Twenty years on from the global devastation wrought by the alien nasties of Independence Day, Earth has united to adapt and adopt all the leftover technology to prepare for the retaliation. On 4 July, naturally, it comes. And it comes hard.
★★★★
As Dubai’s Burj Khalifa lances down from a fiery sky into the London Eye, tossed like a used popsicle stick amid the gravity-churning fury of a 3,000 mile-wide, claw-shaped alien mother-of-all-battles-ship, Jeff Goldblum tiredly absorbs it all and deadpans: “They like to get the landmarks.”
If his David Levinson — one-time computer guy, now Director of the Earth Space Defense — exudes a wonderful, war-of-the-worlds-weary sense of ‘been there, blown that up’, his creator and chief catastrophiser Roland Emmerich is as gleefully destructive as a kid given a free pass to smash all the crockery at the village fête. Especially the saucers. With new tech, new toys and new ideas, the modern era’s Master Of Disaster has returned to the scene of his greatest triumph and really let rip.
Allowing the same blend of multiplex-rattling spectacle and ‘yeah, you got us’ daftness, Emmerich has gone all out to recapture his ’96 mojo and, for the most part, succeeds. While the occasional call-back clunks (Jessie Usher as orphaned-son-of-Will-Smith Dylan Hiller fails to sell the line, “Get ready for a close encounter, bitch!”, but we’re not sure who ever could), other riffs prove sonorously nostalgic. And we’re not just talking about another death-defying dog. Whether it’s Goldblum reliving his co-pilot jitters in another spacecraft, Bill Pullman pulling on his flight suit once more as PTSD-stricken ex-president Whitmore, or Brent Spiner making a welcomely deranged return as surprisingly not-dead professor Brakish Okun, you’ll likely thrum with the same sweet, not-able-to-take-it-too-seriously joy you felt during the first film.
Assuming you’re old enough, of course. But for the next-gen moviegoer, Emmerich and his co-writer/producer Dean Devlin have provided next-gen Earth defenders. Joining Usher are Liam Hemsworth as obligatory maverick Jake Morrison, Maika Monroe replacing Mae Whitman as Whitmore’s daughter Patricia (now an ex-fighter pilot herself, ensuring that in this movie it’s not only the men who get to kick ET’s ass) and Hong Kong model/singer/actor Angelababy.
Old and new faces never fully mingle, though. Aside from a first-act trip to the moon and some cursory father-daughter interaction between the Whitmores, it’s ‘kids over here, oldies over there’. Similar to an awkward family party, except here the kids are going off to engage in an all-too-brief skirmish amid some surprisingly placed paddy fields on the alien mothership, rather than sneaking outside to smoke cigs.
Read More: Empire Online