‘Independence Day: Resurgence’ review: Disaster of a movie

Here’s some advice: see Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day: Resurgence with absolutely no regard for logic and reason. Expecting things to make sense onscreen is utterly futile and will only deplete whatever enjoyment can be squeezed out from this needless sequel. It is best to treat the movie as camp, a film that is so gloriously bad, that it is strangely hilarious.

An excruciating start

The premise is at least interesting enough to amount to something.

Several years after the world was saved from flying saucers by a ragtag team of paradigmatic patriots, the world is peaceful and prosperous, with America leading the united governments in an environment that is still enamored in heroes of the past. Little do they know that the aliens who invaded them so many years ago are brewing another raid, one that is unsurprisingly larger but less inspired. 

There are signs, and the movie takes a lot of time building up the grandiose cataclysm while reuniting the world with forgotten characters from the previous film and introducing new ones that only serve to muddle the already muddled narrative. 

By the time the aliens reach Earth, a viewer beside me was cracking jokes funnier than the ones lazily thrown around by the movie’s numerous frustrated comedians. 

This level of inattention caused by a film that is supposed to be all about spectacle and noise is alarming. The first 30 minutes of Independence Day: Resurgence were not just boring, but repulsive. It’s best to find ways to independently entertain oneself while waiting for the movie’s main event.

The main event

The aliens finally arrive, and as promised, the destruction that they cause is more bombastic than the one we saw 16 years ago. The digitally imagined decimation is over the top, with the screen almost fully painted in harsh oranges representing all the nameless humanity that I can only presume were reduced to embers by Hollywood’s need to outdo itself and create fantasies for public consumption.

This is Emmerich’s forte. Like the aliens he created, the director of disaster flicks like the first Independence Day (1996), Godzilla (1998) The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and 2012 (2009) is addicted to blowing famous monuments up onscreen. There are a lot of things that are blown up in Resurgence, except that they are destroyed in a way that is completely without ingenuity or at least passion. 

The desire for a greater scope has pushed Emmerich to fully flood the screen with artless carnage, but despite the possibilities, what the movie achieves feels quite redundant and shoddy. 

Emmerich pours bits and pieces of pointless portraits of human compassion, such as when a nurse saves a mother and baby, or when an Instagram-worthy puppy is cradled to safety by a toddler. However, amidst the worldwide catastrophe, those pint-sized portraits only serve as insipid excuses to needlessly inject a semblance of a heart in this pageant of epic proportions. 

Unimaginative blockbuster 

What’s left is really nothing more than blockbuster filmmaking at its most unimaginative. 

Stereotypes are piled on top of stereotypes. There is nothing left for the audience to do but to wallow in the awfulness of it all, and maybe find some happiness in imagining that there is some point to this inexplicable case of bad filmmaking. – Rappler.com

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ Tirad Pass. Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema. Profile photo by Fatcat Studios