Independence Day (1996) was a fairly monumental film when it first came out.  It broke new ground in the field of visual effects and managed to supercharge the careers of the actors starring in it.  But, at the same time, no one would ever consider it a masterpiece by any means.  The film was co-written and directed by a frequent name that appears in this series of articles, Roland Emmerich, and though Emmerich has demonstrated himself to be a very flawed filmmaker over the years, Independence Day does present him at his best.  A lot of the flaws in storytelling that plague most of Emmerich’s movies are present in this (his most successful film) as well, but it’s balanced out with an overall general sense of fun and creativity that defined most of his earlier films.  Independence Day was Emmerich’s third studio made film, as well as his third collaboration with co-writer and producer Dean Devlin.  With the success of 1992’s Universal Soldier and 1994’s Stargate, the duo were quickly becoming the hottest team in Hollywood, and it helped them to get 20th Century Fox behind their ambitious alien invasion epic.  Independence Day captured the imagination of audiences with it’s foreboding atmosphere; creating a vision of interstellar invasion from hostile forces that dwarfed anything we had seen on the big screen before.  There’s nothing more provocative in selling a film called Independence Day than making the image of the White House being blown to bits by a 15 mile wide UFO it’s money shot.  But, apart from the imagery, the remainder of the film was, to put it lightly, unsubtle and prone to cliché.  But, audiences didn’t care because the movie still made it feel like you were going on a ride.  It was loud, jingoistic and manipulative, but also crowd-pleasing and in many cases very beautiful to look at.  It was the very definition of a popcorn movie and it indeed lived up to the hype by becoming at the time one of the highest grossing films of all time.  And like all smash box office hits, audiences were anxious to see more.  Surprisingly, Emmerich and Devlin didn’t immediately jump at the opportunity to create a sequel, only choosing to go further if they could find the right story.  Almost 20 years later, they finally did, but as we would learn, it may have been better to leave the story be.

In the 20 years after Independence Day released into theaters, Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich had much less success as filmmakers.  Somehow, Roland has been able to gain financing for all of his projects, but his box office success has fallen way short of his early days, and today his track record is marked more by box office bombs than hits.  You can also see him trying to recapture that Independence Day magic as most of his films like The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 2012 (2009) and Moonfall (2022) all basically feature the same plot; humanity saved by the end of the world by maverick hot shot fighters and enlightened nerds that no one listened to before.  The creative partnership between Devlin and Emmerich also came to an end, with them parting ways after making The Patriot (2000).  Even though the two were taking separate paths, they still held onto the idea of returning to the Independence Day universe.  But the further distance they put between it and a sequel, they more they would risk missing the moment when it would become a success.  Cinema changed very quickly in the years after Independence Day‘s release and so did the world for that matter.  The imagery of the film, which included notable landmarks like the White House and the Empire State building being blown up just weren’t going to work anymore in a world that witnessed the 9/11 attacks happen in real life.  If a sequel to Independence Day was to occur, it had to be very different in order to not be trauma inducing.  But, the team of Emmerich and Devlin also had to contend.  With an audience that had kind of moved away from science fiction films like Independence Day.  Blockbuster films in the new millennium were shifting from sci-fi to fantasy with the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films leading the charge and then eventually super hero movies were all the rage in the following decade thanks to Marvel and DC.  Independence Day was becoming more and more a relic of it’s time, but with some still potent nostalgia flavored into it.  Eventually, Emmerich and Devlin settled on a story they wanted to tell, and it would involve not one but two sequels with a two part storyline.

Instead of picking up right where the first film left off, these new sequels would embrace the gap in time, and show how humanity responded to it’s near apocalyptic encounter with the alien invaders.  In one of the sequel’s better ideas, we see how humanity has deconstructed the alien technology from the downed wreckage of their ships, and have since used that tech to make advancements of their own.  It’s a logical narrative step that helps to differentiate the film from the original.  Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t do much else with that idea.  Yeah, the ships that the Earth’s military forces use are more sleek and high tech, but the film is also pretty inconsistent with it’s world-building, and it still shows a lot of low tech things like gas powered cars and present day warships still being used.  It’s basically the filmmakers deciding when to use high technology in the story when it’s there to look cool and forgetting pretty much anywhere else it might make sense to have it.   This element in particular is a big reason why the sequel falls apart.  Emmerich seems only interested in hitting all the familiar beats of the story, while ignoring the foundation which made them work in the first place.  The jump in time and the advancement of humanity in those years could have made for an interesting dynamic change in the story that could have made it a very different kind of movie that could stand independent of the original.  But, no, in order to get Fox behind this follow-up, he pretty much just made the original all over again, just with a bigger scale to it.  It otherwise undermines the idea of there being a more advanced society in this story when the aliens themselves have come with a bigger ship.  They don’t even change the way that the characters try to take out the aliens; they send a ship inside the mothership with the plan to blow it up again from the inside.  It makes you wonder why they advanced their technology at all when they just try to do the same thing again.

