World's End (Again): INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE

Independence Day: Resurgence is a big, dumb, simplistic summer spectacle. And on that level – and that level alone – it’s mostly satisfying. Like its predecessor, the biggest hit of 1996, it is modernized 50’s pulp flying saucers sci-fi done up in storms of cutting-edge effects and an unfailingly direct corny affect. They’re the sort of movies that bring gigantic UFOs to hover menacingly over the Earth before spewing forth malevolent destruction. They don’t come in peace, so humans must fight back. There’s no great metaphor at work, innovative speculative alien designs on display, nuanced character development, or provocative subtext. It’s just straight to the point: loud, outsized ray gun shoot-‘em-ups as revenge for large-scale landmark destruction. It is what it is, and I suspect anyone going to see this would know what they’re in for, especially with Roland Emmerich (he of the original, as well as The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, and White House Down) at the helm.

With a twenty-year gap between the original and this sequel, Resurgence takes the opportunity to imagine an alternate universe. It removes some of the modern day what-if?-scenario frisson from the build-up, but serves to turbo-charge the action with faster ships and zippier weapons. The movie opens surmising that the aftermath of its precursor caused an era of international harmony. There was no time to fight each other while people were too busy mopping up remaining aliens, studying massive crashed spacecraft, building a planetary defense force, and appropriating extraterrestrial tech into our own. That’s why travel is faster, weapons are more powerful, and Skype signals are so strong. (An earthling video chats with a man on the moon with no lag. No wonder there’s world peace.) Alas, as humanity regrouped, so did the aliens. Guess what? They’re back, and this time they’re meaner, bigger, and more prepared. Surprise, surprise.

Emmerich stages the proceedings as a reiteration of the original’s plot in a larger, newer package. Alien beasties swarm out to attack. Cities are leveled. Humanity appears on the brink of destruction until – eureka! – we have a plan to strike back. That’s familiar. What’s new this time around is the size of the spectacle. Now filled up with CG filigree where the first was one of the last big hurrahs for model work, there’s room to blow up more of the Earth, leading to one of the great hilarious B-movie exchanges in the picture when the alien craft is landing. “It’s touching down over the Atlantic!” “Which part?” “All of it.” Yes, just like that all cities bordering the Atlantic are smashed and flooded. It’s such an overwhelmingly, incomprehensibly large swath of destruction, no time for teasing down one famous place at a time, it’s hard to feel. At least it shows the intergalactic attackers have improved on their plan and just smashed us all to pieces right away.

Of course the fate of the world rests in the hands of small group of stereotypes. It’s one of those disaster movies packed to the gills with no character arcs, just threadbare subplots and a cast that’s half comic relief and half stock types. All surviving cast members return (minus Will Smith), notably Bill Pullman as the former president and Jeff Goldblum as a prominent scientist. It’s nice to see them headlining a major motion picture again, especially one that leans into the nuttiness of its premise. There’s a moment where an alien-fighting expert African warlord (Deobia Oparei) wants to board an emergency trip to the moon. Goldblum calmly looks at him and says, in a dry eccentric line reading only he can conjure, “This is off limits to…uh…ah, ah…warlords.” (He’ll later be happy the intimidating guy packs his machetes and hitches a ride despite the objection.) Elsewhere there’s a president (Sela Ward), a general (William Fichtner), a psychologist (Charlotte Gainsbourg – what a cast!), and a passel of attractive twenty-something fighter pilots (Liam Hemsworth, Maika Monroe, Jessie T. Usher, Angelababy) representing a new generation with somehow less personality than the old.

There’s something familiar and hollow, but routinely diverting, about all this space invaders hullabaloo. Watching cities get decimated, people trapped in bunkers planning their responses, fighter jets scrambling, and laser guns zapping is just a regurgitation of a regurgitation. But at least the movie is shamelessly itself, simple and a little loopy. There’s a tonal mismatch between the devastation and the general lightness. London and D.C. are exploded. Families are torn apart. Untold millions die off screen. And also a man (Brent Spiner) wakes up from a two-decade coma and runs around Area 51 with goofball zeal, a frustrated human flips off a monster while urinating on an alien flight deck, and two lovebirds discuss their real estate options. (They’re going to buy their dream house, “if it’s still there.”) It’s a movie that includes a huge desert melee against massive tentacled critters lurking out of Green Slime, squishy cannon fodder, and a giant queen Kaiju rampaging while the humans finagle a magic cure-all MacGuffin orb into helping them save the planet. Then it gives a school bus full of kids (and Judd Hirsch) ringside seats for the finale

Somehow this added up to light dopey fun in my mind, a passable sound-and-light show. It’s apocalyptic and harmless, high stakes and totally inconsequential. And Emmerich is enough of an old pro to know it. He and his co-writers (like his old collaborator Dean Devlin) are specialists in crafting gleaming half-serious silliness. They throw in a handful of self-aware lines winking at the goofiness of the whole endeavor, including having two different characters say, “That’s definitely bigger than last time.” And they have the right components to build their frivolous popcorn craft. When the battles begin, the swirling effects have a fun adventure spirit, and throughout Markus Förderer’s cinematography feels properly industrial-strength clear, making the film’s abundance of murky and confined sets appropriately glassy steel and dim mood. The plot’s convolutions pass by with the excitement of a 12-year-old recounting the events in a bargain bin sci-fi paperback. The thing is just as formulaic as you’d suspect, and a crassly commercial attempt to cash-in on a 90’s nostalgia property. It's not entirely successful, and yet it does what Jurassic World and Fuller House couldn’t (an admittedly low bar). It finds just enough reason to exist and pulls off a return with some skill. I didn’t even mind the final shot where characters practically turn to the camera and say with a grin, “How about we make this a trilogy? Whaddya say?”

