Independence Day: Resurgence picks up twenty years after the events of the first movie. Earth has rebuilt everything and is now using the advanced alien for the betterment of the entire planet. But the alien invaders haven't given up on this little blue dot, and it sends a massive ship that quickly pushes through Earth's space defenses and destroys a good chunk of the civilized world. It lands in the Atlantic Ocean and starts drilling into the Earth. A ragtag group of scientists, political leaders, and soldiers must do everything they can to stop the aliens before they reach the core and destroy the entire planet.
Independence Day was almost entirely about the spectacle. Few could point to it as a movie of any real substance, and yet it managed to produce a few iconic moments that have allowed the movie to last in the moviegoing consciousness over the last two decades. In spite of mostly being silly, it had weird moments of passion that transcended the empty blockbuster bravado. The same cannot be said of this sequel, which struggles to find any emotion at all within the endless scenes of CGI destruction. It never stops long enough to let the audience feel anything, making all the destruction feel callous and pointless.
The main directive appears to have been to make everything bigger. And so we get an alien spaceship that is 3000 miles across, generates its own gravity, and destroys cities simply by passing over them. It laughs off Earth's defenses, its power so beyond the pale that the planet shouldn't have a chance at all. Except it doesn't act logically in any way. It could destroy all life on the planet before it attempts the time-consuming process of digging to the core, but it doesn't do that. It quite graciously gives Earth an opportunity to fight back and keeps finding ways to expose its weaknesses to our ever-obliging heroes.
And so success doesn't come as a result of extraordinary valor from our protagonists; they make progress because the aliens are so bad at being villains. It is hard to take them seriously as a threat because they're so bad at wielding their overwhelming power. And though they destroy a lot, the film hardly lets us feel it. There is time, for example, for a character to make a quip upon witnessing the utter destruction of London. "They like to go after our monuments," he says, sparing no thought for the massive loss of life that just occurred.
The film hardly tries to make human beings out of its characters. They are just component parts of a blockbuster machine, dutifully filling their roles in this massive piece of orchestrated destructive. The cast is almost inconsequential, the actors mostly getting by on either familiarity or good looks. No one really gets a moment to shine, even the likes of Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman able to draw any real emotion from their lines. Taking center stage instead is the VFX excess, which mainly means plenty of weightless scenes of computer-generated ships firing lasers that hardly ever seem to hit anything.
Independence Day: Resurgence represents a lot of what went wrong in the last twenty years of tentpole blockbusters. It is a film that primarily exists because of nostalgia, its creators having nothing new to say. It goes aimlessly bigger, mistaking that excess for growth and progress. It relies more heavily on VFX and forgets humanity in the process. The most memorable moments of the first movie had people as its focus, whether it be Will Smith dragging an alien across the desert, or Bill Pullman giving that rousing speech. This film offers no analogues, caring little about making people feel.
My Rating:
