How is Dr. Okun (Brent Spiner's character) still alive, as seen in the previews? Didn't he die in the first movie?
Apparently, they've decided to retcon it.
They never actually confirmed he's dead, though. Mitchell seems to check for a pulse, but we never see or hear about Okun again.
He went into a coma. A twenty-year one apparently, as he doesn't wake until the movie's events in 2016.
They probably wanted Spiner's star power more than they wanted to make sense. Even if you could buy him being in a coma from shock and/or abuse from the alien taking over his mind, he was right up against the very-not-bulletproof glass that was subsequently shot out to kill the alien. Unless the shooters are from the Class of '95 at Stormtrooper Academy, it's highly unlikely they would have missed him (and his vital organs) yet managed to kill the alien standing several feet behind him.
If you look in the original movie, there's a short scene of the alien actually getting shot, and Okun isn't against the glass anymore. And when we see his unconscious body later on he doesn't appear to be shot.
So when Okun wakes from his 20-year coma, he needs his glasses to see. And it turns out, his glasses have been conveniently kept by his bedside for all this time?
Yes, so? It's clear that his friend/boyfriend/whatever has been taking dutiful care of him all these years. There was probably some amount of hoping Okun would wake up one day, which led him to keep the glasses there just in case. People do stuff like that to give themselves hope.
Will the movie explain what happened to the characters from the last movie we haven't seen yet? Constance Spano is suspiciously absent, especially since she reconciled with David in the first film and I imagine would be a pivotal figure in the post-war world and in David's life. Also absent are Major Mitchell, Miguel and his siblings, Albert Nimzicki and General Grey. Grey and Nimzicki I guess can be explained by them having died between films, as both of their actors have sadly passed on.
Spano and Nimzicki aren't seen or mentioned, but General Grey does have a brief cameo.
The novel Independence Day: Crucible clears up plenty of details. Connie, for instance, died a few years before the film.
Is there a reason they couldn't have at least mentioned that in the movie? They bothered to show Dylan's mom even though his dad was specifically mentioned to be dead already. Connie was David's ex-wife, and (having not even heard of the novel) I'm guessing was his wife once again after the film. That seems like something that should at least get a mention before they threw another potential love interest into the movie.
General Grey is in the movie as a cameo. It was Robert Loggia's last appearance.
We're told that a Destroyer ship from the first attack landed in Africa and began drilling into the planet's core before the mothership was nuked, cutting its power supply. Does this mean that the ultimate goal of the first alien wave was to harvest Earth's core? If so, why did they bother destroying our cities and apparently gearing up for a direct ground assault when harvesting Earth's core would've killed everyone on the planet anyway? And if so, why did they need the Atlantic Ocean-sized Harvester ship in this movie instead of just the standard Destroyers?
Yes, their goal was to harvest Earth's core, they probably tried to wipe us out first to avoid us actually possibly hindering their harvesting operation, and they have the giant Harvester ship because the Destroyers wouldn't cut it anymore now that we can counter them.
It's also possible that harvesting a planet's core would've taken a combined effort on the Destroyers' part due to their size, whereas a Harvester would've been large enough to finish the job by itself.
Another possibility is that the mothership from the first movie *was* a colonization force: wipe out the indigenous civilization, take over the planet and, once its surface is depleted and despoiled by the aliens' civilization (could be years, could be millennia), call in a Harvester to suck out the molten innards to wring the last bits of use out of it. The landed City Destroyer opening up a tap into the core doesn't necessarily mean they were going to drain it dry the way a Harvester would; they could've just been planning to draw on it for their day-to-day energy requirements. When the aliens got the distress call, they realized Earth would be one of *those* planets where it wasn't worth the trouble to deal with the natives while leaving it habitable, and sent a Harvester to rip out the core immediately.
It's also stated in the movie that the Harvester uses a MUCH larger drill than the Destroyer used. It's possible that the Destroyer was going to SLOWLY suck up the material over a period of years while they mined the rest of the planet's surface materials. After the failure the first time around, they probably said "Screw it, just get the core and move on."
The Sphere claims the Harvesters use the metal to upgrade their ships. The ship in the first movie was not only much smaller, but did not have an internal biosphere like the second Harvester does. The first ship was probably a younger queen, still establishing herself, and she needed Earth's biosphere for for when she expanded her ship. The second ship didn't.
If the ship landed on the Atlantic Ocean, why were parts of China destroyed?
