'Independence Day Resurgence' review: Roland Emmerich, this is 2016, not 1996

Roland Emmerich’s 1996 movie Independence Day was a special event — its release was the moment Hollywood completely ditched Intelligence Quotient for Entertainment Quotient. Not only was it one of the stupidest films of all time but it was vastly fun and memorable. The special effects were cutting edge and Will Smith’s fighter pilot with a NASA fetish was a blast. Fast forward 20 years, we now have a sequel, strangely titled Independence Day Resurgence, with Emmerich back in the director’s chair minus Smith. The ‘Resurgence’ moniker in the title perhaps indicates that Emmerich plans to remind viewers how silly the original film was and that the era of dumb action blockbusters needs a resurgence of sorts. The results are, predictably, not very good. [caption id=“attachment_2854662” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Still from ‘Independence Day Resurgence’[/caption] This time the aliens are back to invade the Earth, clearly pissed off that they were defeated by Jeff Goldblum’s Windows 95 computer virus earlier. The alien queen arrives with her brigade and a mother ship that excretes out a flying saucer as big as a whole ocean to exterminate mankind. But Earth isn’t going to take it standing, because America is once again to the rescue. Their first female president (Sela Ward) teams up with the legendary alien expert (Goldblum) and fighter pilot (Liam Hemsworth) to fight back with as many missiles as possible. And this time America has harvested the alien technology found earlier to build fighter ships to attack the aliens. But the plot isn’t why people watch films like these so let’s get to the real stuff — the popcorn entertainment. The problem with Resurgence is that since the first movie there have been two or three movies every year of the same or larger scale. 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. The White House explosion in the original was an iconic image but thanks to oversaturation of the blockbuster genre that sort of a shot is now very routine. As a result there’s only so much crumbling buildings and destruction that one can take nowadays without the backbone of interesting characters and fun jokes. Unfortunately Resurgence has zero interesting characters and jokes that would make your eye roll. The design of the aliens in the original was nothing to write home about — they seemed like bad ripoffs of the designs of HR Giger. Things don’t much improve this time either, and simply making the aliens bigger in size doesn’t render any eye candy as such. Like most Emmerich films the conflict becomes a worldwide event with different countries pitching in to fight, but America ends up being the one to show everyone how it’s done. The kind of fun in the original Independence Day was reflective of the ’90s when movie watching was a much more innocent experience so harmless fun was a high benchmark for entertainment. But 2016 is not the ’90s and a little sophistication in filmmaking wouldn’t hurt. You can’t just make dumb stuff without anything remotely new to show or at least subverting the dumbness of the genre. Ironically the moniker ‘Resurgence’ works because this is the kind of movie that reminds audiences of what not to watch and signals an end to the interest levels in audiences.