Independence Day: Resurgence (12A)

two stars

Dir: Roland Emmerich

With: Jeff Goldblum, Liam Hemsworth, Maika Monroe

Runtime: 120 minutes

ACCORDING to Boris Johnson, never usually a visitor to these parts of the paper despite the Jean Harlow hair (or should that be the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz?), the UK has a chance this week to have its own Independence Day should it vote a certain way.

Whatever happens tonight and tomorrow is likely to be vastly more entertaining than Roland Emmerich’s picture, a sequel to the 1996 blockbuster that takes the original’s charm and Oscar-winning special effects flare and trades them for cliches and by-the-numbers mayhem.

The picture opens 20 years on from the events which threatened Earth last time around. Mankind appears to have learned its lessons from the last too-close-for-comfort encounter, and there has been no war for decades. Even Russia and America are getting on famously. Just to show civilisation has entered a new, cool, post-modern age, there is a woman president, too (Sela Ward).

It is all quiet, then, on the western, eastern, northern and southern fronts. Too quiet. After what seems a good half hour of nothing happening, things mercifully start to occur. Alien prisoners who have been catatonic for decades show signs of waking up. A spaceship left behind from last time is flickering back to life. More importantly, Jeff Goldblum, without whom no science fiction blockbuster is complete, has turned up and is looking increasingly troubled. It is never a good sign when Jeff looks anxious. Like Prof Brian Cox appearing puzzled, it is a sure symbol that something is amiss in the universe.

All those years of peace, love and understanding lead humankind to respond to the new strangers in the skies the only way they know how – by attacking with everything they have got. Before you can say, “Shouldn’t we have asked them to tea first?” there is wall to wall shouting, screaming and missile firing. But who are these visitors? What do these strange symbols mean? And how did Charlotte Gainsbourg’s agent persuade her this was a good gig to take?

Some familiar faces from the previous picture turn up, though to disclose their identity would take some of the fun away from a picture that needs all the help it can get to hold your interest. Joining the old gang are some new young guns, led by Liam Hemsworth, Maika Monroe and Jessie T Usher as fighter pilots who have to boldly go, etc, while looking cool in jumpsuits. Each is given the chance to do plenty of “cockpit acting”, a task that requires lots of pulling faces at close quarters.

Emmerich returns to the original for the same basic story structure: visitors are coming, visitors arrive, the Earth must be saved from those pesky visitors, and so on. One did not expect much originality on that score. Every alien invasion picture sticks to the same bones. What is more tiresome are the countless nods to other pictures, Cloverfield, Close Encounters and Jurassic Park among them. Characters spout cliches as if their continued existence on Earth depended on them, and there is lots of fist pumping thrown in for bad measure too. Though the story is a simple one, it is told in a scrappy fashion, with ugly jumps from one part to the next. Even the destruction of world landmarks is carried out with not much imagination.

The entire enterprise seems dated, as though the picture was made two months after the original movie rather than two decades. But then Earth-in-peril films, Independence Day, Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact, and the rest, had a good long moment in the sun. The world survived and moved on. So did special effects, although one would not always know it from the sometimes scrappy fare on offer here. Audiences have progressed too, and it takes more to impress them than giant space ships. They want solid stories, three dimensional characters, a dash of wit mixed in with the spectacle, none of which they get here. Independence Day, alas, has had its day.