Dash_Riprock
Member
...Holy. Shit. Alright, so before I lay down the summary, its important to note that novelizations typically contain scenes not in the film are sometimes based on earlier, entirely different drafts, so this may not fully represent the final film. Feel free to ask any questions and I'll try to answer them.
So anyway, here we go (UNMARKED SPOILERS, last chance to turn back):
The story begins on a Russian outpost on Saturn's moon Rhea, the farthest human settlement in the Solar System. The outpost is destroyed along with most of Saturn's rings when what looks like a black hole opens right next to it.
The story then cuts back to a small African country in the Congo (called Umbutu I think) where David Levinson, Jeff Goldblum's character, is investigating strange reports from the downed City-Destroyer that crashed near there. As he investigates we learn the fates of the surviving ID4 characters:
-David is now head of the Earth Space Defense (ESD). His wife Connie died from cancer in the 20 year gap.
-David's father, Julius, wrote a book about the war in which he has given himself a far bigger role and tried to sell it around the country, mostly to old folks in retirement homes.
-President Whitmore has never recovered from the mind-rape the Aliens gave him in Area-51 and has become a total recluse, not seen in public for years. His secret service agent is constantly having to keep track of him and he has terrible nightmares, along with occasionally scrawling strange aliens symbols on the ground.
-Whitmore's daughter Patricia dropped out of pilot training in order to take care of her father.
-Steven Hiller (Will Smith)- died in a crash testing the first prototype fighter incorporating Alien tech in 2007.
-Jasmine Hiller, his wife, is now a nurse. She is still grieving over Steven's death.
-His son, Dylan Hiller, is now a pilot and the ESD's poster boy, though he is still haunted by his father's death and his attempts to live up to him
-Dr. Okun (Bret Spiner's character) has been in a coma ever since the Aliens attacked him. His boyfriend (yup, he's gay) Dr. Issacs, works at Area 51 and still remains hopeful that he'll wake up one day.
So anyway, David and a woman named Anissa, who was an old girlfriend after Connie died but their relationship went sour, investigate the downed city-destroyer in the Congo powering up by itself. They're escorted by Dikembe Jr. the dictator of the country and son of the previous president, who after the war of 96 continued to battle the alien survivors of the crashed ship for years afterwards. After repeated contact with the Aliens he eventually went insane and formed a cult worshiping the aliens, trying to sacrifice Dikembe jr, who also has powerful visions regarding the aliens.
David and the others find that, unlike the other City-Destroyers, this one was drilling all the way down to the Earth's core to harvest its energy. They also discover that a distress signal had been sent by the ship.
Meanwhile, on the Lunar station, we're introduced to Jake, Liam Hemsworth's character I'm assuming. Along with his friend Sam, they're a couple of washouts from the ESD who now pilot tugs from the moon to Earth, are constantly butting-heads with the Chinese commander of the Lunar defense station. Jake has a beef with Dylan as he blames him for being scrubbed out of the ESD pilot program after a training accident. He is also Patricia's old boyfriend though they haven't spoken since he washed out.
On July 3rd, the Lunar stations looses contact with the Rhea station and discovers the immense wormhole created there. Soon, an immense ship comes through the wormhole. The Lunar station prepares to destroy it with the City-Destroyer canon, but David tells them to stop, as the ship does not look anything like the Alien's vessels and may well be from an entirely different race. The current US president (though ESD is a multinational organization the US and to a far lesser degree China basically call the shots), a woman named Lanford, considers his advice but decides that its better to be safe than sorry and orders the canon to open fire. It does and the ship is disabled and crashes onto the moon. The whole world cheers in celebration as this is seen as proof that Earth is ready for the Aliens.
However, David is convinced that the ship is from another race and commandeers Jake and his friend to sneak them up aboard the down ship to find answers. While this is going on, the City-Destoryer canon mounted on Olympus Mons on Mars is utterly destroyed by the REAL alien, which if you've seen the trailers you already know what it looks like.
As the Aliens arrive, Whitmore, who was preparing to interrupt a victory speech by the president to warn them that what they shot down was not the real Alien threat, essentially becomes comatose as the powerful alien visions return. Meanwhile, Dr. Okun awakens from his coma and immediately sets to work scribbling down alien symbols.
So from here, things happen pretty fast. The Lunar Station fires at the new Alien Harvester (what the massive new mothership is called) but it has no effect. The Harvestor obliterates the Lunar Base cannon along with the dozens of other cannons stationed all around Earth with no effort before settling down on the top of Earth like a hat (again, like in the trailer). David and Jake barely escape the devastation on the moon and try to go back down to Earth to meet with the President and coordinate a plan of attack. The immense gravity of the Harvester conflicts with the Earth which results in massive chunks of earth along with cities and people being sucked up towards the ship. David and Jake are also sucked up but manage to survive. This essentially annihilates the entire US east Coast along with London, much of northwestern Europe, and basically anywhere else where the Harvester touches down and lands. Eventually the gravity conflict ends and everything comes crashing down again (scene from trailer where Berj Khalifa crashes into London and whatnot). Dylan flies to his mother's hospital and starts to evacuate it. However, Jasmine slips and dies just as Dylan is about to pull her up into the helicopter.
