sequel to independence day resurgence awesome

As the skies darken and ominous extra-terrestrial signals are received ahead of the July 4 holiday, will these plucky kids kick enough alien ass to do their folks proud? Even if we had the inclination to care, we hardly have the time, as the writers race to cram in a surfeit of storylines, many of them involving returning players. Joining the new guard, and seemingly assuming the lead role for further franchise entries, is Liam Hemsworth as Jake, a renegade pilot with all the palatable roguishness and toothy luster of “Top Gun’s” Maverick Mitchell while he’s not a blood relative of any known characters, we’re informed that he was orphaned in the first alien attack. president Lanford (Sela Ward) dubiously informs us, “We have had no armed conflict.” “Resurgence” may notionally be set on planet Earth, but it plainly takes place in a parallel universe. Usher) also following a noble military path is former first daughter Patricia Whitmore (Maika Monroe, replacing Mae Whitman), whose dad (a silver-bearded Bill Pullman) is addled by trauma from the attack of 1996 - since which time, steely new U.S. The previous film’s hero, Will Smith’s fighter pilot Steven Hiller, has passed on in vague circumstances, succeeded by his strapping son Dylan (Jessie T. Its rather scattered screenplay - written by five hands, where the 1996 film managed with two - forges a dense network of callbacks to established events and characters, in certain cases via next-generation newbies. Whether our collective memory of “Independence Day” is quite as treasured and detailed as “Resurgence” imagines it to be is another question.

In 2016, however, the chief point of reference for “ Independence Day: Resurgence” is “Independence Day” itself, even as its narrative and aesthetic (now in postmillennial 3D) provides a handy summation of the Hollywood blockbuster’s evolution over the last 20 years: Just as the “ID4” influence has been detectable in everything from “Armageddon” to “Pacific Rim,” so are those successors reflected in Emmerich’s latest.

When “Independence Day” nuked all before its path in the summer of 1996, it registered as a buffed-up sci-fi twist on the heaving, heavily populated disaster spectaculars of the 1970s, prompting a wave of similarly muscle-headed, brink-of-doom epics in its wake - including a couple more by Emmerich himself. Nostalgia, as they say, is not what it used to be.

Sequel to independence day resurgence awesome