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Independence Day: Resurgence or "IDR" (2016) is an American science fiction sequel to the 1996 film Independence Day. Directed by Roland Emmerich, written by Emmerich, Dean Devlin, and Carter Blanchard, and produced by Emmerich, Devlin, and Harald Kloser, the sequel featured Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Judd Hirsch, Vivica A. Fox and Brent Spiner reprising their original roles. In addition, newcomers Liam Hemsworth, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jessie Usher, Maika Monroe, Joey King, Sela Ward, and William Fichtner also join the cast. Will Smith will not return. Filming began on April 20, 2015, and IDR was released in North America on June 24, 2016.

Plot

Twenty years after the events of the previous film, the international community recovers and the United Nations creates the Earth Space Defense (ESD), a united global defense program that serves as Earth's early warning system. The main defense force uses technology salvaged from the remains of the alien forces, with military forces assembled on the Moon, Mars, and Rhea, while the Area 51 base has become the Space Defense Headquarters.

In Africa, ESD Director David Levinson meets with Dr. Catherine Marceaux and warlord Dikembe Umbutu, who lead him to an intact alien destroyer. Aboard the ship, they discover that the ship was drilling a hole before the aliens' final defeat and had sent a distress call to its home planet. Furthermore, Umbutu and former U.S. President Thomas Whitmore experienced recurring visions of extraterrestrial logograms ever since their personal encounters with the aliens, and Umbutu is learning how to read them.

A spherical ship emerges from a wormhole near the ESD's Moon defense headquarters. Levinson is convinced that it belongs to a different extraterrestrial race that is benevolent and urges the world's government not to attack, but President Elizabeth Lanford gives permission to shoot it down regardless. Against ESD orders, pilots Jake Morrison and Charles Miller picks up Levinson, Marceaux, Umbutu, and Floyd Rosenberg on a space tug and they head for the crash site, where they recover a container. Suddenly, an alien mothership 3,000 miles wide emerges and destroys the Moon base before approaching Earth. The space tug is caught in the mothership's gravitational pull, which also lifts buildings and structures from most of Asia. The debris falls over Europe where the tug manages to escape, as it passes over London, before heading on to Area 51.

The mothership lands in the north Atlantic Ocean, destroying several cities in the process, including Washington, D.C. Captain Dylan Dubrow-Hiller attempts to rescue his mother, Jasmine, but she dies when the mothership's landing strut makes impact with the hospital she works at. The mothership begins drilling a hole in the middle of the ocean to harvest the heat of the core, which will destroy Earth's magnetic field in the process. The aliens also raid the Cheyenne bunker, in Colorado, killing the President along with most of her Cabinet. General Joshua Adams, a Cabinet official, is named the designated survivor and immediately sworn in as the 46th President.

Upon the space tug's arrival at Area 51, Dr. Brackish Okun wakes up from his twenty-year coma. He proceeds to open the container from the wormhole, which releases a giant white sphere of artificial intelligence. The sphere reveals that it was sent by a party of refugees to help evacuate humanity to a refuge planet from the invading harvesters. Meanwhile, Whitmore interrogates one of the aliens held in captivity since the last war. The ESD learns that the aliens, while similar to Earth's insect kingdom, are not like locusts as they initially believed but exist in eusociality and that their queen is coming. ESD forces, led by Dylan, stage a counter-attack but are caught in a trap within the mothership that disables their weapons and wipes out most of the squadron. Dylan, along with Jake and fellow pilots Charlie Miller and Rain Lao, manage to escape.

Seeing that its activity has alerted the alien queen to its presence, the sphere's A.I. tries to convince the ESD to destroy it in order to prevent the aliens from getting the coordinates to the refuge planet. The remaining ESD forces instead use the space tug as a decoy and put the sphere in an isolation chamber, intending to lure the alien queen's ship to a secluded area to destroy it with nuclear weapons. Against his daughter Patricia's wishes, Whitmore volunteers to pilot the space tug on the suicide mission. During the subsequent battle, Whitmore leads the alien queen's warship to the trap and detonates the bombs, sacrificing himself and destroying the ship with the Queen still inside.

However, the Queen survives using an energy shield on her exoskeleton and heads for area 51. Patricia personally flies a combat jet and destroys the queen's shield projector, allowing Dylan, Jake, Charlie, and Rain to kill the queen before she can destroy the sphere, and the rest of the aliens flee. With the queen dead, the mothership stops drilling and retreats from Earth. Okun reveals that the sphere has asked them to lead a resistance against the aliens and offered them new technology in preparation for an assault on the aliens' home world.

Cast

Appearances

By type 
Characters Creatures Events Locations
Organizations and titles Sentient species Vehicles and vessels Weapons and technology Miscellanea

Characters

Events

Locations

Organizations and titles

Sentient species

Vehicles and vessels

Weapons and technology

Videos

making

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Promotional

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First Trailer

Second Trailer

References


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