As David and Jake escape the Harvester and rush back down to Earth, Whitmore, who is being treated for his collapse at the Area 51 hospital, wakes up and heads to the holding area where dozens of Alien PoWs are being held (mostly to be experimented on as after the mothership in the first one was destroyed they essentially became catatonic though they of course awoke when the new Harvester arrived.) Whitmore locks himself in with the aliens so that one will take control of him and speak like in the first film in an attempt to gain some answers. As the aliens control Whitmore, we learn the following:
-The Aliens are lead by a Queen, like bees
-They didn't want Earth for its surface resources, they wanted to drill to its core and harvest that energy to refuel their ships. They only have 12 hours before the core is breached and planet Earth is fucked.
The Aliens release Whitmore and attack but are subdued. Dikembe who is there with David, takes out an Alien in a biosuit armed with ONLY TWO MACHETES. Whitmore is again comatose where he has powerful visions regarding a large, perfect silver sphere...
Meanwhile, and attack plan is drawn: David developed a special energy ray called the Okun Ray which when it collides with the Alien's energy shield cancels it out. The plan is a repeat of the first film: Disable the shield, send a fuckton of fighters and take out the mothership with a ton of "Cold Fusion" bombs.
Dylan of course leads the assault in the fighters along with Jake, his friend, and Chinese pilot names Rain who is the niece of the Lunar commander. Everything seems to be going well, the shield to the Harvester is disabled, Dylan, Jake, Rain, and several other fighters make it inside. Just then however Whitmore wakes up screaming:
"She knows! She knows!"
An EMP-type device is fired inside the Harvester which disables all the fighters within. Outside, the Aliens launch another specialized EMP that disables all of the satellites which were firing the Okun Ray. It then releases all of its fighters (millions of them) and begins to massacre the ESD forces. An alien ground force breaches the Preisdent's command center in the Cheyenne Mountains and abducts her to the mothership.
Jake, his friend, Dylan, and Rain are the only pilots who survive inside the mothership. All of their fighters released their Cold Fusion bombs but that aliens sent small devices to disable them as well. As the aliens inside the ship kill the remaining pilots, Jake, Dylan and the others try to make their way to a hanger so they can steal some Alien fighters and escape.
Meanwhile. Whitemore tells David and the others to get to the first other ship that crashed onto the moon as their only hope lies there.
While all this is going on, David's dad Julius has managed to escape the devastation and is now driving an old school bus along with several other survivors, mostly kids. They are trying to make their way to Aea 51 since Julius knows David will be there.
David and the people at Area 51 manage to get back inside the crashed ship on the moon where they find what they're looking for: A large, perfect silver sphere, the exact one Whitmore, Dikembe and Okun all saw in their visions. Bringing it back to Area 51, the sphere reveals itself to be the last survivor of an ancient race that was destroyed by the Aliens long ago. His race essentially shed their physical bodies and uploaded themselves into virtual reality, and this sphere is the representation of all of this species' knowledge. The sphere reveals several things:
-The Aliens have destroyed thousands of worlds to harvest their cores
-The mother ship from the first film budded out of the Harvester body (Organic tech and whatnot) and was sent to subdue Earth. The Aliens didn't think that they needed anymore since Humans are such a "primitive" species.
-Humans are the first species known to ever defeat them.
-The sphere was coming both to warn Humans and to evacuate as many of them as it could to a hidden fortress world bristling with weapons where countless other species whose worlds have been destroyed are mounting a resistance.
-They don't have 12 hours until the core is breached, they only have TWO
-By activating the Sphere, they have alerted the Queen to its location, and no doubt she will now come for it.
The sphere asks them to destroy it because if the Queen captures it she will learn to location of the resistance planet and destroy it. Instead, Okun and David formulate a plan: since the Queen is locking on to the Sphere's "RF frequency" they can duplicate he frequency seal the Sphere in a room where she can't detect it, and trick the queen into capturing the decoy in a tugship, which will be loaded with Cold Fusion bombs. As cold fusion bombs as powerful (A general mentions just one will level everything "From here to North Dakota") There first have to place a shield around the Queen's ship when it arrives to contain the blast.
As all this is going on, the current president is brought face to face with the queen. She is ENORMOUS, at least 200 feet tall, and has her own powerful biomech suit which makes her look like a demonic praying mantis. The Queen interrogates the President about the Sphere's location but the President basically tells her to go fuck herself. President is killed as the Queen is alerted to the sphere's location and heads down in her personal ship.