The ship flew over them while landing and they were sucked up by its gravity.
It was Singapore, but this bothered me as well. It dipped close enough to earth to suck up a South Asian city, then, what, scraped its way across the entire Eurasian continent before bearing down over the UK, trashing every country not worth mentioning between the South Pacific coast and London Bridge?
Why did the Alien Queen go after the school bus?
Either she somehow recognized that David (who was in the bus) was the guy who masterminded that trap, or she was just really pissed off and went after the first humans she saw.
She ignored it because she was focused on getting to the Sphere and couldn't afford to waste time on killing things that weren't directly in her way.
The queen had no problem shooting jets out of the air but for the school bus moving verrry slowly somehow this was a problem? Also, once the bus escaped the queen David drives back to helplessly watch because that's more important than getting your dad and a bunch of kids to safety?
How did Patricia destroy the Alien Queen's shield?
I'd assume that based on what we've seen, all Harvester shields have a limited amount of shield energy (though it can vary from the fighter's "can handle missiles but not a few seconds of sustained plasma fire", the City Destroyer's "Ahaha you thought a nuke would work", and the Queen's "Can tank a cold fusion bomb strong enough to "level everything from (Area 51) to Houston", implying that it has a blast radius of around 1,200 miles, enough to level the entire western half of the US). Once the threshold is reached, the shield overloads and stops working. The queen likely burned most of her shield energy to survive the cold fusion bomb, then lost the rest when the fighters opened fire on her. Patricia just happened to deplete the last of her shield reserves.
Actually if you watch really closely, as she fired her gun it seemed to "drain" the shield into the gun then fire, maybe its an attack/defense switcharoo, ergo, the she can only attack or defend with her suits energy at one time, not use both at the same time, when Patrica fired in that split second she must of damaged the switch that fired up the shield meaning it was stuck on attack only. and only she could have one like that due to her size (ships probably have better ones due to the Queen never usually having to personally fight).
If the Sphere's alien species has superior technology to the point of scaring the regular aliens then how were they wiped out?
That doesn't necessarily mean that the Spheres had a 100% chance of defeating the Harvesters. Just a high enough chance that the Harvesters decided that they had to be eliminated before they could get any stronger.
Having superior technology doesn't always guarantee victory, as proven by humans managing to repel the Harvesters twice despite being at a severe technological disadvantage.
There are Real Life examples where armies with superior or more advanced weapons lose to one less advanced by factors like underestimation, tactics, terrain or numbers.
Moreover, the Sphere's technology may have only developed enough to be as big a threat to the alien's as it is AFTER most of the Sphere's race had been destroyed. Hence why the survivor focuses on gathering a rebellion that can use and further improve the weapons the Sphere has learned to build over the ages.
Quality vs Quantity. Maybe the Sphere were more advanced technologically but they didn't expand or have the amount of resources like the Harvesters have from taking over planets or whole systems.
There is also the possibility that the Sphere's civilization was a peaceful one that had abandonded military aggresion ages ago. Once the Harvesters attacked they probably did apply their science into developing all sorts of superweapons, but by the time they had them operative and in sufficiente numbers, the invaders had done enough damage and inflicted enough casualties that even having the technological upper hand wasn't enough to beat them.
Why are people who have been psychically linked to the Harvester aliens now drawing pictures of the Sphere? I understand it is a nod to Devil's Tower in Close Encounters and anything can get handwaved away by saying that the script writers just didn't care but if it is suppose to be a warning of what is coming it's a very vague warning that clearly no one in charge heard about.
Why were the aliens in Africa not catatonic like the ones in Area 51?
Maybe each ship has a commanding officer who acts as a "mini-queen" to direct the crew of that particular ship so that the main queen up in the mothership doesn't have to control everything personally. If the "mini-queen" of the ship in Africa was still alive, it could organize the surviving crew from that ship into a mini-hive to hold out against the local humans while waiting for their distress call to be answered.
Confirmed in the "Crucible" novel. It's a bit vague, since the human characters don't know about queens, but there are references to aliens becoming inexplicably demoralized after certain large fights, and the final survivor in Africa is described as having a different, larger armor-suit than the others, and its group fought with more vigor than any they'd found in years. Maybe there's a "royal jelly" type thing and a group of aliens can "promote" one of their number to queen.
