Stupid sequel can’t recapture past
Independence Day: Resurgence (M) 120 mins ★★
This 20-years-on sequel to Independence Day isn’t the worst or the most objectionable film of 2016, but it’s probably the stupidest.
Director Roland Emmerich gets most of the band back together (Will Smith the most notable absence, although his stereotype is amply replaced by Liam Hemsworth’s cocky hothead) and inexplicably attempts to pretty much recreate the first movie, largely by repeating lines of 1990s dialogue and shifting the characters around in a game of musical chairs. I guess he figured the first movie was such a hit, why change it?
The problem is, what worked in 1996 was the timely combination of Smith’s sass-talking charm and the fact cinemagoers had never seen the White House blown up quite like that before. Twenty years on, we’ve seen that particular icon go down, along with the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, Golden Gate Bridge and so on, in every movie with a natural disaster or terrorist plot at its core. Two decades on, the catastrophe ought to be mind-blowing, but instead it’s incoherent and thus unaffecting.
What of our brave heroes, then? Perhaps therein lies progress. Well, there’s a woman president who makes ruthless decisions quicker than you can say ‘‘moral dilemma’’. Former president Whitmore takes on the crazy Randy Quaid-role (yawn), while Jeff Goldblum’s Dr Levinson is slowly turning into his father (who also returns).
Emmerich casts art-house francophone Charlotte Gainsbourg in a pointless scientist role (get back to your Von Trier movies, love!), but the plot still doesn’t make any sense. The icing on this sickly, shop-bought cake is the fact the only person who can understand the aliens’ writings is a machete-wielding African warlord.
Glory be. And, at the end, they leave it open for another sequel ...