Prospero | New film

“Independence Day: Resurgence”

Blowing up London this time, the latest alien-invasion has only its own silliness going for it

By N.B.

Editor's note: the review below is timed for the June 24th release of “Independence Day: Resurgence”, which features London being blown to bits. The review also coincidentally falls on the day of Britain's EU referendum, which some pro-Brexit campaigners call “Independence Day”. Though our review is entirely unrelated, for those noting the coincidence, it's worth reminding readers that The Economist strongly backs Remain.

ROUGHLY 45 minutes into “Independence Day: Resurgence”, London is destroyed by a 3000-mile-wide alien spacecraft. If that weren’t unfortunate enough, two of the film’s heroes, a jittery boffin played by Jeff Goldblum and a cocky hunk played by Liam Hemsworth, happen to be flying through the city at the time in a supersonic space shuttle. Not to worry, though. Mr Hemsworth’s character is such a nifty pilot that they zoom along the Thames and past the disintegrating Tower Bridge without a scratch, cracking jokes as they go.

This odd combination of mass destruction and breezy quipping was trademarked by “Independence Day”, a science-fiction disaster movie which became the highest grossing film of 1996. Co-written by its German director, Roland Emmerich, and its American producer, Dean Devlin, the film shocked and delighted audiences by staging the obliteration of the White House and the Empire State Building. A wave of blockbusters featuring exploding landmarks has been rolling non-stop ever since. Poor old Tower Bridge was shredded just last month in “X-Men: Apocalypse”.

Puzzlingly, not even the 9/11 attacks, or any subsequent terrorist outrages, have slowed down this wave of cinematic demolition, although in “Resurgence”, the city-razing scenes don’t seem as insensitive as the ones in “Independence Day”. The difference is in the respective tones of the two films. Less of a sequel than a spin-off video game, “Resurgence” is so brazen in its goofy artificiality—what with its computer-generated backdrops, cardboard actors and 3000-mile-wide plot holes—that when London’s bridges start falling down, most viewers will care even less than the characters do.

For the first few scenes, it seems that the film might have a bit more substance. It’s 20 years after the last alien invasion, and the catastrophe seems to have had some positive effects. Western civilisation has become a space-age utopia in which all nations are in harmony, and the scientific knowledge we’ve gleaned from the aliens allows us to zip to the moon and back in minutes. It’s an intriguing setting that deserves its own HBO series, but it’s not all sweetness and light. The callow American President (Bill Pullman) from the first film is now a croaky, white-bearded invalid. “You gave up flying to take care of me,” he tells his daughter (Maika Monroe), “and I know how much you loved it.” Messrs Emmerich, Devlin and their three co-writers come up with a lot of dialogue as subtle as that. The hippy boffin (Brent Spiner) from “Independence Day”, for instance, has been in a coma for 7300 days, a fact which is conveyed to the viewer by having his boyfriend saying, “Can you believe it? You’ve been in a coma for 7300 days.”

The inclusion of a gay couple is one of the film’s few grown-up aspects. Otherwise, it revels in immaturity. For all of the militaristic stupidity and inappropriate wisecracks of the first “Independence Day”, there was something undeniably ominous about the arrival of the looming alien craft, and genuinely horrifying about the widescale destruction it wrought. The follow-up is in too much of a whizz-bang hurry to sustain any of that mystery or atmosphere. Its characters react to every mind-bending developent with little more than a shrug. And because they no longer having to rely on human technology or ingenuity, they default to sub-“Star Wars” dogfights and laser-gun shoot-outs showcasing a crowd of blandly good-looking “Hunger Games” types. Will Smith, the break-out star of “Independence Day”, turned down the sequel, so in his place we have Mr Hemsworth, Ms Monroe, Travis Tope, Jessie Usher and Angelababy (a Hong Kong star brought in for the sake of the Chinese market). Mr Emmerich must have been hoping the five of them put together would have as much charisma as Mr Smith had 20 years ago. They don’t.

The irony is that when the “Star Wars” and “Jurassic Park” franchises were revived last year, the directors of the new films were driven by their deep reverence and affection for those franchises’ earliest entries, whereas the “Independence Day” series has been revived by its own creators, Messrs Emmerich and Devlin, and they’ve made a self-parodic B-movie with no obvious purpose other than to set up a further sequel. They seem just as happy to trash their own legacy as they are to trash the world’s heritage sites.

It’s not all bad, though. “Resurgence” may be too slapdash and dumbed-down to have anywhere near the seismic impact of its predecessor, but it can be enjoyable in its cartoonish dopeyness. At its best, it is a rollicking tribute to the cheesiest of sci-fi monster movies: imagine a giant tentacle-waggling insectoid galloping through a Nevada desert after a yellow schoolbus driven by Mr Goldblum. Mr Emmerich recently commented that superhero films were “silly” compared to his own brand of blockbuster, but he should be careful about using that adjective as an insult. Silliness is the one thing that “Independence Day: Resurgence” has going for it.

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