There is a bit of trivia on the IMDB page for
Independence Day: Resurgence that talks about how, after the success of the first film, 20th Century Fox paid screenwriter Dean Devlin a large sum of money to write a script for a sequel. The story goes though, that after completing the script for what would have been the original sequel to 1996's
Independence Day Devlin decided not to turn it in and instead gave the money back to the studio. The trivia goes on to state that Devlin did this because he felt the story didn't live up to the first film. As we are now twenty years removed from that original film and have now seen what an
Independence Day sequel looks like this course of action only seems to beg one question: how bad must that original sequel script have been? Could it really have retreaded the beats of the first film as much as
Resurgence does? The only thing that differentiates the first film from this new one is the passage of time and how that has changed earth's technologies and defense systems while having what cast returns look a little older. The IMDB page goes on to say that it was only fifteen years later, when Devlin met up with director Roland Emmerich to try again, that they felt they had finally "cracked" a story for a sequel. Though it is difficult to be downright negative towards a film story and character development certainly aren't
Resurgence's strong suits and may even be the most laughable aspects of a movie that tries really hard to be funny. One can't help but feel that, in this scenario, "cracking" the story only meant they were offered a lot more money than before. If
Resurgence does indeed deliver the story that Emmerich and Devlin thought more justified the existence of a sequel to their 1996 feature it can only now be concluded that they were only going to repeat themselves more with the scrapped screenplay. While
Resurgence certainly finds moments of dumb fun and some rather spectacular action sequences given special effects have improved greatly in the last two decades it is more or less a retread of what we saw in that original movie in terms of ensemble cast and humans versus aliens. Granted, the question easily posed in response to that statement is, "what did you expect it to be?" and the answer to that is that they at least try to find a new way into that same old story.
