Independence Day: Resurgence Review – Death By Boredom

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Twenty years ago writer Dean Devlin and director Rolan Emmerich ushered in the modern era disaster blockbuster with a film that’s never been called by its given name – it’s always been ID4 rather than Independence Day. It set the set the bar for everything from the Transformers franchise to the modern summer comic book tentpoles. Plus it included one of the best presidential battle-cry speeches of all time, “we will not go quietly into the night…” Cut forward to today and we have Independence Day: Resurgence – a film so lackluster and ill-conceived that it makes you re-evaluate your fondness of the original.

We’d known that some of the charm of the original would fade with the loss of Will Smith (Will has previously commented that After Earth was his Sci-Fi father-son film so he didn’t want to turn around and do another one immediately afterwards), but hey there would still be Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, and Brent Spiner back reprising their characters, and the addition of Liam Hemsworth as newcomer Jake Morrison, so how far afield could it go? Far, far afield. Next county over afield.

Last time the earth was attacked by the aliens the ships were already an impressive 6-mile across city destroyers, and the main mothership was 600 miles across but still in space. This time it’s 3,000 miles across and landing on the Pacific Ocean. Science Fiction films need to really run their stories into the ground when an audience begins to laugh at what’s on screen rather than with it.

The story runs that the Earth has expected that the aliens would return one day, so they’ve made use of the intervening decades to learn from the salvaged alien technology and build their own space defense forces. When it finally comes time for a massive weapons installation on the moon to be used, it lasts about as long as Goldblum’s enthusiasm for his part in the film.

The plot beats are largely the same, only less compelling. There’s no rousing speeches. The aliens built a bigger ship but they still have the exact same flaws as the last time. It would have been a more enjoyable ride had Fox simply released the original again back into theaters. Now whenever hearing Pullman’s President Whitmore giving his speech in ID4, I’ll just think of how much of a wasted character he was in Resurgence. The only good to come out of all of this is one could have a lively debate amongst friends on which was the worse film – Resurgence or After Earth.

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