Monday, February 22, 2016

An Alternate Idea for Independence Day 2

Last week, I talked about why I didn't like Independence Day 2. This week, I'm going to pitch my idea for it.

Independence Day 2 has the same scavenger aliens as the first one. Now they're coming back in a grandmother ship for…some of their guys holed up in Africa? 

And I know the aliens in Africa will be important because it’s the only detail from the movie website that doesn’t jibe with a smoothed-over, business-as-usual post-war Earth. I mean, what will Independence Day 3 cover? The Scavengers’ deeply-held belief that the third time is the charm?

Imagine: Earth rebuilds after The War of 1996. We have a series of small cities built on the edges of the ruins of our old cities. Things are decentralized, but we do have a unified world government and hella-cool command center which runs our early detection crap, our alien-tech defense forces, and our expeditionary fleets. It’s a big complex and maybe Earth’s largest city (because millions died in the last movie).


Earth knows that Scavengers go to planets, use up resources while living there, reproduce, and then build another fleet or two who spread out and hit the next couple of worlds. The galaxy is huge and the Scavengers are a virus in it. Any odd, desperate fleet of them could come back to Earth and cause us more trouble so we have expeditionary fleets. They go out and find Scavengers and wreck their shit up. Does that mean Earth is committing genocide? ¯\_()_/¯

Doesn’t matter. The opening act is an expeditionary fleet kicking some scavenger ass and stumbling onto a New Alien race. Maybe they prey on the Scavengers. Maybe they only see us fucking up Scavengers and think we’re assholes. Maybe they use the Scavengers to keep the upstart planets off their lawn. Whatever their reason, they wanna fuck us up. They wreck the expeditionary fleet, steal the data on where Earth is and then do the thing.


And by “do the thing” I mean come into the Sol system and wreck the biggest, newest, shiniest command center we have and conquer Earth. End of movie because let’s be honest; there’s almost no point to a second Independence Day movie if it doesn’t set up the inevitable third one. The third one will feature expeditionary fleets that were away from Earth when we were conquered coming back and assaulting the New Aliens to literally free Earth from alien rule.

No this is not the plot to Robotech.

4 comments:

SkilTao said...

Independence Episode VII: Independence World

Seriously though, "they come back for some aliens holed up in Africa" sounds like they repurposed a script from the sequel to District 9. I was going to offer an alternative plot, but then realized it'd just be the front half of your proposal, with retaliation against Earth being shunted to movie three. But "liberating someone else's world" is maybe too topical to fly as escapism. Guess they could always rehash Macross, or ExoSquad. Or do a prequel war for Starship Troopers.

VanVelding said...

Yeah, every story idea for this ended up coming out sounding like something else. Maybe everything really has been done before or maybe I'm too old to come up with new ideas

SkilTao said...

Meh. Reduce anything to vague enough terms, and there's bound to be something that sounds just like it. There's a lot to be said for detail and execution.

VanVelding said...

True, true.