Director: Roland Emmerich
Production Company: TSG Entertainment/Centropolis Entertainment/Electric Entertainment
Country: USA
Year: 2016
The White-House-Exploding aliens are back, and they’ve brought with them even more firepower for round 2. Taking place twenty years after the original film, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, and the rest of the crew (minus Will Smith) return to face the alien menace once more, in a world vastly different since their first appearance thanks to the incorporation of scavenged alien tech. The world has come and is now without wars (a very hopeful and naive look at ourselves), we’ve got spaceships working moon bases, and Area 51 looks like its straight from Tron with all the neon strips breaking up the wall space. We’ve had two decades to prepare for the aliens’ return, but nothing could prepare us for the fateful day, and the destruction it would bring.
Something struck me when I was watching Resurgence, about midway through. I twigged what the problem with the film was. It wasn’t the acting, which is great from Goldblum and Hemsworth and the usual A-listers. It wasn’t the special effects and CGI, which although is very good, is also in greater abundance than a Pixar film, something which I (and Christopher Nolan, it seems) detest. It isn’t the humour, which whilst it isn’t rib-tickling, is nice and gives it a family-friendly blockbuster feel, like proper blockbusters of old. And although there’s an impressive tendency to decide that the set design and cinematography should combine to create dark sets with random splatterings of LED strips that completely fail to illuminate anything to a substantial, visible, degree, it’s at least in keeping with the new sci-fi styling that we’re so used to, even if it is just piggy-backing off cyberpunk and other scifi neo-noir aesthetics whilst wholly failing to integrate its themes.
No, the problem is exactly the same problem that Shane Black’s The Predator would have two years later. It feels like a generic alien invasion movie which has been slightly changed to accommodate making it an Independence Day sequel. The Cloverfield sequels, 10 Cloverfield Lane and The Cloverfield Paradox, do the same thing, although thankfully to a limited extent. Resurgence doesn’t have it’s own identity, and hasn’t managed to build on the first Independence Day to successfully carve out its own style and feel of invasion story. You make the returning characters different people but keep the same functions, the slight design of the aliens so you avoid copyright, and just say that this is twenty years after some alien invasion threat in the past, and boom. Same movie, but nowhere near the same amount of bums on seats. So they take it and make it a sequel instead and rake in the cash.
It’s a film which hits all the notes a big, CGI explosion-fest sequel to the first film should technically have for a popcorn munching audience, but it has none of the heart, brains, or interest. Will Smith isn’t in this one, and as much as I hate to say it, Liam Hemsworth doesn’t have the charisma that Smith had in the original, and feels very much like a generic replacement for the Fresh Prince. Couldn’t get Smith, so in comes Mr Hunger Games. It’s a bit like The Rise of Skywalker in many respects. Yes, it does indeed do everything needed to make it a sequel, and will make a load at the box office (actually not that much considering the budget; under $400m against a reported $165m budget, which is bad when that’s not including advertising). But it’s nothing new, nothing fresh, or even interesting. It’s just a thing that happened and nobody really cares. The reward for this film should be to dig a cold grave for it, punch the DVD into the ground, and finish with the phrase ‘Welcome to the earth.’
Rating: 3/10
Review by Kieran Judge
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