The aliens can clearly switch between "mostly autonomous" and "ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL" as seen during the fight with the Queen, so they're not like the Buggers/Formics who simply drop dead if their Queen dies. If the Super Mothership was literally one minute away from reaching the core, why didn't the aliens on board just continue drilling? The Sphere said it would be "recalled by other Queens", but certainly a new Queen would look at the situation and say "Keep drilling, you're less than a minute away from victory" instead of "Well, fuck the other Queen's dead come back home". The only explanation I can think of is "Most of the Queens don't consider Earth worth taking out, this particular Queen is just a lone wolf.".
The aliens are probably just that much of a Hive Mind. Cut off the head and the body gives up and goes home.
Or, perhaps the recall order is just auto-programmed into the super-ship, and the other Queens aren't actually able to control it across many thousands of light-years. Plus, I would imagine it would take some time to extract the Earth's core even after breaching the mantle. A hole a mile in diameter, while big from a human perspective, is a pin-prick in comparison to the Earth as a whole. It would take years to extract the core through an opening that small.
Adding to the point above, what do you think will happen if humanity (or any other enemy alien race for that matter) manages to get their hands on the technology and resources on board that ship? The losses in resources alone would probably cost them a couple of looted planet cores at minimum.
Alternately, the aliens just flock to the banner of the closest Queen if too far away from one to receive orders. Kill the Queen, and they all bug off in the direction of the nearest leader until they are close enough to be lead.
Isn't twenty years a bit long to let the prisoners keep their armor?
Seeing what happened to Okun and his group after they tried to remove an alien from it's armor, it's logical that the Area 51 staff weren't eager to try again. That, and they probably didn't care about the comfort of their captives.
It's also possible that the armor is also their life support, and they don't survive if kept out of it for very long. So if you want to use them as prisoners instead of cadevers, keep them in the suits.
Confirmed in the Crucible novel: It states that the aliens merge with their bio-suits, so removing them is fatal.
If I may, when Dikembe stabs the bio-suit in the back, the little alien inside almost instantly jumps out and the Queen looks like she's going to do the same near the end of the movie. Why would either of them do this if leaving the suit is fatal?
Because staying in it was going to be fatal much faster by dint of being killed by humans right then. Theoretically if the alien can fight on and kill the humans, it might be able to either repair its suit or find another one. But even if not, most sentient beings, even when faced with imminent death, will do what they can to prolong their life, even if only by a few minutes or seconds.
A different question would be why they are allowed to keep their limbs knowing how dangerous they are with them and no discernible need for them in captivity.
What exactly caused the whole anomaly with Saturn's rings near the beginning?
Implicitly, that was the mothership passing by, hence why the monitoring station there went dark.
Even the Harvester ship didn't have strong enough gravity to tear up Saturn's rings like that. Did it maybe arrive through a wormhole like the Sphere did, and that's what did it?
Maybe it crashed through the rings while it was cloaked? Maybe it was gravitationally cloaked as well as visibly cloaked (is that something you could do with antigravity?).
Alternate theory: The rings got distorted by the Sphere alien wormholing in to evacuate the Rhea base ahead of the Harvesters. Recall the big swirly vortex of moon dust getting sucked into the wormhole when the Sphere pokes a hole into existence over the Moon. If this is the case, they hopefully evacuated the humans through the wormhole and didn't keep them aboard the ship to get shot down by the overly-twitchy humans.
The novelization has Rhea being ripped apart by the intense gravity of the wormhole (and everyone stationed there is killed in the process), so it was not another Sphere alien coming through.
Would life on Earth really have ended the moment the aliens breached the core? Or would they have had to extract a good chunk of it first before Earth's gravity and atmosphere were lost? Also on the subject, why didn't the aliens loot cores from other planets/moons in the solar system? They wouldn't have had to deal with any natives there.
It's unclear how long it would take to actually extract enough of the inner core to cause noticeable damage to the magnetic field, as the Harvesters didn't have a chance to begin Step 2. As for the second question, the Queen was responding to a distress call and wanted to finish off Earth before humans could become a threat on par with the Sphere's species.
It was stated in the first film that the aliens' biologies are similar to humans. It's possible they couldn't have survived on Jupiter or Saturn long enough to wipe it out.
The humans likely didn't want to find out what happens after the core is breached. Maybe the core is siphoned out like a milkshake. Maybe the core is popped like a zit (recall the planet in the opening with the gaping core-deep crater making up one whole side of it.)
