Independence Day: Resurgence

Director: Roland Emmerich

Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Vivica A Fox, Bill Pullman, Liam Hemsworth, Maika Monroe, Travis Tope, William Fichtner, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Judd Hirsch, Jessie Usher, Brent Spiner, Angelababy, Sela ward

After exactly 20 years, Independence Day — one of the biggest science fiction movie of all time — comes back with its sequel, Independence Day: Resurgence.

It is one of the biggest movies of the summer — a long-in-the-works, $200 million sequel to a 20-year-old, trendsetting summer blockbuster. And yet you won’t see many early reviews from critics based in the United States.

Declining to screen a film for critics before release is usually a pretty strong sign that the movie isn’t any good — or at least that the studio believes critics won’t like it. It can also be read as a signal that with a presold, mega-budget sequels like this, the studio’s marketing team thinks critics simply don’t matter: It’s an Independence Day sequel. Your decision to buy a ticket won’t have anything to do with whether a critic liked it or not.

Around 45 minutes into the film, London is destroyed by a 3000-mile-wide alien spacecraft. If that weren’t unfortunate enough, two of the film’s heroes, a jittery boffin played by Jeff Goldblum and a cocky hunk played by Liam Hemsworth, happen to be flying through the city at the time in a supersonic space shuttle. Not to worry, though. Hemsworth’s character is such a nifty pilot that they zoom along the Thames and past the disintegrating Tower Bridge without a scratch, cracking jokes as they go.

This odd combination of mass destruction and breezy quipping was trademarked by Independence Day, a science-fiction disaster movie which became the highest grossing film of 1996. The inclusion of a gay couple is one of the film’s few grown-up aspects.

The irony is that when the Star Wars and Jurassic Park franchises were revived last year, the directors of the new films were driven by their deep reverence and affection for those franchises’ earliest entries, whereas the Independence Day series has been revived by its own creators, Messrs Emmerich and Devlin, and they’ve made a self-parody B-movie with no obvious purpose other than to set up a further sequel.

It’s not all bad, though. Resurgence may be too slapdash and dumbed-down to have anywhere near the seismic impact of its predecessor, but it can be enjoyable in its cartoonish dopeyness. But the nostalgia associated with the film is what makes the film worth watching. And yes, we miss Will Smith, but the name and feel of the movie is worth going back to the alien world that we visited 20 years back.