It’s pretty clear from the get go that Independence Day: Resurgence was a doomed project.  The studio immediately balked at the idea of shooting two sequels back to back and instead opted to make the one with a wait and see policy with regards to the third.  So, Resurgence was put into the production with the hope that Emmerich and Devlin could re-ignite the magic of the original film and hopefully turn this into a franchise that could go on for many years afterward.  But one big roadblock derailed this at the beginning.  If there was one movie star from the original film that could easily help lift this franchise, it was Will Smith.  Of all the actors from the first Independence Day, Smith had the best post-movie boost.  He became a big box office star thanks to other hit films like Men in Black (1997) Hitch (2005) and I Am Legend (2007).  And there was no doubt that his star power was greatly increased by his starring role in the original Independence Day.  So, having him on board for these sequels would easily give them a boost thanks to his devoted following of fans.  Unfortunately, Will Smith bowed out of returning to this franchise.  He cited that there would have been a scheduling conflict with this and his role in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad (2016), which was shooting at the same time.  It’s probably true, but one can’t also help to think that Will Smith might have also seen the writing on the wall with the overall lack of interest there was for a movie like this.  His track record with sequels had also been pretty spotty, with the Men in Black films under-performing.  This wouldn’t have been a problem for Emmerich and Devlin had they had a plan B if one of their original actors didn’t return.  Unfortunately, their original script, the one that got the greenlight from Fox, centered around Smith’s character Capt. Hiller.  With that poor moment of hindsight becoming a problem, the two had to quickly rewrite their script in order to write Capt. Hiller out of the movie.  What we get is an unceremonious off screen death with the character of his son, played now as a grown up by actor Jesse T. Usher, taking up his place in the story.  Usher tries his best to fill that vacancy, but his character is also lacking in much of the charisma that helped to set Will Smith’s performance apart in the original.  So, like all doomed sequels, Independence Day: Resurgence was put into production in a frenzy that never quite coalesced together.

The movie still got many of it’s legacy actors to come back, but a lot of them had their characters unnecessarily altered in a bit of regression based on where we left them before.  Jeff Goldblum’s David Levinson fares the best as his character has risen to the level of head of the Earth’s Defense Force; an upgrade from his position as a satellite engineer who decodes the alien tech from the first film.  Robert Loggia (in his final film role) also makes a memorable return as General William Gray.  But, other legacy actors aren’t so lucky.  Judd Hirsch returns as David’s over-bearing father, and the movie weirdly turns him into more of a comic relief character that gets into shenanigans after surviving the destruction of the aliens with a family of orphaned kids.  Hirsch’s performance in the original was much more grounded while at the same time making him a funny personality and confidant to his son.  But here, he’s just a cartoon character and it’s a waste of a great talent like his.  Bill Pullman’s President Whitmore is also downgraded in this film, showing him mentally unstable in the 20 years after the last invasion.  It’s a far cry from the inspirational figure he posed in the original film, which showed him as a steadfast leader who rose to the challenge.  It is nice to see all of these actors back together again, but the movie seems to treat them disrespectfully.  Vivica A. Fox barely even gets a couple of lines in before her character is unceremoniously killed off.  And unfortunately, none of the new characters are interesting enough to carry the weight of the rest of the film.  Liam Hemsworth is a pale imitation of the swagger that Will Smith brought to the story and the aforementioned Jesse T. Usher is barely a character as well.  There was also a bit of controversy surrounding the recasting of Maika Monroe as President Whitmore’s daughter Patricia.  It was believed that Mae Whitman, who played the part in the original at age 8 and has had a successful acting career ever since, was passed over because she wasn’t deemed “conventionally pretty” enough for this film.  How much of that is true is unknown, but fans were a bit outraged.  Whitman herself has stayed above the controversy and has avoided commenting on it.  And of course, the movie makes a baffling decision to bring back Brent Spiner as Dr. Okun.  Yes, Star Trek alum Spiner is a beloved character actor, but his presence here makes no sense as his character was shown to be choked to death by one of the aliens in the original.  The sequel’s explanation: he was in a 20 year coma.  One of the many examples of lazy writing throughout.

