Nobody goes to an Emmerich film craving a nuanced plot or layered performances. The delight of his movies is that they’re user-friendly—less noxiously macho than Michael Bay’s films but also more shamelessly cartoon-y than a real auteur, like Steven Spielberg. Independence Day was peak Emmerich because it best harnessed the “God, isn’t this great?!” enthusiasm he had for larger-than-life spectacle: Smith’s widescreen grin and Jeff Goldblum’s not-quite-winking turn as a bemused scientist perfectly synched up with their director’s weightless tone, clueing us in that it was okay to sit back and let the concentrated tomfoolery wash over you.

In Resurgence, Goldblum still cracks his wry jokes—Brent Spiner and Judd Hirsch reprise their roles as one-note comic relief—but the original’s pleasure has mostly been replaced by a formidable competence that won’t inspire a lot of beach balls in the theater. In part, this is because Resurgence’s greatest suspense isn’t whether Earthlings will be able to stop a new band of invading aliens but, rather, how Emmerich can justify revisiting his blockbuster so many years later.

Resurgence’s greatest suspense isn’t whether Earthlings will be able to stop the invasion, but rather how Emmerich can justify revisiting his blockbuster so many years later.

Many sequels have to elevate the stakes so a follow-up seems understandable, but with Resurgence, Emmerich is essentially just repeating himself. The director isn’t merely competing with his 1996 film—he’s squaring off with a litany of invasion and disaster movies that he and others have made since. It’s no contest: The alien ships may be bigger and the creatures themselves more impressively rendered, but the déjà vu of destruction doesn’t do Resurgence any favors. One of the first film’s strengths was, oddly, its unoriginality: Emmerich didn’t reinvent the alien-invasion storyline so much as he figured out the most mainstream, super-sized way of telling it. By comparison, Resurgence is an echo of a rehashed notion, as irrelevant as it is solidly executed.

Does it matter that the new film comes out in a post-9/11 world, one where it doesn’t take much imagination to envision a peaceful city ripped to shreds or buildings reduced to rubble? Where other contemporary blockbusters try to ennoble their scenes of carnage by introducing an air of dignified shock and solemnity, Resurgence blithely ignores the real-world parallels. Lots of characters self-sacrifice for the greater good—and others’ deaths are meant to be motivating factors for our haunted protagonists—but it all just glides right past.



This might be tact on Emmerich’s part—the director understands his movie’s role as harmless entertainment—but one suspects that it’s more likely a sign that he doesn’t want to mess with a sure-shot formula for a movie that needs to be a big hit. Emmerich’s last real commercial success was 2012, which came out seven years ago, an eternity for a blockbuster filmmaker, and Resurgence feels self-consciously fashioned to serve an audience its director hopes is still out there. This film isn’t a resurgence—it’s a retrenchment. Why wait 20 years to prove you can make your best film all over again, but without the sparkle that made it so special in the first place?