I think, considering the ongoing controversy over police brutality and excessive force, the worst thing for the current society is if Adnan really is guilty, because it'll justify a whole ton of shoddy police work and excessive force by vindicating "gut feelings" or whatever horseshit someone wants to use to justify…

Then have I got news for you. There were actually three books released with the original Independence Day. The novelization, "Silent Zone," which dealt with the backstory of Area 51, and "War in the Desert," which had the "It's about bloody time" guy in Iraq during the montage at the end fighting off alien survivors…

This won't end well.

There's a novel, "Independence Day: Crucible," that covers the twenty-year gap. The major through-lines are David's rise to head of planetary defense, the ground war in the Congo, and the story of Lesser Hemsworth and His Conventionally Attractive Friends becoming space-pilots. If you had that much investment in the…

The white orb was honestly pretty cool about being shot down, considering. On the other hand, if I'm interpreting it right, the piece that survived was the entire "crew" and the rest of the ship was empty so it could be loaded up with humans, so it didn't really have much to be upset about. We'd only just fucked…

The ex-wife character died in-between movies in a car crash. Not actually mentioned in the film, so you might wonder why Goldblum has an on-again, off-again with a hot French psychologist, but that's the backstory.

There usually is. Not sure what it would've been in this movie, since there wasn't much off-the-shelf military equipment used; all the planes and bases and stuff were all futuristic stuff.

He could've been the general who ended up being president by default, but noooooo, "Suicide Squad" seemed so much more fun.

Of course, now I read on TVTropes that in the novelization, Whitmore was a young, idealistic Democratic Senator from Chicago who, I don't know, was in the reserves or something. The sequel explicitly setting the original in '96 really makes hash of the whole "Gulf War vet" backstory.

Actually, yes. There's also a dog who's inability to follow when people run away nearly gets everyone killed, but it's much smaller and less cute than the last one.

And there is a character who pretty clearly would be Smith if he'd re-upped. But nooooo, he had to play second-banana to Jared Leto in Suicide Squad….

Welcome to the wonderful world of production design, where you take all the crackpot shit your director comes up with an turn it into something that makes sense. I guarantee you that the below-the-line people on this movie have worked out detailed timelines, maps which cities on Earth were rebuilt and to what degree,…

Well, it's less of a spade and more of a… skyscraper-vacuum. That rotates about the Earth, and then turns off. I think maybe it's an artificial gravity thing? Or a real gravity thing? Like, they read one of those pop-sci articles about the original movie point out the ships were so big their gravity would do most of…

I'd probably grade a slot higher than you on a fixed scale, but that's pretty much my takeaway. It's weird how Emmerich and Devlin had pretty solid fundamentals for ID4 and Stargate, but those seem to have slipped away more and more with their subsequent blockbusters.

Oddly enough, if you're a politics nerd at all, Bill Pullman was pretty clearly a Republican. Military background, base is disdainful of "compromise" and "politics," the right-wing commentators on McLaughlin defend him and the left-wing ones give him shit, an african-american woman from California mentions she voted…

The way the movies explains it is that the aliens aren't so much rapacious nomads as implied by the first one, but more of a rapacious empire. The big ship from this one (call a "Harvester") is one of several that taps and drains the planet's molten core for the aliens to use as power and raw materials.

A guy in college liked to imitate Judd Hersh when I was around, "You'd all be dead now if it wasn't for my David!"

So, my biggest problem with the film, straight up: They didn't get David Arnold back. A movie like this needs a soundtrack that'll grab you by the scruff of the neck, slam your face into the table, and tell you what emotions you're going to feel.

The feeling I got is they were modeling a bit on the structure of the first film, which could coast on the world-building because it was regular present-day Earth (which they, in fact, played up by using a shit-ton of real-life reporters and media personalities on the TV news sequences. Even today, most movies will…

Yes. If you're wondering about the mechanics, as near as I could tell… well, imagine you slammed a giant spade through Asia, scoopy-side down, continued west around the planet, and then you stopped digging your giant-ass furrow around England, so the stuff you picked up initially settles there.