As to why not harvest other cores, not all planets have molten cores of nickel-iron. Mars doesn't, and gas giants may or may not even have solid cores (it's speculated that Jupiter, for instance, may have a core of a diamond as big as Earth). Maybe solid, non-nickel-iron cores are useless to them.
If the Super Mothership was able to suck up buildings all the way from Singapore to Dubai (and drop them as far away as London), why didn't it just do a flyby of the entire planet and eliminate all resistance by simply flying around the planet once and then landing?
Judging from the objects being literally lifted up, the gravity field in question most likely didn't come from the ship's own mass, but involved artificial gravity manipulation. Might have been an energy costly terror tactic, and they simply couldn't spare the energy for the rest of the planet.
Alternately, they just didn't see the point in wasting time using Gravity Screw to dropkick every city on the planet, and decided after the big entrance to get to work.
It's also possible they didn't even know they WERE doing it, since it was a byproduct of them simply entering the atmosphere.
Why in the world did they move the President and the entire line of succession to the same place? You think they would have learned after the the Vice-President and the Joint Chiefs were killed when NORAD was hit in the Battle of 96 that you have to send them to separate secure locations.
Probably to continue showing what Earth goes through in the first half of the film: They got a tad too cocky and sure of facing the aliens next attack after years of advancing their technology...And it bit them in the ass
Because that's....kinda actual what happens in reality. When the entire line of Sucession needs to be in a place (Think something like a state of the union or an important whatever) they remove all but one random member to it in case everyone else dies.
Why the shout-out to China in the press meeting near the beginning? It has zero bearing on the plot, save to introduce the Chinese pilot, whose nationality, again, has no bearing on the plot. Please tell me it's not the shoehorned attempt at a flattering comment directed at the foreign market that I think it is.
What "shout out"? China being portrayed as a global super power is a pretty common thing in modern science fiction.
It's established that the defense forces are an international affair, so if anything the cast is suspiciously American-heavy.
Of the International Legacy Squadron, which is shown to have members from a variety of nations, only the Chinese and American pilots are given any kind of screen, and the American pilot is Will Smith's Legacy Character. So, yes, it appears to be just currying favor with the Chinese movie market.
It's implied Julius is going to adopt the kids at the end. But even if their immediate family is dead, wouldn't they go to their next-of-kin? Also, his age would probably be a problem for adopting young kids.
Given the amount of devastation that occurred in the movie, there's no telling how long it would take to find next-of-kin. Julius is offering at the very least to take the children in until they can find their next of kin, and likely adopting them if next-of-kin can't be found. As for age, there are real life cases of older adoptive parents, and there are probably advances in medical technology in the wake of the first alien invasion for the elderly. Besides, even if Julius dies, he still has a son.
Given that David Levinson still doesn't have any children (and his wife died 7 years ago), I think it's a safe bet he doesn't want any children. They could have adopted together, or he could do that on his own after her death, but he didn't.
He may have never made having kids a priority, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't still take in a handful of children with nowhere else to go whom his father obviously cared for. If Julius adopted them, that makes them family, and David clearly cares about family.
So the military shoots down a mysterious alien spacecraft that displayed spacewarping technology they've never seen before... and decide to just leave the wreckage there? Really? They don't sense any lifesigns, so they just say screw it and leave it there? How damn lazy are these people?
The president, her staff, and the top military commanders are more focused on the celebration taking place, and probably figured that they could attend to the wreckage once the festivities were concluded.
So when the Legacy pilots burn out their engines escaping the queen's control, and they say they won't be able to fly - how are they still clearly flying under their own power?
Rule of Cool. Gliding Does Not Work That Way (especially in a ship that's only moderately more aerodynamic than a brick).
How can Dikembe Umbutu be a warlord when the movie says there has been world peace for 20 years?
According to the tie-in novels, Dikembe's country was intentionally isolated from the rest of the world by his father after the War of 96 due to his fears of renewed colonialism by other nations. When he died, Dikembe had to fight off a few insurrections to become leader of the country, which was in pretty bad shape at the time.
This is freaking alien technology we're talking about. How on earth has America or the U.N. not managed to get their hands on it? How could Dikembe have stopped them from doing so?
There's plenty of other technology for them to study and use without going to war with a small country with its own problems. Besides, Dikembe's warriors have proven to be big enough badasses to stand up to the aliens on a one-to-one scale. What army's going to want to fuck with that just for some tech they could probably just as easily salvage elsewhere? Besides, the world had a lot of rebuilding to do after the War of 96... by the time they got around to having enough resources and attention to turn to Dikembe's country, they may have simply decided it wasn't worth it to disturb them.
