Independence Day: Resurgence trailer

[TithonusSyndrome]

The CGW broke out in 2001 and dragged on and on until 2006, plenty of time for combined ground forces to be rebuilt and deployed to central Africa. Whoever the ID4verse's President of the DRC would have been at that time would have become a globally vilified figure for having made repeated assurances to the global community that he was able to handle a rabble of stranded, starving aliens and yet allowed it to go on for years and years without accepting outside help. I doubt very much that he would have remained in office if Western powers lost faith in his ability to contain them.

For crying out loud, these aliens somehow managed to spend five years eluding the Congolese state authorities, despite the giant smoldering crashed ship. That alone should have been a giant loss of face.

[Elheru Aran]

Ah, in that case there's not much excuse, yeah.

It appears that they've come up with a decent chunk of background expository material to fill the gap. Could you kindly link?

[TithonusSyndrome]

http://www.warof1996.com/

As for the "eluding" part, I just considered the possibility that maybe the aliens sealed themselves in the hulk of the ship until their rations ran out five years later, and at that point had no option left but to make a desperate attempt to fight their way past the humans on the ground. It makes more sense than... the entire crew of a highly conspicuously alien ship running around the DRC unnoticed for half a decade.

[Elheru Aran]

You are a bro, sir. *tabs*

[NecronLord]

The CGW broke out in 2001 and dragged on and on until 2006, plenty of time for combined ground forces to be rebuilt and deployed to central Africa.

Hah hah hah.

That's a good one.

They can justify any degree of damage to the Western World they want. Up to and including complete destruction of all life on Earth - the Mothership was the size of a Death Star and with more mass than Saxton's calculation of one; the Endor Holocaust applies in full to the Independence Day setting. They can say that rebuilding was as difficult as they please; it's suspension of disbelief that humans survived at all.

If they say the West just got back on its feet, that's super-duper-uber-super generous. Even the thermal of the city-killers passing through the atmosphere in the original film would be an extinction level event.

The cost of a foreign war is mind-boggling for nations that haven't had their twenty top cities vapourised.

Those planes in the trailer could be literally the entire airborne armed forces of the world - airplanes are expensive, you don't pay for a USAF or Russian Air Force after having your nation burned down.

There is of course the other question that you're ignoring; are the humans confident they'd beat the Congolese aliens, let alone confident they'd do so without local support, for all we know they don't think that's possible (nor should it be, really). If the ESD attacked, do they really know they'll be coming back?

[TithonusSyndrome]

Yes, Independence Day is not a hard science fiction franchise, thanks. Not all suspensions of disbelief are equal, though, especially ones that involve applications of scientific principles that will not be intuitive to general moviegoers. Suspending disbelief to the point where a sequel is possible at all versus honoring thermodynamic concepts that not everyone is familiar with is just Hollywood standard practice, but being unable to muster up some new ground forces and the naval force projection to send them to Africa five years after the attacks - particularly since the ID4s didn't attack military assets other than Area 51 in the first place - presents a more glaring discrepancy to a layperson.

[NecronLord]

Yes, Independence Day is not a hard science fiction franchise, thanks. Not all suspensions of disbelief are equal, though, especially ones that involve applications of scientific principles that will not be intuitive to general moviegoers. Suspending disbelief to the point where a sequel is possible at all versus honoring thermodynamic concepts that not everyone is familiar with is just Hollywood standard practice, but being unable to muster up some new ground forces and the naval force projection to send them to Africa five years after the attacks - particularly since the ID4s didn't attack military assets other than Area 51 in the first place - presents a more glaring discrepancy to a layperson.

With what military exactly? The aliens were using their aircraft to destroy human military assets. There's no reason to assume any surface asset of the US Navy survived 1996, given how large and slow surface assets are compared to the military assets that survived to the end of the film.

TECHNICIAN
They must be targeting our
satellites. We've lost all
satellite communication, tracking
and mapping.

GENERAL GREY
Have NORAD relay intelligence to
our on board computers?

The Technician nods and exits. Defeated, the President slumps
sullenly.

GENERAL GREY
We've moved as many of our forces
away from the bases as possible
but we've already sustained heavy
losses.

