Independence Day: Resurgence movie review (2016)

There’s also William Fichtner who, surprisingly, doesn’t turn out to be a secret villain for once as the commanding general; model/actress Angelababy, who basically exists to serve as eye candy and appeal to coveted Chinese moviegoers; and, in the strangest bit of casting of all, Charlotte Gainsbourg as a psychiatrist studying people who’ve come into contact with aliens.

And—what are the odds?—the aliens have come back, exactly 20 years later in a flair for the dramatic, to make contact again. Only this time, they’re in a spaceship that’s 3,000 miles wide. (“How the hell did we miss this?,” Goldblum’s David Levinson wonders aloud.) They use it to latch onto Earth in order to drill into its core and steal our resources. Or something. Only a giant, talking orb—smooth, shiny, white and full of crucial intergalactic information, like the latest must-have device to roll off the Apple assembly line—can stop the obliteration of humanity.

You could look at it as a satirical metaphor for the growing sense of xenophobia and isolation that plagues places throughout the globe: “These invaders are coming here illegally to take from us and wreak havoc. We have to keep them out. We have to make Earth great again.” But that would require thinking.

Emmerich crosscuts between all these various characters and storylines with little sense of pacing or coherence. Just as something “important” is happening, he’ll jump over to something else, mixing suspense, seriousness and silliness in a way that’s jarring. Whereas the attempts at humor in the midst of great peril often worked in the original “Independence Day”—because it was a movie that was self-aware without teetering into parody—here, they’re consistently clunky.

And because so much of the action takes place in various bunkers full of enormous monitors and anxious, uniformed people barking orders, it’s hard to tell who’s where. Washington D.C.? Area 51? The moon? They all look exactly the same.

They will all look exactly the same again—at least to the aliens—when the inevitable third “Independence Day” movie comes out, as it’s suggested in the film’s final moments. This time, you’ve been warned.