Because the head of that country told America and the U.N. to scram. The other option would be for the USA to stage a military invasion in order to loot the alien tech by force, which would not be great for a world striving for peace after the War of '96.
The "disaster deadline" in the movie is the point at which the Earth's core is breached. But what about the colossal hole they've drilled through the planet to reach that point? Wouldn't that cause potentially catastrophic issues itself, regardless of whether or not the core is breached?
The hole is only one mile in diameter, which is not very big in comparison to the size of the entire planet. For that to be the cause of such major issues would be the same concept as a human being in danger of bleeding to death from a single pinprick. The hole is simply too small and the rate of blood loss (or whatever the planetary equivalent would be) is too slow to put the person (or planet) in any substantial danger.
Of course it would cause catastrophic destruction in real life, just like having a moon-sized object plow our atmosphere, merge with our mass (the effects on our rotation and orbit would itself be irreparably destructive, and much of our atmopshere would evidently have been destroyed as well). The borehole to the core itself would be a mile wide tunnel through the mantle, which is pretty much all magma. The ocean water entering this would create a zone of intense boiling, and sea levels would drop - not a ton, but noticeably - especially once the atmosphere starts filling with steam. On top of that, expect insane tectonic effects. In short, it would end most life on earth already, and stopping a few kilometers short of the core would accomplish little to prevent this.
How could the civilian treasure hunters on board their ship possibly have had the equipment to monitor the progress of the aliens' drilling beam?
As shown in the opening scenes while the President is practicing her speech, the technology in use 20 years after ID 4 is extremely advanced. Since a civilian treasure hunting ship would not be complete without some ground sensing sonar, the ship would have upgraded their technology in kind in order to make the most of searching for sunken ships. The signifigant level of technology is reinforced when the ship's crew refer to current (by our standards) RF transmitters and when the Area-51 crew refer to radar as old technology.
Wouldn't a ship with a 3000 mile diameter entering Earth's atmosphere cause severe atmospheric turbulence on a scale never before witnessed? Also wouldn't it also cause massive earthquakes just by touching the planet and changing plate tectonics? The mass that various plates would suddenly have to support on them would surely have some effect when it comes to volcanic eruptions or tremors.
I'd say there's probably some measure of anti-gravity supporting the superstructure of the ship, since such a massive vehicle would probably collapse under its own weight or rip to shreds from tidal forces when approaching Earth.
Even with antigravity, the ship was still a solid object with mass, which means it has to be displacing a an equally significative amount of air once it enters our atmosphere. That air has to go somewhere, and it will be moving fast.
After the events of the original movie the Aliens sent a distress signal as they were being defeated which was received by a Harvester Queen. The Queen then came to Earth to enact her retaliation 20 years after the first invasion, almost to the day. This begs the question: ¿Did the Queen receive the distress signal instantaneously through Subspace Ansible and it took her 20 years to get to Earth from wherever she was? ¿Or did the signal took 20 years to reach her and she got to Earth right away?
Also, the Sphere thing who intercepted that signal from 20 years ago and travels to Earth presumably from somewhere else arrives at almost the exact same time (off by only a day or two over twenty years). That is a phenomenal coincidence.
What's up with the Sphere thing's technology? We are told it is superior to the invaders but the Sphere's ship is taken out with one shot from the crappy copy weapon that humans had built on the moon...a weapon that invader ships are not damaged by at all. One telegraphed shot and the Sphere's ship is wrecked.
Notice that the Sphere's ship was destroyed because it didn't put up a shield. Without a shield, the invader's ships are equally as destructible. Two possibilities, A) The Sphere being the "Big Good" came fully in peace, and didn't think a defense was needed, or B) for all their tech the Sphere's civilization never managed to develop energy shields, which eventually gave the invaders the upper hand.
So the special isolation lab at Area 51 is on the top floor, not even below ground level? This is in a base that in the previous movie is established as being deep under ground. That means that the humans built their super high security alien prison above ground at an underground base even though there is an entire army of aliens still fighting in Africa who might decide one day that getting all their friends out of that prison might be a good idea. It also means that when the alien queen was coming for the Sphere, the humans best idea is to hide it above ground in the mostly underground base. They can move the equipment to shield the entire base and contain a fusion bomb in the span of hours but they can't set up an isolation room somewhere other than the top floor? Protected by a roof that the alien queen can literally punch through? There are higher security vaults on earth containing seeds.
