Roland Emmerich fulfills the MacMahonian criteria required to be considered a fully fledged auteur, since his films evince a distinct unity and coherence of style and content. Namely, Emmerich's films (1) consistently uphold America's values, (2) in order to do so, they systematically depict America being cataclysmically destroyed and (3) they are not that good.
Independence Day: Resurgence is the 17th feature film directed by Roland Emmerich, German director, producer and screenwriter who moved to Tinseltown in 1992 to continue to do with bigger budgets what he had been doing in his native Germany for some 10 years, the qualities of which, contrary to standard MacMahonian protocol, were commented upon in the previous paragraph.
Independence Day: Resurgence, it certainly will not surprise the MacMahonian's numerous readership to learn, consists in a totally lazy regurgitation of the 1996 eponymous effort, also directed by Emmerich, involving an alien invasion etc.
One is left with the impression Emmerich did this film to try to top George Lucas' Star Wars VII –the Force Awakens (2015) in coming up with film History's most lukewarm disappointing sequel. Independence Day: Resurgence's moon base is straight out of Space 1999 (1975-1977), the moon walking scenes straight out of 2001, a Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1967), the spaceship duels straight out of Star Wars. Plot and twists thereof, the less said the better, character development marginally above Pokemon.
Three (marginally) redeeming qualities: (1) the action takes place in 2016, but an alternative 2016, as 20 years after the alien attack depicted in the original Independence Day massive investment in astronautics, avionics etc resulted in cool moon bases, a protective laser satellite belt around the Earth and hi tech skyscrapers and maglev vehicles all over the place that manage to make even DC look cool; (3) increasingly mandatory Chinese cameo, in the person of none other than Angelababy, playing hero love interest, unremarkable in itself except inasmuch as it rekindled my hope in a China-US rapprochement and (3) ending sequel-threatening quote (from mandatory eccentric scientist): “time to kick some serious alien ass”.