Independence Day: Resurgence (2016) on Netflix
Two decades after the 1996 invasion, the Earth Space Defense guards the planet with alien technology. Pilots Jake Morrison and Charlie Miller defy orders when a ship appears near the Moon.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb5.2/10201,874 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes29%
Trailer
Plot summary
Twenty years after the 1996 war, the United Nations has founded the Earth Space Defense, a global force built with technology reverse-engineered from the first invasion's aliens. Its director, David Levinson, goes with Dr. Catherine Marceaux to the African state of République Nationale d'Umbutu, where a landed alien saucer still stands. The two find that its crew drilled at the site and sent a distress signal home before being defeated. A spherical ship then emerges from a wormhole near the Moon, and the Security Council orders it destroyed over Levinson's objections. Pilots Jake Morrison and Charlie Miller defy that order and take a space tug to the wreckage with Levinson, Marceaux, the warlord Dikembe Umbutu and controller Floyd Rosenberg aboard, and recover a container holding a large sphere.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Will Smith nearly returned for the Independence Day sequels, but Fox refused the $50 million salary he demanded for the two films, ending talks in October 2011.
- After the November 2015 Paris attacks, the filmmakers changed a scene so that Dubai's landmarks, including the Burj Khalifa, crashed onto London instead of Paris; Roland Emmerich said, "The English can take it."
- Mae Whitman, who played the president's daughter in the first film, declined to even read for the part in the sequel, according to Roland Emmerich; Maika Monroe was chosen from a shortlist that included Gabriella Wilde, Britt Robertson, Merritt Patterson and Lucy Boynton.
- Emmerich went back to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, a location he loved from the first film, but a windstorm before the crew arrived blew dirt into the salt and turned it beige.
- Scanline VFX, the first effects vendor hired, built detailed models of London and Singapore from thousands of reference photographs and Lidar scans so the mothership landing could realistically destroy both cities.
- The filmmakers avoided shooting in India or showing any prominent Indian monuments being damaged, to head off protests and legal action from Indian religious groups and activists.
- The film's international IMAX opening of $10.8 million from 533 theaters was Fox's biggest ever, beating the $8.1 million record set by Deadpool earlier that year.