The forces at the end of the film were explicitly those that had withdrawn and thrown themselves together in the surviving bases by day two of the alien campaign; and almost entirely light aircraft and ground troops, all they have to do is toss out a line saying 'the aliens destroyed the navy in 1996' and your problem is basically solved there, unless you think a conventional power-projection navy should be a rebuilding priority when it is literally useless against another alien attack...

[TithonusSyndrome]

For the sake of audience sensibilities, possibly; but it still doesn't jive with the website saying that foreign powers offered to send help that was "fiercely" refused. What was this help they were extending that didn't rely on having armed forces sent to central Africa? If it was just aid, which the language of the website doesn't explicitly preclude but nevertheless seems unlikely, why on earth would the DRC refuse?

Hell, maybe the navy was destroyed like you say, and the western powers drafted up plans to cobble together a substitute force projection using eminent domain over cargo ships. It's not like friendly Congolese ports are some Normandy-esque landing action. Either way, apparently there were offers of military support from the rest of the world that the DRC rejected with conspicuous stubbornness.

[NecronLord]

Sending Ground Forces to assist is both immensely easier to do than invading a country against its will, and easier for a small country to block. They could have offered to send ten thousand ESD guys in shuttle-runs with converted commercial airliners and been fiercely refused putting this occupying force in the Congo.

Job done, wholly consistent. And if that's all the USA can do, apart from maybe send swanky new hybrid-fighters to bomb the Congolese (which would by the by give the Aliens a chance to expand) then they can't do anything about the aliens without local help.


And for the record; no, the point wasn't 'they should be compelled show the earth a blasted wasteland' it's that there's no level of reduction in Western power in world geo-politics that can't be justified using the original film if the writer pleases, with even the slightest lantern-hanging, a common writer's technique.

[TithonusSyndrome]

I'm not suggesting that the west would have invaded the Congo to get at the marooned aliens, that's ridiculous; I just doubt that career DRC politicians with an ounce of political self-preservation would have defied the entire rest of the world out of what I can only assume is pride when they know full well that they can undermine them politically without having it come to armed conflict. The French pull levers in central Africa routinely without making it top policy priority. What could they have done against literally the entire rest of the planet throwing cash at their political rivals, or worse by way of covert ops?

On top of all of this, we know that the Americans have firsthand experience with alien mind control, something even a naked and vulnerable alien was able to do without access to any of his equipment. If the suspicion emerges that DRC officials have been reduced to sockpuppets whose entire job is to create the appearance of being proactive against the aliens while intentionally bumbling just enough to allow them to have a fighting chance of escape or survival, that changes priorities immensely.

[NecronLord]

We'll see?

If they want to make the first world the peer of what are IRL Third World nations - easily justified - if they want to make the world a post-apocalyptic hellscape that makes The Road look optimistic, you can do that too based on the source material :- they're obviously going for the former, or at least for a situation where strongarming the Congo was undesirable or impossible for the rest of the world, and it would take only the slightest writer's skill to justify that such as 'they've enough scavenged alien tech to make it a quagmire' or 'we've only got so much fuel to wage a campaign' or 'seriously fuck those aliens are scary, let's make noises about doing something but not actually do it' - as it seems from the trailers, it looks like the UN is finally going into the Congo in the film, but we'll see.

The point is the aftermath of the original film is sufficient that our real-world preconceptions of geopolitics need not apply. You mentioned France, well, given that the French flag is in some materials, sure enough they probably survived, but one city-destroyer smacking Ile-de-France for twelve hours could justify France losing a fifth of its real-life population and nothing like the power it is now. France could well be receiving aid from Africa in this setting.

As for the mind control; they don't really have any experience defeating it, so that's kind of irrelevant. Experience getting beaten every day with a stick doesn't make you a stickfighter.

[TithonusSyndrome]

If the world outside of the Congo begins to suspect that they aren't dealing with them in good faith and are merely trying to present the illusion of a robust military campaign to contain the aliens, that's hardly irrelevant. There is one cure humanity has experience with in defeating alien mind control - "is that glass bulletproof?"

Again, none of this changes the fact that, as you say, we're just going to have to wait and see why things are the way they are as outlined on the War of 1996 website. Based on all available information, though, it'll have to be one *hell* of an explanation to account for all of these odd developments.

