INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE – Review

Review by Stephen Tronicek

Roland Emmerich. This guy has been working his butt off making predominantly intense and pretty good fare out of screenplays that were either flat-out bad or at least flawed in a way that actually mattered. The Day After Tomorrow, 2012and White House Down are all bad screenplays full of unsubtle and sometimes offensive stereotypes and material, but all move over into the realm of fun, at least because Emmerich is too talented of a director to let us criticize them. He knows what he’s doing and intelligently plays on the emotions instead of bombarding them. This is the case with Independence Day: Resurgence.

Resurgence picks up twenty years after the first Independence Day and follows many of the same characters as they, yet again, attempt to stop and survive an alien invasion. The plotting on display here is sloppy and doesn’t feel quite as epic or uplifting as the original film. Then again, not too much in this genre has. This most likely also comes down to the fact that Independence Day didn’t need a sequel because the central driving theme had already come to a close, and Resurgence doesn’t actually have anywhere else to go with it. The coming together of all the countries already happened in the first one, and now that this is the case, there is nowhere else to go with these characters and this world other than to just have a boilerplate alien invasion featuring characters from Independence Day.

The characters of this franchise were never that deep, but here, some of them lack any sense of personality. That actually seems to fall more on the actors, though. Take, for example, Maika Monroe as Patricia Whitmore. While her track record may be grossly overrated (It Follows), Monroe is a truly dedicated actress who knows how to strike the campy balance necessary for this movie. Liam Hemsworth, on the other hand, just reads out the dialogue he’s given while giving a tough guy face, and while that type of performance is ok and even necessary for a movie like this, it doesn’t give him any nuance to speak of. Not to mention Jeff Goldblum’s pitch perfect affectation for this material would be a crime. Goldblum was simply made for this stuff and his 90’s charm carries over easily from the first one.

In a full spectacle sense, despite the middling efforts of the plot, Independence Day: Resurgence succeeds with the type of speed and efficiency that most blockbusters can’t even begin to grasp, and the reason is undoubtedly Roland Emmerich. He never jumped on board with the overexposed and dynamic shot action that dominates the market, and the film benefits wholeheartedly from this. Aerial dogfights carry speed and weight, and as the fighters zip past each other only barely missing a collision, the excitement is wonderful. Large sweeping shots of a landing alien spacecraft inspire awe and, at best, giddiness. Again, Emmerich is the type of director that plays to the emotions, and in doing so, one can almost forgive the otherwise small seeming stakes and almost lifeless characters.

Independence Day: Resurgence is not really the best sequel we could have gotten for such a classic, but it’s certainly worth a look on the grounds that, unlike the collective of action movies that inspire depression, this one inspires happiness and prompts laughter.

3 of 5 stars