not going to diminish the first film for me.  With all that in mind, my final score for Indepence Day: Resurgence is a 7.5/10.  It could’ve been a lot better and the pacing could’ve been a little bit quicker, but it’s still movie that’s fun as hell with some really stunning visual effects.

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