Metacritic reviews

As spectacular as you’d hope from a sequel to the 1996 planet-toaster, and as amusingly cheesy. You’ll enjoy yourself enough that you won’t even miss Will Smith.

Resurgence doles out the action and effects work in carefully calculated, incremental doses, which give the film a cumulative tension. Even if it’s hokey and jokey, this is a loud, effects-driven piece, with a driving score. For fans of Roland Emmerich disaster movies, this both hits all the marks, while delivering nothing new.

It’s all too much too fast, and the cumulative effect is like watching a two-hour trailer – more dizzying than thrilling.

The main thing consumers will be looking for from Resurgence is bang-for-buck entertainment, and that it delivers reasonably successfully.

This cinematic Big Mac entertains abundantly on its own second-hand merits.

The spaceships and the destruction are bigger but not better in Roland Emmerich‘s twenty-years-later follow-up, where only Jeff Goldblum‘s sense of humor saves the day.

While the plot is dumb and the script is worse, watching aliens explode in spectacular fashion isn't the worst excuse to spend to two hours in air-conditioning.

This might have been titled ‘Independence Day: Submergence’. It’s certainly hard not to drown in the sea of CGI, with the exponential increase of pixels being to Independence Day what the Star Wars prequels were to the original trilogy.

This isn’t just lazy, it’s borderline nonsensical. Resurgence inflates the scale of the alien threat to such a preposterous degree – the mothership takes up roughly an eighth of the Earth’s total surface – that the queues of honking traffic and rooftop helicopter rescues we’re supposed to invest in can’t help but feel like microscopic trifles.

Joyless and tedious, a reboot quite without the first film’s audacity and fun... It’s a movie that is going through the intergalactic motions.