The first trailer for the upcoming Independence Day: Resurgence was released recently, and if anything, makes it clear that Roland Emmerich’s movie will feature the same spectacular action and special effects as the original 1996 movie.
And this will be an apocalyptic movie, in which humanity’s existence is threatened by a destructive force of some kind, like in Emmerich’s earlier 2012. In that film it was the prophetic Mayan apocalypse that was tearing the world apart, with the heroes escaping from volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and other natural disasters. And in 1996’s Independence Day, aliens reached Earth on huge spaceships with the idea of destroying human civilization in order to acquire the planet’s natural resources.
It wasn’t a film like Spielberg’s E.T. or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which a benign alien intelligence wanted to contact and enlighten us. No, these aliens could not be bargained with, so humanity rallied its forces and thanks to intrepid fighter pilot Steven Hiller (played by Will Smith) managed to defeat the aliens and save the day, in what was certainly a jolly good summer movie.
The original Independence Day was one of the biggest blockbusters to date, and helped make American actor Will Smith one of the biggest movie stars of our time. So many fans are wondering why the big name actor is missing from Roland Emmerich’s upcoming movie?
Apparently this is due to the fact that Smith is done with sci-fi movies for the time being according to website Cinemablend. He also did not want to play Colonel Hiller in Independence Day: Resurgence, who would have been the movie father of actor Jessie Usher, who was to play the son of Smith’s character in the movie. Because Smith had already acted in director Shyamalan’s After Earth, which also featured the father-son angle and starred both Will Smith and his real-life son Jayden Smith.
Rest in peace… Will Smith’s character won’t feature in the new Independence Day movie.
So how does the movie’s plot explain Smith’s absence from this Independence Day sequel? On the promotional website www.warof1996.com, it is stated that Hiller died “while test piloting the ESD’s first alien hybrid fighter”. And this is in fact one of the movie’s plot points, how humanity recovers alien technology and uses this technology to combat the new alien threat, as it seems the extra-terrestrials did not take their defeat well and are back with bigger and meaner spaceships as can can be seen in the movie’s trailer above.
But even if Will Smith won’t be returning for Independence Day: Resurgence, at least star Jeff Goldblum will reprise his role as the wacky MIT graduate scientist, and new members of the cast include Liam Hemsworth, who plays the hero, and actress Sela Ward, who has been cast as the President of the United States, in a movie that will likely be one of the year’s top blockbusters when it hits the screens in June 2016.