Cinephiles, rejoice: director Roland Emmerich has announced details on his long-anticipated sequel to 1996's summer blockbuster Independence Day. Sequels, actually: according to Entertainment Weekly, Emmerich and co-writer Dean Devlin have penned two full scripts for the follow-up, which will be set twenty years after the events in the first movie and will again feature the return of Independence Day's IT-challenged squid-headed monster antagonists.
"The humans knew that one day the aliens would come back," Emmerich explained to EW. The invading tentacular horde from the first movie managed to send out a distress signal before being implausibly hacked by Jeff Goldblum's PowerBook and... actually, you know what? I'd probably better just stop using words like "implausibly" right now, because otherwise this article is never going to get written.
Twenty years after the first movie, Earth is a changed place: glowy-blue organic alien technology from the vast ships implausibly knocked out of the sky by plucky human resistance fighters...damn it, there I go again. Um, alien tech has been incorporated into the everyday lives of the people of Earth, but not without difficulty: the technology can be scavenged and used, but not recreated from scratch. "We don’t know how to duplicate it because it’s organically grown technology, but we know how to take an antigravity device and put it in a human airplane," explained Emmerich. Emphasis added by me, because in a fascinating twist, Emmerich has created a future where portable electronics actually represent a legitimate threat to commercial aviation.
The aliens, who arrive at Earth through "wormholes" or something, will find themselves facing some familiar foes along with some new faces. President Lone Starr Bill Pullman has signed on to appear, but not Will Smith (likely because Will Smith's agent does a better job of screening phone calls than Pullman's). Another confirmed returning character is Will Smith's stepson, Dylan (played in the first movie by Ross Bagley). No word yet on whether or not Dylan's dog from the first film will return, but early signs point to no, because dogs don't live that long. This is depressing. Much like killing off Newt before the credits in Alien 3, I fear the dog's absence will undermine a significant amount of the first film's dramatic throughline. Snort.
Emmerich claims that the two-film sequel will be separated by a cliffhanger, just like the recent Hobbit film and its sequel. God willing, though, they won't be as long. I was 18 when the first movie came out and even though I have fond memories of showing up early on opening night and waiting in line with my buddies to see the flick, I don't think even that long-gone Coke-and-Sno-Caps-fueled teenager version of me would have the patience for four hours of Emmerich-penned craziness. Wait, am I being negative again?
Ars has done some more digging—and by "digging" I mean "laughing about this in IRC"—and we've uncovered several additional details of the movie's plot. In the intervening twenty years, the squidaliens have actually developed firewalls for their networks, which will lead to a tense scene wherein President Lone Starr Pullman and another actor (Dylan or, if available, Dylan's dog) attempt to quickly hack through the aliens' network defenses by doubling-up onto the same keyboard. Once they've rerouted the mainframe through the firewall or something, they must upload the Alien Mothership Killing app from the iTunes store to the alien mothership, but it turns out that it's too big to directly send over LTE without breaking their bandwidth cap for the month. Furious, the team races to contact Kim Dotcom and get a Megaupload account before it's too late, and...
OK, who am I kidding? This entire premise is preposterous. There's no way Apple would approve an Alien Mothership Killing app in the iTunes Store. The sequels haven't entered production yet, so we'll have to stay tuned and see how things shape up.
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