It took director Roland Emmerich twenty years to get around to making a sequel to his 1996 alien invasion blockbuster INDEPENDENCE DAY, and I think the general consensus when INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE reached theatres was that he shouldn't have bothered. The movie made just short of $400 million at the global box office, but reactions from critics and a lot of movie-goers were not positive.
I was never a huge fan of INDEPENDENCE DAY to begin with, but I gave RESURGENCE a chance and found it very tough to sit through.
While doing the press rounds for his new film, a World War II movie called MIDWAY that reaches theatres on November 8th, Emmerich revealed that he's not very fond of RESURGENCE himself. In fact, it seems he regrets making it.
Speaking with Yahoo!, Emmerich said,
I just wanted to make a movie exactly like the first, but then in the middle of production Will (Smith) opted out because he wanted to do SUICIDE SQUAD. I should have stopped making the movie because we had a much better script. After I had to, really fast, cobble another script together. And I should have just said 'no,' because all of a sudden I was making something I criticized myself, a sequel. Life sometimes happens a certain way… but I’ve always been into American movies and I never could understand anything else."
Directed by Emmerich from a script he wrote with Dean Devlin, James Vanderbilt, James A. Woods, and Nicolas Wright, INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE has the following synopsis:
We always knew they were coming back. After INDEPENDENCE DAY redefined the event movie genre, the next epic chapter delivers global spectacle on an unimaginable scale. Using recovered alien technology, the nations of Earth have collaborated on an immense defense program to protect the planet. But nothing can prepare us for the aliens' advanced and unprecedented force. Only the ingenuity of a few brave men and women can bring our world back from the brink of extinction.
The film stars Jessie T. Usher, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Vivica A. Fox, Judd Hirsch, Brent Spiner, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Liam Hemsworth, Joey King, Maika Monroe, Sela Ward, DeObia Oparei, Angelababy, Mckenna Grace, and William Fichtner.
Since Will Smith didn't return, it was said that his character died in an accident between movies.
If you want to watch a movie that even the director wishes didn't exist, INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE can be found on Amazon.