You never know quite how he will respond to any predicament, nor, you sometimes feel, does he. It always is.) I will watch him in anything that stop-start delivery, all ums and hums, combines with his smile-so winning, yet so quick to die-and his buggy eyes to suggest a soul both hyper and hazed-over. (The world, by comparison, is easily saved. In short, it’s up to Goldblum to save the film. Rivalry flares between Hiller and Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth), a fellow sky jockey, but it peters out after a single punch in the canteen.

Usher), is now in the hot seat, though sadly he lacks the firepower of his father’s personality. Meanwhile, Smith’s character has died, either because Smith’s agent considered the financial package insufficiently galactic or, more likely, because Smith read the script. Who will stop them this time around? Whitmore is now a shaggy ruin with a walking stick and a supply of meds the current President (Sela Ward) seems decisive, but the film confines her to the fringes of the action. Needless to say, this dreary state of affairs cannot be allowed to persist, and the bracing news brought by the sequel, “Independence Day: Resurgence,” is that the aliens have returned, to harvest Earth’s molten core. So noble was their effort, apparently, that it ushered in two decades of universal peace: armed conflict among nations has subsided, and the world, in line with John Lennon’s instructions, has lived as one. Assistance was provided by his grumpy father (Judd Hirsch), a Marine Corps pilot (Will Smith), and Tom Whitmore (Bill Pullman), who was the leader of the free world and of the airborne defense.

Twenty years ago, in “Independence Day,” an alien attack was repelled by David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum), a scientist so brilliant that he even knew how to send a virus from his laptop.

Sequel to independence day resurgence