UNABLE to leave a 20-year-old, US$817m, sleeping franchise lie, German writer/director/producer Roland Emmerich has reanimated his 2006 hit “Independence Day,” ready for a global assault.

    As wilfully cheesy and cheerfully nonsensical as the first, the movie’s two distinguishing features are the absence of original star Will Smith — of small consequence in such an over-populated cast — and the blinding glare of Hollywood’s newfound love for China, with Angelababy and Chin Han, enjoying brief moments of Mandarin-language dialogue before Kuala Lumpur falls on top of London. Literally.

    Harking cheekily back to the original “Star Trek” and all its TV iterations, this is a stealth assault on that audience before Paramount’s “Star Trek Beyond” opens in July, with family-friendly names such as Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman and Judd Hirsch to anchor older audiences while Liam Hemsworth, Maika Monroe and Jessie Usher take care of younger crowds. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Angelababy and Deobia Oparei are there for foreign markets, and the aliens themselves will look remarkably familiar for connoisseurs of the “Aliens” franchise.

    In the 1996 original, MIT satellite engineer David Levinson (Goldblum) assisted pilot Steve Hillier (Will Smith) to help President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) defeat a fleet of hostile aliens on July 4, Independence Day. On the very 20-year-anniversary of this proud victory, the Earth is threatened again by the same evil, slimy space invaders, and the various principal players in the first film must come back to creaky life to assist in its defense. The peril, of course, is heightened: last time, the mothership was one-quarter of the size of the moon — now “it’s 3,000 miles in diameter!”

    There’s also a slew of new characters to define, meaning “Independence Day: Resurgence” hops around its cast with an ADD gusto which ultimately becomes part of its occasionally-evasive charm. While the purposefully multi-ethnic and globally-inclined casting may feel itself to be revolutionary, in reality it’s a page ripped out of the original “Star Trek” TV show, as is the idea that the invaders work as a hive, with those exposed to the original invasion force now part of the Queen Bee’s consciousness.

    With Levison examining strange extra-terrestrial occurrences in Africa accompanied by a psychiatrist played by Gainsbourg, the new U.S. president (Sela Ward) must grapple with this latest invasion on her own. Whitmore is mentally debilitated, but his former fighter-pilot daughter (Monroe) is now a White House speechwriter. There’s an “international legacy squadron” of pilots, led by Dylan Hellier (Usher, playing the son of Will Smith’s character) and Rain (Angelababy), while over on the moon, their former colleague, rebel bad-boy orphan pilot Jake (Hemsworth), kicks his heels.

    More and more cast members flood in — more than aliens, for the greater part of the film — from Judd Hirsch as Levinson’s father, to Vivica Fox returning as Hellier’s mother and the comedy comatose scientist Brackish Okun (Brent Spiner), to, eventually, a schoolbus full of lost children. Undoubtedly, there’s too much going on here, but the fast switches do help disguise Emmerich and co-writer/producer Dean Devlin’s thin premise.

    And it’s ultimately hard to resist a film which is so confidently self-knowing. As the aliens commence their global destruction — which includes a trademark Emmerich tidal wave — Goldblum quips “they like to get the landmarks” just before the London Eye hones into view (and shortly before Kuala Lumpur falls on top of it). There’s a white ball, an emissary from a now-extinct “nice alien” planet, which is hilariously chatty and expositional. The ever-reliable Goldblum now has a wildly improbable role as the head of the global space defence program, and “palpable” sexual tension with the bizarrely-cast Gainsbourg.

    “Independence Day: Resurgence” doles out the action and effects work in carefully measured, incremental doses, which give the film a cumulative tension almost despite itself. Even if it’s hokey and funny, this is a loud, effects-driven piece, with a driving score. For fans of Roland Emmerich disaster movies, it both hits all the marks, while delivering nothing new. Yet in today’s global marketplace, that should be enough to deliver the commercial payload.

    The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen. (SD-Agencies)