Independence Day Resurgence

The first part of Independence Day Resurgence which was released in 1996 happened to be in that era where we didn’t have much of a CGI support to create all that enormous visuals of collateral damage across the globe. With this second outing the disaster lover Roland Emmerich isn’t trying to explore anything drastically new. He simply elaborates the scale using some ideas that may impress you because of the sort of imagination.

It is the present day and America along with all the nations in the world has decided to celebrate two decades of the July 4^th Independence Day. But unfortunately, on this very same day, there were other plans for earth’s old rivals. Independence Resurgence is basically the fight against these bigger alien invaders.

I really got impressed by the beginning of the movie on how they predicted modern day if such a thing had happened back in the 90s. Visuals like a huge memorial monument for the martyrs, a reinforced White House and showing how humans advanced in many areas of space research and flight technologies using whatever they learned from the captured Alien debris. All these sort of made me feel that it will be really different from the first one. But gradually the movie slips in to the familiar zone of patriotism, sentiments and a plan of attack that’s quite a repetition of what we already know. We are in a time were just grand scale visual effects is not enough to make a movie worth watching (at least in Hollywood). So this repetition of strategy and the largely imagined “scientific” development keeps the movie in a watchable zone without any wow factor to its credit.

Most of the characters from the first part, except Will Smith are there in this movie. Liam Hemsworth as this slightly arrogant astronaut was fine. The other major additions to the franchise are Jessie Usher (son of the character played by Will Smith in the first part), Maika Monroe, Travis Tope and Angelababy. Jeff Goldblum was fine doing the role of David. Bill Pullman had to take some effort in being that transformed ex American President and the actor was good doing that role.

Roland Emmerich, the man who likes to break every existing structure (not of filmmaking) created by humans, uses his creativity to visualize that end of the world scenario. The idea is pretty much similar to what he did in Independence Day and 2012. Maybe because he has already destroyed White House in almost every other film he has made, this time he only destroyed its backyard and the flag on top. Screenplay somewhere repeats the character equations we have seen in the first part. The sort of ego issues between President and David was recreated using the characters played by Liam Hemsworth and Jessie Usher. Interestingly there was similarity in the characters who decided to get in to the mother ship. I don’t know whether that had to do with any of the censor cuts, but they haven’t really showed the audience how the American President’s life got compromised. And like I said, the science in Independence Day Resurgence is not the hypothesis inspired Chris Nolan science.

So to sum it up, Independence Day Resurgence is an average cinema for me. If you are just looking for the bigger scale depiction of the 96 movie, it will satisfy you. It’s never a boring cinema. But due to the fact that we know a lot from the first part, there isn’t much of creative surprise to the credit of this Rolland Emmerich movie.

Rating: 2.5/5