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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. The pilot’s son, Dylan Hiller (Jessie T. Usher), is now in the hot seat, though sadly he lacks the firepower of his father’s personality. Rivalry flares between Hiller and Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth), a fellow sky jockey, but it peters out after a single punch in the canteen.

In short, it’s up to Goldblum to save the film. (The world, by comparison, is easily saved. 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. You never know quite how he will respond to any predicament, nor, you sometimes feel, does he. The main reason for the success of “Independence Day” was the mashing together of Goldblum and Smith. They were a genuine odd couple—the wonkish ruminant sharing a cockpit with Mr. Congeniality, whose days flew by without a flutter of self-doubt. No surprise, then, that Goldblum seems a little lonely and marooned in the latest venture, which suffers from a nagging case of Smithlessness. There’s nothing here to compare with the eruption of joy, back in 1996, when our heroes hurtled free of the enemy stronghold by the merest squeak, eliciting, from Smith, the triumphal roar “Elvis has left the building.”

The director, now as then, is Roland Emmerich, who, like a constant lover, refuses to tame his devotion; and what he loves is enormity. The incoming mother ship, this time, is round and flat and three thousand miles in diameter, as if the aliens’ deepest ambition were not to exterminate us but to make paella for everyone on the planet. And, if you dig the ship, check out the mother—the queen of the meanies, who rolls up late in the show, gambolling across salt flats toward a school bus full of innocent children. In a way, Emmerich is more fearless than any of his characters, boldly embracing clichés from which other directors would shrink and flee, and unabashed by his old-school craving to astound. Witness the gravitational field exerted by the ship, which can suck buses, cars, and bridges out of a city and whoosh them upward. As a spectacle, that is outdone only by the spooky sight of Judd Hirsch, who hasn’t aged a minute since the last film.

The first “Independence Day” had the gratifying slap of good pop cinema, harmless and weightless; the follow-up is twice as big and half as fun. Even the special effects begin to pale, and some of them, in the closing scenes, feel sketchy and unfinished. Either Fox ran out of time or cash or Emmerich, taking his cue from Schubert, simply threw up his hands and said, “Screw it. That’ll have to do.” In truth, the film doesn’t really end, let alone draw to a cathartic conclusion; it just stops. If you must see it, then at least try to do so, as I did, in IMAX and 3-D. This is known as immersive moviegoing, and what it means in practice is that, rather than watching London being destroyed before your very eyes, you are left with the distinct impression that London is being destroyed midway between your eyeballs. Everything quakes. For the price of a single ticket, I got to experience a two-hour sci-fi extravaganza and had my sinuses drained at the same time. You can’t argue with value like that.

No one but John le Carré would write a novel called “Our Kind of Traitor.” That unstable compound of clubbability and deceit belongs to him alone. The book, which appeared in 2010, has now become a film, directed by Susanna White. Its hero is Perry Makepeace (Ewan McGregor), who would rather not be a hero at all. He is married to Gail (Naomie Harris), a lawyer; he teaches English literature at a university in London; and his surname betrays a constitutional wish to stay out of trouble. But trouble comes to find him anyway.

It takes the portly shape of Dima (Stellan Skarsgård), an effusive Russian thug. (His naked body, glimpsed at a sports club, is so richly inked with tattoos that it’s more like a treasure map than like a living form.) Dima works for the Mafia of his motherland, and his job is to launder money as efficiently, and no doubt as regularly, as the rest of us wash our shirts. He has fallen foul of his employers, however, who will soon exact vengeance, and his plan is to trade his wicked secrets—some involving British politicians—for a new life, plus a new identity, in England. But how can he communicate with the spymasters of London and not alert his predators, who presumably track his electronic spoor? If Dima asked me, I would say, “Write a letter and pop it in the mail,” but I guess that might abbreviate the plot. Instead, he befriends Perry, who is on vacation at the same hotel, in Marrakesh. The Englishman, wary of being impolite, accepts a glass of Château Pétrus, not a wine that you should ever spurn, and an invitation to a night of Bacchic misrule. Thus wooed, he agrees to transport a memory stick on Dima’s behalf, only to find himself wading up to his chin in the slime of the intelligence game.

The novel was adapted by Hossein Amini, who clearly enjoys the challenge of tough texts. If you have conjured screenplays, as he has, from Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Elmore Leonard, and Patricia Highsmith, then le Carré is no cause for alarm, and some of Amini’s alterations are well wrought. Where Perry and Gail, in the book, are on their trip because she has inherited a slab of money, the movie tells us—with a shot of her lying sadly in bed, reluctant to make love—that they are trying to repair a dented relationship. That suits the mood of sorrow (le Carré long ago persuaded us that a country can fray and fail as easily as a marriage), and it also suggests why Perry might accede to Dima’s plea—not out of moral probity or patriotic duty but simply for the thrill. How better to rouse your sex life than by turning into a spy?