One of the other things that doomed the project is that while it tries to advance the film with the standards of the time, it actually feels like a regression as well.  The original Independence Day was certainly a breakthrough for CGI digital effects, many of which still look fairly good nearly 30 years later.  But, it’s also important to remember that much of it worked because it was backed up with a lot of incredible practical effects too.  Those exploding buildings from the alien attacks were all done with scale models, helping to give the destruction a really tactile feel to them.  The puppeteering of the alien in the frightening autopsy scene also gives the movie an incredible looking creature that was handcrafted by some talented artisans.  When we think of visual effects from that era, it encompassed a lot more than just what was programmed into a computer.  Unfortunately, a lot of that practical movie magic has been usurped by CGI over the years, and Roland Emmerich unfortunately has been one of those filmmakers that has ditched practical effects more and more over time.  This is very evident in Resurgence as a everything from the alien mothership, to the city wide destruction, to the aliens themselves are now all done with CGI animation.  The thinking is that it should look better, but it doesn’t.  The tactileness is gone and replaced with a lot of vaguely discernable CGI mayhem.  Roland would probably argue that the movie is more impressive because CGI has allowed them to make everything bigger in scale.  But bigger isn’t always better.  The mothership in this film is as big as a moon, and is capable of generating it’s own gravity.  And yet, we don’t feel the same dread about it landing on Earth as we did with the smaller 15 mile wide ships.  That’s because the ship is honestly too big to convey, so all we get is a lot of the sky on fire as it lands.  It’s nowhere near as scary as those massive discs of metal piercing through the clouds and hovering menacingly over the city.  The same goes for the alien creatures as well, which were also given CGI makeovers.  In this film, we finally meet the alien Queen, who is massive in size, and she is nowhere near as menacing as the smaller ones we saw in the original.  Overall, Roland is trying to do everything he did before in the original with computer animation, and it makes his film feel less real and in addition the aliens much less scary.

With a lot of legacy sequels, the question inevitably comes up to this: Why?  Why make a sequel to this so many years later.  Most of the time, the answer simply is money.  Studios want to capitalize on established IP, and they’ll dig deep into their libraries in order to make something old new again.  But, most of the time, it doesn’t work.  Sure, there are examples of making legacy sequels that not only live up to the original, but also somehow manage to surpass it, like Top Gun: Maverick (2022).  But most of the time, the result is something like Independence Day: Resurgence, which just feels like an empty imitation of what once was.  And the original film was not exactly an all time classic either.  For a lot of audiences, Independence Day was a fun diversion that featured some at the time cutting edge visual effects and a few semi-inspirational moments that made them want to root for the heroes.  But, let’s not forget that the story and the characters were paper thin generic archetypes that were merely there to string together the action set pieces.  Independence Day is enjoyable as a visual effects spectacle, but over time it has also become something of a joke too with it’s many cliches.  For some, that’s part of the enjoyment as well because it gives the movie some campy value.  Essentially, Independence Day: Resurgence is what happens when you do the same movie, but take out all the things that made it fun in the first place, including the stuff that became fun ironically.  And the very insulting part is that the movie insists on us treating the film more respectfully than it deserves.  This is due to the fact that it’s trying to build lore that they hoped would help turn this into a franchise on the same level of say a Star Wars.  We weren’t interested in that back in the original and we are less so now.  The appeal of the alien invasion storyline from the original is that we know so little about who the aliens are and why they want our planet.  In Resurgence, we get introduced to a new concept of another alien race of non-organic beings that are also at war with the bad aliens, personified by a mysterious super intelligent orb called the Sphere.  At the end of the film, after the Queen alien is defeated, the movie arrogantly sets up the next chapter with the humans teaming up with the Sphere to take the fight to the aliens’ home world.  Yep, it’s another one of those franchise hopeful movies that ends on a cliffhanger that we’ll never see resolved.

It’s no surprise that Independence Day: Resurgence did not perform as well as it’s predecessor.  The movie flopped and was pretty much dismissed by both critics and audiences alike.  And in my personal opinion, it is one of the worst sequels in recent memory, ranking as the worst movie on my list from that year.  Sadly, there is an argument to be made that a sequel to this could have worked, but due to too much time passing and things not lining up the way they should’ve, we got this compromised movie that doesn’t do anything special and is entirely a waste of time and talent.  For the sake of the original film, the fact that this movie is so forgettable is a blessing, as it doesn’t take away from it’s entertainment value.  It seems like everyone has just agreed to ignore it.  Even Roland Emmerich considers making the movie a mistake, saying that they shouldn’t have moved forward after Will Smith passed on the project.  I mostly feel bad for the actors, a lot of whom just look lost in the movie.  What they did to Bill Pullman and Judd Hirsch’s characters feels especially insulting to the legacy of those characters, who while they weren’t exactly the deepest of characters in the original were still a bit more dignified than they are presented here.  Also, there’s a rather unnecessary bit of queer-baiting done in the movie as they reveal that Spiner’s Dr. Okun had a same-sex partner this whole time.  Emmerich himself made a big deal that he was writing a gay character into his movie, but while the intention is good thing, the execution is pathetic as we only learn about Dr. Okun’s relationship late in the movie, with it ultimately being meaningless in the long run.  If you can’t commit the whole way, then stop going partway and falsely claim that you are breaking barriers.  All that aside, it’s a pathetic and insulting attempt at building a franchise out of a just passable enough popcorn flick from the past.  It’s much better to just re-watch the original even with all of it’s flaws.  Indepndence Day: Resurgence is yet another in the long line of cinematic travesties brought to the big screen by Mr. Roland Emmerich, and unfortunately this was one that reflected back poorly on one of the few good movies that he had made in the past.