Independence Day: Resurgence

Independence Day: Resurgence 

Starring Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Liam Hemsworth, Maika Monroe

Directed by Roland Emmerich

The Story:
Twenty years after Earth defeated an alien invasion, we've got peace in the world, and we've learned how to use the alien technology to further protect us and serve as a shot in the arm for forward thinking (however, for some reason, they decide to not use force fields).  As the anniversary approaches, the new President (Sela Ward) requests the attention of scientist David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) and former President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) to attend the big soirée.  Meanwhile, Whitmore's daughter Patricia (Maika Monroe) is now grown up, working in the White House, and engaged to Jake (Liam Hemsworth), a pilot currently assigned patrol on the moon.

Meanwhile, Dylan Hiller (Jessie Usher), the now-grown son of famed war hero (and conveniently deceased) Steven Hiller is a captain in the ESD (Earth Space Defense), and takes a team to the moon.  As this happens, a small alien craft enters the atmosphere, and is quickly taken care of.  While Jake and David go to discover the wreckage, a massive mother ship arrives, 3000 miles in diameter, and lands on Earth, causing its own gravity, sending parts of the Earth into the sky.  The aliens have returned, and now they're bigger and badder than ever. 

The Synopsis:
I never saw the original "Independence Day" when it was in theaters, but only years later when it was on DVD.  I wasn't big on movies back in the day so I didn't really notice any reviews it got, but it turned out to be a huge critical success, as well as becoming one of the highest grossing movies of 1996.  Seeing it on DVD, I could understand the excitement, as it was the first real alien epic blockbuster, with a stellar cast, great effects (once again, the whole White House explosion/Empire State Building destruction scenes are still some of the best out there), and strong character development. 

Flash forward twenty years later.  Now CGI is all the rage, and Roland Emmerich is best known for his destruction porn films that have a thin script, lack of development, but a whole heck of a lot of destruction ("The Day After Tomorrow" and "2012" immediately come to mind).  He decides to direct his first sequel with "Resurgence," and it seems that all the campy fun and thrills of the original were left on the cutting room floor, and the script (which involved a whole heck of a lot of people) seemed to be people throwing darts at different ideas on a wall and trying to compile them together into one somewhat cohesive narrative.

If you're allowed alcohol at your theater, you should play the drinking game whenever someone mentions "twenty years ago" or "1996."  You'll be drunk by the time the opening title starts, and you might actually enjoy what's happening, because it takes a special dumbing down of the brain to fully appreciate what you're seeing on screen.  Instead of everything that made the original such an endearing piece of cinema, we get your typical sequel tropes (bigger ship, more aliens, deaths of original cast members, bigger destruction), mixed with the latest, greatest CGI, and absolutely none of the heart of the original.  It was almost painful to see Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman try to squeak out some semblance of  hope that what they're doing isn't just for another paycheck.  The only star who was in the first who seemed to really enjoy what he was doing was Brent Spiner, whose Dr. Brakish Okun had a much more meatier role here than the original, and he hammed it up with every scene he was in.  He was the saving grace of this otherwise Earth-shattering disaster.

A good amount of actors from the original return (because, let's face it, none of them have anything resembling an actual career today), but the one very notable absence is Will Smith, who's still a big Hollywood draw (if you ignore "After Earth").  Smith reportedly wanted 50 million for both sequels (yes, there's plans for a third), and Emmerich couldn't grant him his requests, so he did what any director would do in that situation - he kills off Smith's character off screen before the movie begins.  Is this a spoiler I just revealed?  If you didn't know that little tidbit of information, you've been living under a rock with dial-up Internet.  Smith's character was the heart and soul of the original, giving us some classic one-liners ("welcome to Earth," "now that's what I call a close encounter"), and without his natural charm and charisma, we've got a pale pallet of so-so actors who become so interchangeably inconsequential that you don't care for any of them.

Here is a listing of each new actor, and their incredibly pointless story:
Liam Hemsworth - the young upstart pretty boy engaged to the former President's daughter
Maika Monroe - the now-grown President's daughter who's engaged and knows how to fly a fighter plane (and who isn't Mae Whitmore, who played the daughter at an early age and would've been perfect here, but she wasn't deemed "attractive" enough)
Jessie Usher - son of the hero, doesn't showcase any emotion even when its needed, dislikes Liam's character, leads people
Sela Ward - Hillary Clinton-wannabe President
Travis Tope - Liam's BFF, even at times seeming to want to be more than BFFs, kinda like Harry Connick Jr.'s role in the original
William Fichtner - General who gives the rousing speech Pullman gave in the original, yet this time it was so insipid and uninspired it deserved a golf clap
Angelababy - hot Asian

What were their names?  I have no clue.  Didn't much care either.  As I said earlier, each character has their own role, and they stick to it.  We get no backstory to their history or why we should care about them, they just exist to fill the screen.  Vivica A. Fox is back too, and this time she's a doctor.  I guess some strippers really do just do the job to pay for med school.  Still, I find it funny she's a doctor now, twenty years later, after having no formal nursing school training beforehand.  They had to take at least five to ten years to clean up the Earth, so unless she took a really accelerated program, I have no clue how she became a doctor.

So the aliens come, and for some reason we've managed to use their technology to up our attack and defense, but never thought to use their technology to make any type of force fields.  Instead, the aliens come knocking with wanton destruction as easily as a boot coming down on an ant.  The only really epic destruction scene occurs somewhere in Asia (I thought Hong Kong, but I could be wrong), when everything is raptured to the sky and then comes crashing down in London.  Other than that, most of the film takes place in Area 51.  No worldwide destruction, no universal fear, just a smaller, quarantined area.  Finally there's a part of the story that's incredible stupid, but I won't go into it because it'd give away certain aspects of the movie, but needless to say it seems very convoluted in the grander scheme of things.   

The Summary:
We've been waiting twenty years for a superior sequel to a cult classic.  Instead, we got "Resurgence."

The Score: B-