[NecronLord]

If the world outside of the Congo begins to suspect that they aren't dealing with them in good faith and are merely trying to present the illusion of a robust military campaign to contain the aliens, that's hardly irrelevant. There is one cure humanity has experience with in defeating alien mind control - "is that glass bulletproof?"

That's more a limit of the alien (or the pilots at least) telepathy, which only ever affected one person at a time. It wasn't as if the president or Dr Okun beat the telepathy.

Again, none of this changes the fact that, as you say, we're just going to have to wait and see why things are the way they are as outlined on the War of 1996 website. Based on all available information, though, it'll have to be one *hell* of an explanation to account for all of these odd developments.

I don't think it's that much of a stretch to say that strongarming the Congo is difficult for X reason.

[TithonusSyndrome]

That's more a limit of the alien (or the pilots at least) telepathy, which only ever affected one person at a time. It wasn't as if the president or Dr Okun beat the telepathy.

Yes, one naked alien stripped of his gear and his suit in an indeterminate state of damage. The mind control capabilities of whatever equipment the crashed Congolese ship has on board would be a complete unknown that would keep the intelligence community awake at night for years, and would have to be discussed at some point when weighing the DRC response to foreign military support.

I don't think it's that much of a stretch to say that strongarming the Congo is difficult for X reason.

I don't know, enough of the old prior world order still remains to keep the Congo on the bottom of the pole. The usual suspects are the ones with bases on the Moon and Jupiter. It's not the Congo with a base on Mars in the trailer, it's France.

[Alkaloid]

You realise the entire website implies that there was a pretty fundamental change in diplomatic relations following the invasion of the entire planet by aliens and the destruction of a huge number of major cities across the globe yeah? 20 years of global unity is kind of the theme there, not 20 years of aggressive US hegemony.

It's entirely conceivable that the US, or the west generally might not feel quite as compelled to act like the complete shit heels they generally have in Africa in reality. They might actually be willing to respect the DRCs stance of wanting to defeat their own invaders themselves like all the other countries in the new global super happy alien-arse kicking boy band did? If the war isn't getting out of hand, the DRC aren't losing and every former world power is having to complete a massive re armament after having a huge amount of their infrastructure annihilated what's the harm?

The trailer clearly shows the DRC were fine with reaching out the the Earth Defence Council or whatever when they found what looks like something unexpected? Aggressive refusal doesn't mean kicking observers out of you country and acting like a mind controlled quisling, it means saying no loudly.

[TithonusSyndrome]

You realise the entire website implies that there was a pretty fundamental change in diplomatic relations following the invasion of the entire planet by aliens and the destruction of a huge number of major cities across the globe yeah? 20 years of global unity is kind of the theme there, not 20 years of aggressive US hegemony.

From the POV of an in-universe piece of Earth Defense Force propaganda, I see nothing that couldn't be compared to the EU commissioning glowing cultural works about "decades of peace and cooperation in Europe" whilst simultaneously having seriously unequal and even predatory relationships among member states.

It's entirely conceivable that the US, or the west generally might not feel quite as compelled to act like the complete shit heels they generally have in Africa in reality. They might actually be willing to respect the DRCs stance of wanting to defeat their own invaders themselves like all the other countries in the new global super happy alien-arse kicking boy band did? If the war isn't getting out of hand, the DRC aren't losing and every former world power is having to complete a massive re armament after having a huge amount of their infrastructure annihilated what's the harm?

The harm is that it took them an absurdly long time to mop up a confined rabble of aliens with no supply logistics and five years of cabin fever and starvation working against them. At any point in that five year war, the entire rest of the world could hardly be blamed for thinking that this fight should have been a lot swifter and something wasn't going properly, and that it would be better to be safe than sorry at the cost of good relations with the DRC.

The trailer clearly shows the DRC were fine with reaching out the the Earth Defence Council or whatever when they found what looks like something unexpected? Aggressive refusal doesn't mean kicking observers out of you country and acting like a mind controlled quisling, it means saying no loudly.

All entirely possible, certainly; I just don't consider it as likely as interventionism and would like to hear why it didn't happen.

