BouldU.S.–Mexico border that the racist metaphors write themselves, the
insectile aliens are depicted as migrant labor; when they return in the
sequel, it is as an embodiment of colonial resource extraction.
The film has precisely one moment of interest. Everything is going
badly. The aliens have wiped out the U.S. government. They have lured
almost the entire Air Force into a lethal trap. And they are close to drilling
through to Earth’s core, which they intend to extract for no reason that
makes any kind of sense. The ragtag remnants of the military are prepar-
ing for a fight they cannot possibly win. Which is when former president
Whitmore—the Gulf War veteran responsible for defeating the aliens
twenty years earlier—strides into the hangar and delivers one of those
stirring patriotic speeches that everyone can hear regardless of how far
away they are, even if they are wearing earmuffs. It is not as rousing as his
Independence Day reworking of the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry
V, but it does contain this singular admission: “We convinced an entire
generation that this is a battle that we could win. And they believed us.”
Not one person in his audience—apart from David Levinson, to
whom he is ostensibly speaking—looks old enough to have been born
when the aliens first came, just as we are now only months away from
the United States deploying its first soldier who has lived his or her en-
tire life in a nation waging multiple simultaneous wars around the world
(against an entire generation that has grown up subject to U.S. military
aggression). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue that any state which
subordinates itself to “an immense war machine” and “makes war an
unlimited movement with no other aim than itself ” is fascist—a point
appreciated by the violent satirical space opera Starship Troopers (1997), if
not by Presidents Whitmore, Bush, Jr., Obama, or Trump. Although the
aliens are defeated for a second time in Independence Day: Resurgence, it is
still only just another battle in an ongoing conflict. The conclusion sees
humankind being recruited by other alien species to lead a coalition in