It’s an actual challenge to describe just how terrible Independence Day: Resurgence is, even in a year when the disaster that was Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice should have had me limbered up and ready to sling some juicy, pejorative adjectives.
This is a movie where the putative hero imitates a tasteless decal in what is supposed to be a meaningful act of defiance. It’s a film that offers a grim look at just how far Hollywood blockbusters will go to pander to Chinese censors and Chinese audiences. The dialogue seems straight from Wikipedia, and the plot makes no sense.
But watching Independence Day: Resurgence and then rewatching Independence Day itself, I couldn’t help but be struck by two things. As giant action blockbusters go, the Independence Day franchise is both curiously campy and unusually attuned to religious faith, specifically to Judaism. The movies may be, respectively, forgettable and truly awful, and yet they manage to lay down markers that, twenty years later, mainstream action movies have yet to catch up to.
By the time Independence Day was released in 1996, Harvey Fierstein was already a gay icon. He’d narrated The Times of Harvey Milk, a documentary about the openly gay San Francisco city supervisor, who was assassinated in 1978; produced Torch Song Trilogy, a collection of short plays about a Jewish drag queen, and adapted the play for the big screen; cameoed as a gay character on Cheers; become the first out gay man to star as a gay series regular on a television show; and done drag makeup for Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire.
Watching Fierstein vamp through Independence Day as Marty, a swishy neurotic scientist whose first instinct in the face of an alien invasion is to call his mother and his therapist, feels slightly odd and dated today.
But in the context of the era, there’s something remarkable about seeing that sort of unmistakable signalling in a big, red-meat, utterly American action movie. The mid-’90s were years when movies like In & Out and The Birdcage were still trying to convince moviegoers that gay men were like them, just a little nellier. Independence Day didn’t have to explain that Fierstein’s Marty was gay – it was obvious to anyone who was in the know – and the movie didn’t have to make an issue of his sexuality. Marty is there to embody pure panic, rather than to teach anyone a lesson in tolerance.
In a similar way, the tenderest moment in Independence Day: Resurgence comes courtesy not of any of the blandly pretty heterosexual couples in the film, but between two middle-aged gay men. We learn toward the beginning of the film that Dr. Brakish Okun (Star Trek veteran Brent Spiner) has been in a coma ever since one of the alien invaders used him to speak to humanity in the first film, and that in the years since, his partner, Dr. Isaacs (John Storey) has been caring for him, watering his orchids and visiting him daily.
After Okun wakes from his coma, signaling the new alien invasion, Isaacs is killed in one of the many battles against the invaders. Watching Okun mourn his partner, explaining how hopeless he will be without Isaacs to make sure he’s dressed properly and that he takes care of himself and his plants, is the most human moment in a movie where even the actual actors often come across as poorly rendered special effects.
In a similar way, I was struck anew by how Independence Day, more so than Independence Day: Resurgence, handles the question of how religious people might respond to an alien attack.
During the first film Julius Levinson (Judd Hirsch), the estranged father of scientist David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum), is presented as a devout Jew who sends his son off on a dangerous mission into space with a kippah and a copy of the Torah. As alien attacks batter the bunker where the remaining leadership of the U.S. government is hunkered down, Julius leads a group of children in prayer. It’s the rare Hollywood movie that presents religious faith as simply part of a character’s life, something he reaches for in a time of crisis and a facet of his personality that makes Julius a more specific character. In Independence Day: Resurgence, Julius’ religion mostly manifests in the Yiddish that peppers his vocabulary, but it’s still there, for anyone who knows how to look at it.
I devoutly hope that the entertainment industry won’t, for the most part, emulate anything about Independence Day: Resurgence. The fewer bad CGI sequences, incoherent plot twists and naked shout-outs to the Chinese military that make it into American blockbusters, the happier I’ll be.
But in its casual portrayal of gay men and religious Jews fighting the apocalypse along with all the square-jawed leading men Hollywood has to offer, the Independence Day franchise still feels a tiny bit futuristic, even if everything else about Resurgence seems supremely tired.