Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
It feels like just a little under two months since we discussed Roland Emmerich’s sci-fi destruction set-piece Independence Day, because, well, it was, in our Disaster Movies episode. Reviews would seem to indicate that this is a disaster in a more conventional sense, but I figured I’d give it the benefit of the doubt. I can’t say it did a great deal to repay my faith it it, but at the very least it’s not actively miserable.
There’s not a great deal of plot to pick over – mankind’s been doing its best to pull together and figure out better weapons after the events of the first film, knowing that another invasion attempt is likely, and, well, here it is. There’s a few strands for the narrative to pull together. The current director of the Earth Space Defence, Jeff Goldblum’s David Levinson, sees the arrival of an alien artificial intelligence and is promptly overruled on how to handle it, the military blowing it up, but not before it leaves a part of itself to help with the exposition in the final act. The flyboys doing the blowing up are largely headed up by Dylan Hiller (Jessie T. Usher) and his estranged ex-buddy Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth). Down on Earth the science department is headed up by a reawakened Dr. Brakish Okun (Brent Spiner), who reemerges from a coma as the evil aliens approach, and there’s also an odd sub-plot with the head of a totalitarian African state Dikembe Umbutu (Deobia Oparei) who’s country was waging a guerrilla war with the aliens, as it was home to the only mothership on the ground at the time of Goldblum’s computer virus trick.
So, once the stupidly colossal alien ship appears, wrecks a ton of landmarks and starts digging a hole to the core of the planet to harvest it, because science, humanity launches another counterattack that flops, before hitting on a wheeze to use that there alien AI as bait for a trap to lure the alien queen out into the open and take it out, which they theorise will have the same effect crippling as an Apple Powerbook connecting to the alien’s wifi and changing the router password, or whatever Goldblum did in the first film.
Which, in general terms, is broadly the same plot as the first film, but without the charisma. And, it turns out, that was the only thing holding the first film together. In abstract terms, more or less every other element of this film is an improvement, certainly effects-wise, but without any real interest in the lead characters it’s tough to care one way or the other about anything that’s happening in it.
The first film embraced and played up it’s cheeseball nature, and to be fair I think Emmerich tries to go in the same direction with this, but he doesn’t have the characters in place to back it up. The only interesting characters are the returning ones, Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Brent Spiner, and the new ones who are supposed to carry the action don’t make much impact.
Shorn of this, it’s just another CG showreel, and, well, we’ve all seen enough of them and while the effects work here is fine, it’s not particularly noteworthy or worth going out of your way to see. Sure, this isn’t great, but in a year where Gods of Egypt was unleashed upon an unsuspecting populace it’s hard to be too offended by this film.