This summer’s long awaited sequel to Independence Day will pick up many years after the war with aliens that the first film depicted. But if you think that we’ve just been sitting around twiddling our thumbs since then, you can forget it. The human race has been busy, adapting alien technology and generally getting ready for any potential future attacks. Now we have our first look at one of the things the human race has been up to. We built a base on the moon.
Think of it as Throwback Thursday for an alternative timeline. The official Independence Day Twitter account has been occasionally dropping these little nuggets of things that have taken place in between the two films. Here we see that humanity built a base on the moon around 2009. It’s also really nice that they invited humanity’s hero, David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum), to the ribbon cutting. It’s actually somewhat telling. The tweet certainly has the characters to type Levinson’s full name, but doesn’t do so. We don’t need to hear his full name. He’s the guy who destroyed the aliens with an Apple laptop. The entire world probably knows who he is. It sets up a very different character for Jeff Goldblum than we saw in the first film. He’s not the nutty scientist with a crazy idea. He’s likely one of the most well respected men on the planet.
We’re sure that Col. Steven Hiller would have been invited too. Unfortunately, he died two years before the base was opened. Will Smith will not be reprising his role in the new movie, and as punishment (not really) was unceremoniously killed in an accident off screen.
ESD will stand for Earth Space Defense, which will be the name of the military organization that goes to fight off the aliens when they arrive in Independence Day: Resurgence. The image doesn’t give us a great deal to go on but it’s pretty much what you would expect to be a first line of defense from future aliens. In the original film, humanity didn’t even notice the aliens until they passed by the moon, so this will hopefully give them a little more warning next time.
The first trailer gives us what appears to be a decent amount of action on the moon. We also know that Liam Hemsworth’s character in the film actually works at the base, driving a "Moon Tug." It looks like a decent amount of the action may be taking place outside of planet Earth this time around.
Independence Day: Resurgence is set for a pre-Independence Day release in late June this year.