So we figured out space travel, energy weapons, and shields, but nobody thought to make us our own biomechanical Iron Man suits?
Perhaps the suits need a psionic mind to make them work, rendering that whole branch of their tech unusable by humans.
The above comment actually brings up a further point. Where were the capital ships that would naturally have been produced? Realistically, large space vessels would have been the first thing constructed, to be able to project power away from Earth. In the 20 years since the first invasion, humans have developed technology that allows travel to the moon in minutes (versus days) and we have colonized other planets. So, where are the Corvettes, Cruisers and Carriers that the US Navy would have insisted on for defense (for things like say, a space station near Saturn)? Let's take a real world example here: the only ships available for the counterattack of the alien's mothership are small single-pilot craft. This is the equivalent of the modern US Navy using only speedboats and canoes for coastal defense. No matter how many guns you put on a speedboat, it is still only a speedboat. A speedboat armed to the teeth isn't going to do squat against a battleship, except maybe smudge the armor. Soooo..... where are the battleships for space defense? This is made especially jarring as a scene demonstrates that a vehicle meant for construction is actually larger and more durable than a fighter. The fighter pilots should have all asked for space tugs instead! The failed attempt to bomb the queen should have sounded more like this:
Jake: "Their point defense is too heavy, we need to find another route!"
Control: "Standby, orbital bombardment from carrier group Alpha is inbound."
Jake: "Roger control, will proceed after bombardment."
Earth's defense strategy seemed to revolve entirely around big, honkin' space guns, with fighters as more of an afterthough/publicity stunt. There could be two good reasons for this. A) Humanity, for a change, decided we just wanted to get our own house in order and weren't interested in "projecting force," so decided on an entirely defensive setup for shooting down anything that got close enough to be a threat while leaving the rest of the galaxy to its own affairs. B) The tech we were able to reverse-engineer didn't include FTL, and without the ability to expand beyond the solar system there just wasn't enough raw material to make space dreadnoughts bristling with atomic missiles.
So, how exactly does activating the fusion afterburners break those two fighters out of the Queen's control?
It's pretty clear if you watch closely that the Queen sees these two ships on fire and appearing to be out of control. It's likely that chose to release those ships from her control after they spiraled up and out of the tornado in an attempt to keep the rest of the ships from suffering more damage (From what it looked like they took a few of them out by crashing into them after all). Can't have a living shield working against itself after all.
Anyone else think that the death toll for the War of 1996 (three billion) was a tad high? The first wave had maximum impact, despite those cities already having several hours to evacuate. The death toll went down for the second and third waves, since General Grey says, by the time they nuke Houston, that the major cities have been abandoned. Military dead like ranks in the tens, probably hundreds, of thousands since military service is a small fraction for most country's populations. We don't get any indication that the aliens sent their attackers after the refugee convoys. The books say the UK death toll was four million. Is it likely that the three billion was their ballpark figure, so they didn't have to work out how many really died?
Not at all. World population in 1996 was 5.3 billion. In the opening volley, the aliens destroyed (with most, if not all of their inhabitants still in the cities) London, Paris, Moscow, New York, Berlin, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Jerusalem, Beijing, Athens, Mexico City, Rome, Vladivostok, Hong Kong, Seoul, San Francisco, Lagos, Vancouver, Toronto, Havana, Dakar, Ho Chi Minh City, Shanghai, Manila, Calcutta, Bombay, New Delhi, Tehran, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Jakarta, Istanbul, Karachi, Rio De Janeiro and Singapore. Tokyo alone has 37 million people, and the cities in the rest of the initial wave for the most part housed upwards of 4 million people each population wise. So initial death toll is in the hundreds of millions. Military dead adds on to that as well during the counter-attack (most militaries were utterly decimated after the disastrous first counter-strike). By July 4th, 108 cities are in ruins; completely and utterly wiped out (cities added to the tally include Perth and, going by the ending footage, intended targets included Cairo, Dodoma and Sydney). The infrastructure and everything those cities had is gone. The people that survived the initial attacks are now left with ruined cities, with barely any food there, likely no running water or clean water for that matter, no electricity for hospital equipment. With that in mind, most available shelter will likely be tents or camps outside the cities. It's not hard to fathom that after July 4th, a lot more people died due to disease, supply shortages and starvation due to the massive, unprecedented global destruction leaving most nations in serious turmoil.
