Consummate landscape smasher Roland Emmerich isn’t happy, or so it seems, with killing us all off with global warming, Godzilla or Mayan predictive chicanery. No. He wants us to suffer more and more pain, to constantly jack up the glitzy blitz of our apocalypses, trumping our destruction each time with yet another continent-melting conceit. You might even begin to think he’s some sort of sadist. This, to be honest, would explain his palpable delight in noisily offing humanity every other film. It’s also the only reason we can think of for Emmerich’s recent announcement that he’s going to make another Independence Day movie.

Oh, and another one right after that. Deffo a sadist, then.

Emmerich’s plan is to splice his sequel to the 13-year old movie into two, allowing for a better “arc”. Putting aside the fact that it’s equally valid just to say “story”, one of the more interesting slants here is that Will Smith has got to be a part of the project, along with Bill Pullman. The latter’s set to reprise his part as the least convincing President ever committed to celluloid, the former’s presence clearly explained better by his box-office draw than any sort of narrative integrity. This is Roland Emmerich we’re talking about here, after all; range of themes is not exactly one of his strengths (his favourite theme, of course, is still “shit looks cool when it blows up”).

We, quite frankly, are willing to bet any sort of addition to the Independence Day franchise will be little more than a cookie-cutter re-run of the original. Emmerich always makes the same movie; he’s carved a career out of it. The fact he’s whacking old characters in a similar situation doesn’t exactly fill us with confidence – there’s nothing gonna happen here we haven’t seen before. Popcorn destruction is all well and good, but how about killing us in new, unique ways, Roland? Just a thought.