Rating: C
With deep sadness I report that the promise of a worthy sequel made to us by the trailer was exploded into a million fragments like a landmark in a Roland Emmerich film. Granted, it was an ambitious and difficult task to ever try and match the supreme awesomeness of Independence Day, and I will give anything a two-star bump for featuring Jeff Goldblum in a speaking role, but it only ended up gilding the lily; the first one is just a perfect film, and cannot be outdone.
When the aliens return for another go at world domination, the gang reunites to tackle it all over again. It’s pretty much the exact same plot as the first film, with the exception that the characters have no development left to run, and it is set on Earth with an alternate sci-fi history, so we can no longer recognise or buy-into the world being attacked. Almost every character who survived the first film returns, but the problem was always going to be that WILL SMITH IS MISSING. His 100 percent pure awesome ’90s sass was instead meted out in tiny parts to everybody else to try dismally to cover his absence. I scoff—and I won’t even dignify Liam Hemsworth taking up 50 percent of the screen time; I believe it was Alfred Hitchcock who declared “one Hemsworth is one too many.” Practical effects pioneer Patrick Tatopoulos is also sorely missed, as without him this film is a Transformers-level mess of CGI employing a planet of engineers.
Beyond the surface level, though, the film seems thematically bankrupt also. The greatness of the first film in this franchise was that it put us in our place, and showed us that all our military might could not defeat the aliens; it would take self-sacrifice, ingenuity, and borderless humanism. The gun was not power. In Resurgence, however, we just need to find bigger military options, so the bottom line is…’Murica?
Resurgence is not worthy of the first film. But with the bewildering addition of a gigantic, invincible alien Queen, however, it may just be that Godzilla reboot we all were hoping for in 2014.