Twenty years after Will Smith’s Captain Steven Hiller flew a stolen alien fighter into a mothership, Independence Day: Resurgence asks what happens when the victory lap ends. The answer, per Roland Emmerich’s 2016 sequel, is a bigger ship, a longer drill and a cast of pilots who inherited a war their parents won. It runs 120 minutes.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
Earth Space Defense and the Twenty-Year Gap
The setup is the film’s best idea. After the War of 1996, the United Nations founded the Earth Space Defense, an international military and research body that reverse-engineered alien technology into a planetary shield. Bases run from Area 51 to the Moon, Mars and Rhea. Orbital defense satellites ring the planet.
That premise promises a movie about institutions, budgets and the strange peace of a species that knows it is being watched. Emmerich and co-writer Dean Devlin, who also co-produced, instead spend the first act on exposition.
David Levinson, Dikembe Umbutu and the Distress Signal
Jeff Goldblum returns as David Levinson, now ESD director and the government’s leading researcher on extraterrestrial technology. He travels to the African state République Nationale d’Umbutu with warlord Dikembe Umbutu and Dr. Catherine Marceaux, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, a French psychiatrist studying telepathic links between humans and aliens.
Inside a landed saucer they learn the aliens were drilling before the 1996 defeat, and that they sent a distress signal home first. The film treats that as its darkest beat: the first invasion was not a war but a survey.
Thomas Whitmore, Brackish Okun and the Psychic Link
Bill Pullman’s former President Thomas J. Whitmore is back, revered as a world-saving war hero and wrecked by it. He has post-traumatic stress disorder and a permanent psychic link to the enemy. Brent Spiner’s Dr. Brackish Okun and Umbutu share the condition.
The link gives them visions of an unidentified spherical object. Pullman plays a man hollowed out by the thing that made him famous. The film gives him little else to do.
Jake Morrison, Dylan Hiller and the Van de Graaff Crater
Liam Hemsworth is Jake Morrison, an ESD pilot engaged to Patricia Whitmore and orphaned by the first attack. Jessie T. Usher is Dylan Hiller, captain of the ESD and stepson of the late Steven Hiller. Travis Tope is Charlie Miller, Jake’s friend, also orphaned in 1996.
A spherical ship emerges from a wormhole near the Moon. The UN Security Council orders it destroyed over Levinson’s objections. Jake and Charlie defy orders, grab a space tug and collect Levinson, Marceaux, Umbutu and controller Floyd Rosenberg. At the Van de Graaff crater they recover a container holding a sphere.
Then the mothership arrives. It is over 3,000 miles in diameter. It shreds Earth’s planetary defenses, lands over the North Atlantic and begins drilling toward the core.
The Order the Film Keeps
Here is the sequence as the plot lays it out:
| Beat | Event |
|---|---|
| Opening | ESD established, twenty years after the War of 1996 |
| Early | Levinson, Umbutu and Marceaux reach the landed saucer |
| Early | Distress signal and the drilling revelation |
| Middle | Spherical ship emerges from a wormhole near the Moon |
| Middle | Security Council orders it destroyed; the tug defies orders |
| Middle | Sphere recovered at the Van de Graaff crater |
| Late | Mothership arrives, defenses destroyed, drilling begins |
The source does not say how much of the runtime passes before the mothership appears. On the page, at least, the film saves its title threat for the back half.
What the Cast Is Asked to Carry
Maika Monroe takes over Patricia Whitmore from Mae Whitman, a combat pilot who followed her father into service and dedicates her career to her mother Marilyn’s memory. Monroe is given almost nothing to do.
Sela Ward plays President Elizabeth Lanford. William Fichtner is General Joshua T. Adams, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who later succeeds Lanford as acting president. AngelaBaby appears as Rain Lao. Judd Hirsch returns as Julius Levinson.
The cast list is long. Goldblum leans on a persona the film mistakes for a performance. Hemsworth is a leading man with no arc. Usher plays Dylan Hiller, stepson of a legend, and the source notes that Steven Hiller was mentioned to have perished testing a hybrid fighter prototype.
That absence is the film’s founding wound. Early on, Emmerich and Devlin hoped Smith would return. Emmerich said in June 2013 that Smith would not return because “he’s too expensive.” Smith declined due to scheduling conflicts with Suicide Squad.
So Steven Hiller, promoted to colonel, died eleven years after the first film testing the first experimental alien-tech fighter. The sequel writes its own star out offscreen and hands the legacy to a stepson.
A Sequel Greenlit in 2014, Filmed in 2015
Plans for a follow-up started as early as 2001. 20th Century Fox greenlit the project in 2014. Principal photography began in April 2015, mostly in New Mexico, with the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah returning from the original.
Robert Loggia worked on the film near the end of his life. It is dedicated to his memory and commemorates him in the closing credits. That is the most sincere thing in the movie.
Resurgence opened June 24, 2016, twenty years after Independence Day, in 2D, 3D and IMAX 3D. Reviews were generally negative. Critics cited the lack of screen time.
What Actually Sinks Independence Day: Resurgence
The film’s failures, in the order they cost it most:
- It kills Steven Hiller offscreen and hands his legacy to a stepson.
- It wastes Pullman’s Whitmore, the one character with a real interior life.
- It holds back the mothership, and the source gives no runtime figure for when it lands.
- It builds a planetary defense apparatus, then renders it useless so a handful of pilots can save the day.
That last point is the whole argument. The Earth Space Defense is a good idea. The psychic link is a good idea. Neither is developed past the pitch, and the film spends its second half dismantling the first.
The tagline reads: “We had twenty years to prepare. So did they.” The interesting part of that sentence is the twenty years, and the film treats them as a caption rather than a story.
What is left is a legacy sequel that buries its legacy, and a cast of characters defined almost entirely by dead relatives. Emmerich can still stage a large object falling on a city. He cannot make the object mean anything.
Two decades is enough time to build something worth defending. Independence Day: Resurgence spends them on a bigger ship.
Score: 32/100 (3.2/10)
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