In that case, how was humanity able to recover and rebuild, much less expand, in a mere 20 years after the loss of so many people, tons of infrastructure, governments, economy? There's a YouTube video showing a more likely outcome, and it looks more like a Scavenger World that's centuries away from recovering.
The 2.3 billion still alive after the war are still a LOT of people, more than enough to rebuild civilization. Plus, it is canon that science progressed tremendously thanks to the scavenged alien tech. Once you manage to control gravity, building stuff becomes a lot easier.
Why was the orbital defense not "warmed up" before the Harvesters arrived? The leadership apparently waited until their first line of defense was absolutely smashed before thinking to activate the other larger defense system they put in place for just this reason. Wouldn't the system have been activated once the Sphere ship showed up? There could be an argument for energy conservation, but at that point counting beans is really moot.
Also, shorten the countdown. This 10-second count screws the humans twice. Maybe make it a 5 second countdown next time?
What the heck is a "cold fusion" bomb? And how, exactly, does it differ from a "regular" fusion (i.e., modern nuclear) bomb?
Pure, weapons-grade handwavium. Since cold fusion is, by definition, a cold ("room temperature" cold, that is) reaction that essentially produces a few byproduct isotopes and electrical energy, any "cold fusion bomb" would only kill someone if it fell on them. But, since "dark matter" and its associated tropey clan have been so overused - and cold fusion hasn't had its day in the cinema sun since The Saint - the writers probably dragged it out of mothballs for its sci-fi gooey goodness.
Of course, the writers already showed that they really don't give a flying ducky about proper terminology, seeing as how a machete (viewable at any garden store) was identified as a katana. Then again, given that the writing in this movie had more ham than a Hatfield plant, it's pretty clear that "writing standards" weren't exactly a priority.
The katana line was obviously just Rosenberg being an idiot for comic relief though.
How did the Harvesters get footage of Whitmore's Rousing Speech from the first movie in their distress call?
Okay, now I have to ask: how were they able to reverse-engineer all that tech? In the first movie, they said that they couldn't do any experiments until the mothership arrived and the Roswell ship turned on. The majority of the ships ended up as burning wrecks, and any surviving systems would have been useless without their energy source.
They couldn't do anything with the fighters because they had no power and all systems were shut down. After the war they had dozens of city destroyer wrecks, thousands of fighters, tens of thousands of stranded or dead aliens and firsthand experience with their technology. That's a much better place to be in as now we can make educated guesses about things that before we could not even imagine.
Who exactly is the Big Bad of the Harvester Race? We know there are multiple Queens, but who do they answer to? Is there a Harvester God Empress?
Probably the oldest or current most powerful of the Queens. That or its like the Borg or Tyranids where there is no Big Bad to shoot at just a bunch of individual small Big Bad s who collectively run the operation.
Didn't London and Washington DC get obliterated in the first movie? Heck, Tower Bridge in London is still around (until its destruction) in this movie! Seems rebuilding them perfectly would be low priority considering what mankind had just been through.
So all the aliens wanted to do all along was sucking up the Earth's core? ...Are they not aware that all planets and even some large satellites have molten cores? Why waste precious technology and military equipment by fighting against planets with a civilized population that can fight back when they can just ignore them and enjoy sucking up literally all the other planets?
A theory above, is that the Harvesters initially did want to settle on the planet for a while, with their biology being close enough to ours to make it a decent temporary home for them, the "smaller" ships from the first movie working in tandem to drain the core, once we repelled them once the distress signal alerted the Queen to the fact and she went "fuck it, just get the core, teach them to screw with us" her ships Drill is much larger than the old ones, and probably designed to extract the core much faster.
If the super giant ship can do so much damage with the gravity stuff... why can't the aliens just fly it around the Earth to annihilate the entire surface and get rid of the pesky humans quickly?
Why is Julius (Judd Hirsch) bemoaning a lack of grandchildren when he just lost his daughter-in-law only a couple of years before the movie? I understand in the first film his "it's not healthy for you to be stuck in the past" was due to David's divorce, but considering the number of orphans the first war created if grandchildren were an actual issue you'd think he'd spend more time volunteering at orphanages and not puttering around in his boat, acting like a schlemiel. Also, if David really did hook up with Catherine at some point was this before or after his wife died?
