Shrewdly, the screenplay (credited to five writers, including James Vanderbilt, who once upon a time wrote Zodiac) hints that the original’s America-centric rah-rah populism wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Independence Day, in a way, put me on the map in a big way and get me to do a lot of movies.
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Fox’s “Independence Day: Resurgence”, had been forecast for an opening weekend of $50 million at 4,068 locations. This is a movie in which the filmmakers decide that the best way to make the second alien invasion movie bigger than the first alien invasion movie is to literally make a bigger alien. For some inexplicable reason, they want it. So naturally, there’s an arbitrary race against time for our heroes to stop them from wiping us out and getting their slimy tentacles on it. What? Why? Who?
Also reprising their roles from the first film are Bill Pullman, as the now slightly addled President Whitmore; Judd Hirsch as Levinson senior and Brent Spiner as the maverick scientist and 20-year coma survivor Dr Brackish Okun.
Hardly any of these narrative strands are consistently sustained or resolved, making afterthoughts of such players as Charlotte Gainsbourg (vying with recent “Godzilla” star Juliette Binoche for the title of Most Incongruous Thesp In A Multiplex Explosion-Fest) as an earnest psychiatrist and equivocal love interest for Goldblum, and Chinese singer-actress Angelababy as an apparently renowned fighter pilot who nonetheless merits but a handful of non-onomatopoeic lines. The stepson of the Will Smith character, Dylan (Jessie Usher), is/was friends with both of them. The principal newcomers to the cast are Jake (Liam Hemsworth), a rebellious pilot who has been relegated to driving a low-status moon tug, and Patricia (Maika Monroe): fighter pilot, daughter of President Whitmore, girlfriend of Jake.
The aliens are back in Independence Day Resurgence. This is a movie in which pretty much every character with a name at one point obligatorily comes forward to volunteer for a suicide mission. A tragic shadow of his former self, who led the United States air fleet attacking one of the alien space ships two decades previously. If it’s a new one, it’s the same thing, except we have to explain their relationship to a previous character. It’s so utterly boring.
The disaster sequences themselves-of which there are many, placed at regular intervals but disconnected from the story, like operatic arias-have a dreamlike and weirdly exhilarating quality that’s quite different from the plodding wham-bam destruction of the average action blockbuster.
The best part about making any BigList is that whether you like it or not, you’re pretending you have authority so that other people feel like it’s their right to pick that authority apart, little piece by little piece. Big visual effects are no longer seen as revolutionary, and shots of cities being destroyed are just tiresome to watch and an indication of lazy filmmaking.
With Hollywood movies performing strongly in India in recent times, the latest released USA movie Independence Day: Resurgence made a good start at the box office in the Indian market on Friday. The reaction is more like, “Well, she wasn’t in the film for long”. You won’t care much about anything that happens, and it even has the gall to sequel-bait at the end. This is a movie in which a cold fusion bomb can’t break a giant alien’s super-technology shield, but shooting it with a bunch of lasers can.
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The good news, nominally, is that much of the original cast does return for the sequel.