[FaxModem1]

In a twist, the US Army is making commercials that take place in the Independence Day universe:

NPR

U.S. Army Takes Unique Approach With New Recruitment Video

3:45

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May 12, 20164:30 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
Neda Ulaby - Square
NEDA ULABY
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It's the new U.S. Army recruiting video, or is it a trailer for a new Hollywood sci-fi movie? Or is it both? NPR takes a look at the new video.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Military recruitment ads once sounded like this.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: There are things to do and places to go, and the Army Air Forces will supply both to healthy, adventurous and patriotic young men with the will to smack the enemy where it hurts the most.

SIEGEL: Long after World War II, U.S. Army commercials still showed classic images of soldiers jumping from planes, wading through swamps and driving tanks.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Singing) Be all that you can be.

SIEGEL: But today's Army faces new recruitment challenges. NPR's Neda Ulaby tells us about an ad released this week with a surprisingly different approach.

NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: It seems so normal at the beginning. A middle-aged man in a plaid shirt and an Army baseball cap tinkers in his home workshop and talks to someone off-camera.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Were you surprised when your daughter enlisted?

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Not at all. She's a born leader. I know I've been taking orders from her since she was 5 years old.

ULABY: The camera pans over what's hanging on the wall - family photos, framed medals, a sticker that says support the troops. Then the conversation subtly gets strange.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: So you don't worry about her?

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Of course I worry about her. I fought in the war of '96. I know what those things are capable of.

ULABY: Wait, things? War of '96? We see on the wall the framed front page of newspaper reading in huge typeface the words victory. Aliens defeated.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: And I know this planet is safer because she's defending it.

ULABY: Turns out, it's an ad for the movie "Independence Day 2," and it's a recruitment video for the Army.

LISA NOCELLA: Fox actually approached us.

ULABY: That's Lisa Nocella. She's an executive at the advertising firm McCann Worldgroup. It contracts with the Army, and her team and the Army produce the ad. It encourages potential recruits to visit a website for the movie's made-up Earth Space Defense Force, where they can enact missions involving cryptology and aerial reconnaissance.

NOCELLA: And it allows us to tell the Army recruitment story in a very new and very relevant way.

ULABY: You might wonder how fighting aliens from outer space counts as relevant. But this ad helps the Army solve its image problem, says Roger Stahl. He studies the military in popular culture.

ROGER STAHL: I think it kind of initiates a new era. I mean, this really has not been tried before.

ULABY: Hollywood and the military have collaborated on films since at least World War II, mostly realistic ones. But Stahl says right now, the Army is trying to shed its low-tech, olive green image. This commercial makes sense, he says, as part of a larger trend.

STAHL: When you look at the past five or six years of military, Hollywood collaborations, they have mostly left the realistic war film genre and gone to sci-fi superhero movies. The biggest collaborations in recent years have been "Transformers," "Iron Man," the new "Superman" movie, "Captain America."

ULABY: So Stahl was hardly surprised to see an Army recruiting video with a science fiction tie-in. William Strickland served in the Air Force for almost 30 years. He ran its recruitment research division and now a company founded to help with Army management and training.

WILLIAM STRICKLAND: I really like that commercial.

ULABY: Strickland says the ad's alien stuff is secondary to its other appeals.

STRICKLAND: Appealing to patriotism, it's appealing to service, it's a higher calling. Those connections are still there whether it's that made-up thing or if it's real. I mean, the U.S. Army's at war and has been now for pretty much going on 17, 18 years.

ULABY: Strickland says this ad speaks to potential recruits and their parents and influencers. It's clear, he says, the Army's trying to reach prospects interested in science fiction and better yet, in science. Neda Ulaby, NPR News.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

Can't seem to find the video, otherwise I'd post it as well.

[Adam Reynolds]

I found this one, which links to the site http://www.goarmy.com/joinesd.html, which is an army recruiting site.



Wonder how many US tax dollars were spent in marketing?

[Borgholio]

Wonder how many US tax dollars were spent in marketing?

Nearly 700 million dollars per year.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/arc ... ds/252222/

Since it's all volunteer...no advertising, no recruitment. So it makes sense they'd have to spend a lot of money just drawing people in.

[Gandalf]

Wonder how many US tax dollars were spent in marketing?

Nearly 700 million dollars per year.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/arc ... ds/252222/

Since it's all volunteer...no advertising, no recruitment. So it makes sense they'd have to spend a lot of money just drawing people in.

Given the last fifteen years, I'm surprised that they don't have to spend more.