Independence MAYDAY
Help! The giant spaceships are back (whoops, there goes London), Jeff Gold blum is really worried and there’s no place to hide... from aliens who’ve learned NOTHING since the last time our brave pilots gave them a pasting
Independence Day: Resurgence C ert: 12A 2hrs ★★★★★
Twenty years after that ominous shadow passed over as many global landmarks as director Roland Emmerich could think of – and two decades after the White House was blown to pieces in a major Hollywood film for the first time – the Independence Day franchise is reborn. And as Independence Day: Resurgence gets the summer blockbuster season under way, there is surely one big question to be answered. Have the aliens updated their computer anti-virus software this time around?
The lack of it did for them last time and, judging by the dialogue here, anti-alien thinking hasn’t advanced much in 20 years. ‘If we could just blow up the mothership,’ mumbles an excited Jeff Goldblum, ‘maybe it would work again.’ Really, Jeff. After all this time, that’s all you’ve got? The same plan... again?
I’m not going to answer my question because I don’t want to spoil what, for some, will be summertime cinema fun. But I will say it begins brightly and enjoyably before collapsing into the sort of commercial, visual effectsdriven silliness Steven Spielberg might churn out… on a really, really bad day. An hour in and I was fully on board for the ride; an hour later and I was close to asking for my money back.
But let’s begin with the good bits. I liked the alternative present-day that the five-man writing team – Emmerich included – has constructed. For if a fleet of giant alien spacecraft were shot down – as they were so memorably in what is now called the War of 1996 – the future of the world would change.
Which is why it is now politically united, the major cities have been beautifully rebuilt (new White House and all) and – thanks to the fusion of alien and human technologies – we all fly around in gravity-defying helicopters without rotors. It’s a cool-looking place.
And, frankly, one that is all the better for not having the cigar-chomping, horribly over-acting Will Smith in it. For my money, he was the worst thing in the original film, so the news that Captain Hillier, the part he so painfully overplayed, has gone to that great mothership in the sky is fine by me.
But his son Dylan (Jessie Usher) is around – naturally he’s a fighter pilot too – as is old President Whitmore’s daughter, Patricia (played by Maika Monroe and, yes, another fighter pilot, although currently grounded and working in the White House). Her heroically maverick, inevitably bestubbled boyfriend Jake (Liam Hemsworth) is a pilot too, of course. At times, you wonder why they didn’t just go the whole hog and call it Independence Day: The Next Generation. Meanwhile, David Levinson (Goldblum) is still the go-to man for repelling alien invasions, and old man Whitmore (Bill Pullman) is telling everyone who’ll listen that ‘they’re back’. I was enjoying the ride at this point but, looking back, all sorts of danger signs had been quietly passed. A subplot that takes in the only alien
spacecraft to have landed safely in 1996 – in Africa – is underdeveloped and seems an excuse to indulge in a few dark-continent stereotypes and to load up with machetes, while the sketchily drawn arrival of lovely French psychiatrist Dr Catherine Marceaux (Charlotte Gainsbourg) as the new love interest for Levinson simply makes you wonder what happened to the old one? Where’s Connie (Margaret Colin) from the first film? There’s a female President in the White House – why isn’t it her?
With huge spacecraft, there are echoes of all sorts of things – Alien, Star Wars, Prometheus, The 5th Wave – we’ve seen before. And Emmerich is so addicted to scale that when the new lot of aliens arrive in a spacecraft so big it has its own gravity field, you feel all these ships, planes and buildings being sucked up into the air are simply an excuse to show off what the latest effects can do.
Still, as both Tower Bridge and the London Eye are taken out, there’s no denying ‘they always go for the landmarks’ is a nice line.
But the real damage is done by the arrival of a small white sphere, about which I’ll say nothing but which is so trite and silly as to elicit real groans. Those groans continued, silently, as a climax as ridiculous as it is familiar unfolds, and it slowly becomes clear the new film is not a nostalgic return to an old favourite but a cold-blooded, moneydriven attempt to launch a new franchise. Maybe that computer virus wasn’t such a bad idea, after all.