‘Resurgence’ big, dumb summer fun – A mindless spectacle

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If you have any interest in a sequel to “Independence Day”, you’ll likely not be disappointed by the improbably enjoyable “Independence Day: Resurgence .” It’s silly, light-as-air popcorn entertainment.

Director Roland Emmerich’s conceit is simple and hilariously dumb: What would happen if 20 years after aliens invaded, they came back in a 3,000-mile-wide ship? It’s both a redux of the first film — and also not. The world has changed in the two decades since those hovering ships destroyed the White House and most major cities around the globe, and alien defense is now basically a subset of every military outfit — not just some shadowy undercover operation in an undisclosed base in the middle of the desert.

Misunderstood genius David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) is now the first guy they call, not the one knocking at the door trying to persuade everyone to listen. His dad, Julius (Judd Hirsch), wrote a memoir about the whole saving-the-Earth thing. And the generation of kiddos from the first movie have seemingly devoted themselves to their government, including the president’s daughter, Patricia (Maika Monroe), and Dylan Hiller (Jessie T. Usher), son of Vivica A. Fox’s Jasmine Hiller and stepson of Will Smith’s Steven Hiller, who died years ago and is memorialized as a national hero.

The only one not doing so hot is President Whitmore (Bill Pullman), who basically has alien-induced PTSD and a bushy “I’ve lost my mind” beard and cane. Oh, and, surprise! The long-haired Area 51 scientist Dr Brakish Okun (Brent Spiner) didn’t die in ’96 (yeah right); he was in a coma and wakes up when the aliens return.

There’s a whole mess of new characters, including the US president (Sela Ward, channeling Hillary Clinton); a French scientist (Charlotte Gainsbourg); an African general (Deobia Oparei); and a hunky fighter pilot (Liam Hemsworth) who’s engaged to Patricia.

Complaining

The plot is a big jumble of story lines, nonsense science talk and lots of “in ’96” references. Speaking of ’96, there’s nothing even remotely as thrilling or memorable as the first here — no mom, son and pup running through an L.A. tunnel, no Will Smith complaining about missing a barbeque while dragging a comatose alien through the desert, and no set pieces likely to influence future action movies.

Twentieth Century Fox didn’t screen this film for critics in advance — usually the sign of a clunker of a movie. Instead, this is the mindless spectacle we’ve been waiting for. This ain’t much, but it knows what it is, and it’s refreshing to have a “franchise” that isn’t bogged down with source material, fan expectations and allegiance to untold numbers of future films.

So grab some popcorn, turn your brain off, and hoot and holler along with the crowd.

 It would be fun to think that “Independence Day: Resurgence” is as godawful as a lot of people want to say it is — that it’s the “John Carter” of bombastically overscaled paramilitary ’90s-nostalgia alien disaster flicks. But seriously, it ain’t that bad. (And let’s be honest: The 1996 original isn’t that good.) It’s a greasy high-cheese blockbuster served up by people who know (mostly) what they’re doing — which is to say, director Roland Emmerich, in the 20 years since “ID4”, has not lost his touch for shamelessly grandiose and derivative sci-fi schlock spectacle. That said, a movie like this one wouldn’t be a movie like this one if it didn’t offer at least a few invitations to giggle at it. Viewers, of course, are free to choose their own, but just to get you started, here are some of the most ridiculous things about “ID4: Resurgence.”

The Most Ridiculous Character. His name is Dikembe Umbutu (Diobia Oparei), but then, what’s in a name? You will know him simply as “the warlord” (we meet him in the Central African desert where the carcass of the old alien spaceship is docked), and he has his own special technique for combating the deadly extraterrestrial menace. The other characters use machine guns, military jet fighters, cold-fusion bombs, and other stuff like that, but not our warlord: He’s sticking with what he knows best — the two machetes he carries around, criss-crossed on his back, for the entire film. (I don’t even think he takes them off to go to the bathroom.) Don’t get in the way of his blades, alien people! “You kill them from behind”, he gruntingly explains, and he means it, literally. There’s a great moment when a science nerd places his hands on an alien sphere, and suddenly he’s glued to it, and it’s sucking him in — and as everyone in the room rises up in alarm, you can glimpse the warlord in the background…reaching for that machete! He’s the closest thing the movie has to a character out of “Airplane!”

Relevance

The Most Ridiculously Timely Political Allusion. The “ID4” films are not exactly big on topical relevance. How could they be, when the original film was so busy raiding the 1970s with its mash-up of “Close Encounters” and a two-dozen-characters-you-could-hardly-care-less-about disaster film? But in “Resurgence” there’s one character who rings an unmistakably timely bell, and that’s the President of the United States — played by Sela Ward with a steely grin and a studiously tenacious “I am woman, hear me project my strong-on-defense military bona fides” resolve that’s a little too reminiscent of a certain presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to be coincidence. As much as the film would like to pretend that the casting is gender neutral, it’s not: Moments after she issues a terse command like “Take ‘em out, commander!” the president then says, “Let’s hope we did the right thing!” in a way that no Morgan Freeman president would ever need to do. And the surest (unconscious) sign that the filmmakers may be a little nervous about the prospect of a Hillary presidency is the fact that…well, let’s just say that no one stays president forever. (But really, Willliam Fichtner?)

The Most Ridiculously Sincere Bromantic Line. “ID4” of course, had Will Smith, and it made him a megaplex ultrastar, just as he made the movie an ultrasmash. In lieu of the late great Capt Hiller, “Resurgence” has two joystick fighter jocks: Hiller’s military-hero son, Dylan (Jessie T. Usher), and his rival, Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth), who was nearly responsible for Dylan’s death. Attempting to mend fences, Jake says (in reference to the loss of Dylan’s parents), “I’ve been where you are. And I know how deep it hurts.” It takes about 20 minutes for the movie to recover from that line and regain its proper attitude of folks-gettin’-blowed-up-real-good nonchalance. What the movie never quite defeats is the cruise-control innocuousness of this “Top Gun Lite” pair, with Hemsworth and Usher as such smooth, bland, unruffled bros that even their dive-bombing scenes feel like they’re happening on autopilot. (Agencies)

By Lindsey Bahr

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