Film shows no signs of intelligent life
INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE. Directed by: Roland Emmerich, Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Liam Hemsworth, Charlotte Gainsbourgh. Showing at: Walmer Park, Boardwalk, Baywest, Hemingways, Bridge) Reviewed by: Robbie Collin
“THEY like to get the landmarks,” observes Jeff Goldblum during an early action sequence in Independence Day: Resurgence. Behind him, London’s Tower Bridge is being kebabed in slow motion on the Burj Khalifa skyscraper, which has been uprooted from Dubai and summarily dropped on the British capital, along with what looks like half the skyline of Singapore.
By “they”, Goldblum’s character David Levinson – hero of the original Independence Day, and now a leading light at Earth Space Defence – is referring to the alien task force that’s in the process of eradicating all intelligent life on Earth.
Director Roland Emmerich returns along with the aliens for this present-day sequel.
Perhaps for Emmerich, destroying world capitals with city-straddling flying saucers is a kind of Zen-like re-centring exercise – or more likely an emergency tactic to find a thus-far elusive 21st century hit.
Either way, the world has changed since the events of the original film: extraterrestrial-led Armageddon, it turns out, was just the nudge humanity needed to get its act together.
Earth Space Defence is a joint US-China enterprise, based in Beijing with an outpost on what’s helpfully captioned “Earth’s Moon”, while technology from the invaders’ downed ships has helped create a greener, more prosperous and peaceful present.
So when the aliens are summoned back by a distress beacon from one of the original ships, the human jets that fend them off are now equipped both with intergalactic laser cannons and a photogenically multi-racial crew.
Chinese military poster girl Rain Lao (Angela Yeung Wing) flies alongside good ol’ Americans like Dylan Hiller (Jessie Usher), the son of Will Smith’s ace pilot – now deceased, and appearing only in portrait form – from the original film.
Given the film’s pretence of take-no-prisoners bombast, there’s something desperately feeble about Resurgence’s determination to ride the coat-tails of its predecessor until they rip.
In addition to another solo manned flight into the bowels of an alien ship, there’s also a dogfight over silvery salt flats, a puppy in peril, more creepy tentacle ventriloquism, and another patronising shot of third-world nomads cheering on a ridge.
This isn’t just lazy, it’s borderline nonsensical. Resurgence inflates the scale of the alien threat to such a preposterous degree – the mothership takes up roughly an eighth of the Earth’s total surface – that the queues of honking traffic and rooftop helicopter rescues we’re supposed to invest in can’t help but feel like microscopic trifles.
The threat only becomes palpable and human-scaled again in the film’s surprisingly well-staged giant monster finale, in which a school bus with Goldblum at the wheel is chased across the desert by what’s effectively the creature from Cloverfield with braids. It’s stupid, but at that point, stupid feels like an improvement. – The Telegraph