Have-Nots v. Have: TOWER HEIST

The great irony of Tower Heist is that it’s an expensive Hollywood production made by and starring wealthy people that nonetheless manages to tap into some of the 99% rage that’s sweeping the country. The plot concerns a Bernie-Madoff-style Ponzi scheme that sends sleazy finance titan Arthur Shaw (a slimy performance from Alan Alda) into house arrest pending trial. The employees at The Tower, the – what else? – towering New York apartment building he lives in had their entire pensions invested with the man. They’re understandably furious and disappointed when they learn that not only is their money gone, but also that the man will be locked up on the top floor for the near future. It seems that they’ll never get their money back, until a plan begins to form. What follows is involving and enjoyable escapism, competently executed fluff.

Ben Stiller plays Josh Kovacs, the manager of the building, a man who is great at his job, who cares deeply about the building, it’s inhabitants, and it’s employees. It was his idea to ask about investing the pensions with their richest resident. When the FBI agent (the always welcome Téa Leoni) in charge of investigating and detaining Arthur Shaw tells the manager that it’s unlikely that the staff will get their money back soon, if at all, he storms up to the penthouse with the concierge, his brother-in-law (Casey Affleck), and the newly hired elevator operator (Michael Peña). Much to their surprise, Kovacs takes a golf club and destroys some of Shaw’s personal property. The Tower’s owner (Judd Hirsch) promptly fires them.

The three of them are now in the perfect position to execute a plan that, if it succeeds, will steal back enough money to give to the staff that has had their savings ground under by this financial skullduggery. They’ll rob Shaw, a daring, high stakes heist, and find the missing millions that the FBI has been unable to find. To pull off the heist, the three guys get in contact with an ex-banker (Matthew Broderick) who was too meek and honest for the business, apparently, and who was recently evicted from The Tower. He’s good with numbers, but they’ll still need help with the actual robbing part. Luckily, Kovacs went to daycare with a man from his neighborhood who was just the other day arrested for his thievery. They bail him out and get him to help, bringing into the picture Eddie Murphy, who talks a mile-a-minute in his slickest, funniest performance in over a decade.

Now that the team has fallen into place, it’s only a matter of pulling off the heist. It’s complex to a certain degree, although nothing compared to the works of Danny Ocean and crew, filled with double crossings and unexpected complications. The film sets up the stakes and then sends the cast through it capably. The other staff members – Gabourey Sidibe (a maid with a slippery Jamaican accent), Marcia Jean Kurtz (a no-nonsense secretary), and Stephen Henderson (a twinkly-eyed doorman) – fill out the rest of the supporting cast nicely, which is already peppered with talented people giving funny performances. The heist has to work with and around the staff to pull it off and it’s nice to see a big Hollywood production make decent use of its ensemble.

Director Brett Ratner has a reputation as a shallow studio hack that’s not entirely unearned. His films do generally feature a baseline competency, though. I’m not prepared to make some kind of grand auteurist defense on his behalf, but I will say that when paired up with good actors and a decent script, he has at times shown that he knows how to stay out of the way. He is not a filmmaker of distinctive personality, but that’s okay here as it is in, say, his Rush Hour. This is nothing more than a super slick, pleasing and broad, feather-light entertainment. It gets the job done. The writing can’t be called especially nimble, but the script by Ted Griffin and Jeff Nathanson is light enough on its feet to generate enough excitement and enjoyment. There’s some fun stunt work and great use of the building’s height to create some stomach-dropping moments, all the while the score by Christophe Beck, which must be a partial homage to David Shire’s for the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three, keeps things bouncing along nicely. Dante Spinotti shoots the film in warm, shining autumn colors that enhance the New York City in late November setting with some terrific location shooting during Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

That’s probably the best, if awfully imperfect, analogy for why the film worked for me. It’s a soothing, professional spectacle of a comic thriller that parades big stars and photogenic locations through an exciting plot that is both familiar and new. There’s little attempt to flesh out the emotional or personal lives of the characters, although there’s a charming low-key romance the starts to develop between Stiller and Leoni before it’s dropped entirely once the plot really gets going. It’s a big, shallow entertainment that nonetheless taps into some very real class outrage and gives the whole thing a bit more of a kick than it would otherwise have. Tower Heist is light recessionary escapism that’s just satisfying enough to be a lot of fun.