As David and Okun prepare their last ditch plan, they run into a problem: The pilot of the tug is going to have to sacrifice themselves in order to blow up the queen's ship as it captures it. Patricia Whitmore, who has been with her dad the whole time, volunteers. However as she is headed towards the tug, Whitmore orders his Secret Service agent to lock her in an office so that he can pilot the tug. Patricia screams and begs him not to because he already saved the world once. He replies:
"I'm not doing this to save the world. I'm doing this to save my daughter."
The Queen's ship arrives along with hundreds of fighter escorts. The few remaining fighters try to hold them off while Whitmore in the tug flys off. The Queen eventually takes the bait and her ship begins to draw in the tug with a tractor beam . As it does so however, the Queen reads Whitmore's mind and discovers that it is a trap. It is too late however as the shield is place around the Queen;s ship before she can escape. Whitmore flies the tug to be face to face with the queen and before he blows the bombs cries out:
"HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!"
No, I'm not making that up.
The Queen's ship is destroyed and the blast is contained. As everyone cheers, they receive word that fighters are still attacking armies around the world. Just then, from the rubble of the ship, he Queen emerges in her powerful exosuit. Turns out she had a personal shield on her suit which just barely managed to save her from the fusion bomb.
The Queen, now knowing where the sphere really is, heads to Area 51, enveloping herself in a swarm of alien fighters to protect herself as he shield is flickering on and off. David, Okun, and the others try their best to bring her down, but the fighters are too many. She eventually digs deep down into Area 51 and takes the Sphere, killing Okun's boyfriend in the process.
Just then, three Alien fighters break off from the rest and begin to attack the queen. It is Jack, Dylan, and Rain, who manged to escape from the Harvester. Firing off their fighter's afterburners (which are only meant for use in space) they wipe out most of the fighters destroying the queen, damaging their own fighters in the process. The queen is eventually brought down, dropping the sphere as her exosuit collapses. However, she crawls out of the suit and begins crawling towards the sphere, while calling another ship to pick her up. As there are no more fighters left to fight her, and the Earth;s core is only seconds from being breached this looks like the end.
Just then, however, David, who met up with his father on the bus with the kids, Charges forward in the School Bus and crashes it into the head of the Queen at full speed.
The Queen's head is run over and explodes.
By a school bus!
All other fighters plummet to the ground as the Queen dies. The Harvester itself detaches from the Earth and retreats into deep space. Humanity wins once again. The novel ends with the Sphere telling David and Okun that it wants humanity to lead the resistance and launch a counter offensive against the Aliens. It divulges the secrets to interstellar travel (which humans were never able to figure out from the alien tech). David is hesitant, but Okun, still furious about his boyfriend's death, is pumped. The last words of the novel is Okun looking up at the sky and proclaiming.
"Let's go kick some Alien ass!"
Well there it is. I got to say, this is either gonna be really good or just mediocre. It all depends on how the action is handled and the performances. The sequel hook at the end leaves me excited as all hell, though.
So anyway, here we go (UNMARKED SPOILERS, last chance to turn back):
The story begins on a Russian outpost on Saturn's moon Rhea, the farthest human settlement in the Solar System. The outpost is destroyed along with most of Saturn's rings when what looks like a black hole opens right next to it.
The story then cuts back to a small African country in the Congo (called Umbutu I think) where David Levinson, Jeff Goldblum's character, is investigating strange reports from the downed City-Destroyer that crashed near there. As he investigates we learn the fates of the surviving ID4 characters:
-David is now head of the Earth Space Defense (ESD). His wife Connie died from cancer in the 20 year gap.
-David's father, Julius, wrote a book about the war in which he has given himself a far bigger role and tried to sell it around the country, mostly to old folks in retirement homes.
-President Whitmore has never recovered from the mind-rape the Aliens gave him in Area-51 and has become a total recluse, not seen in public for years. His secret service agent is constantly having to keep track of him and he has terrible nightmares, along with occasionally scrawling strange aliens symbols on the ground.
-Whitmore's daughter Patricia dropped out of pilot training in order to take care of her father.
-Steven Hiller (Will Smith)- died in a crash testing the first prototype fighter incorporating Alien tech in 2007.
-Jasmine Hiller, his wife, is now a nurse. She is still grieving over Steven's death.
-His son, Dylan Hiller, is now a pilot and the ESD's poster boy, though he is still haunted by his father's death and his attempts to live up to him
-Dr. Okun (Bret Spiner's character) has been in a coma ever since the Aliens attacked him. His boyfriend (yup, he's gay) Dr. Issacs, works at Area 51 and still remains hopeful that he'll wake up one day.
So anyway, David and a woman named Anissa, who was an old girlfriend after Connie died but their relationship went sour, investigate the downed city-destroyer in the Congo powering up by itself. They're escorted by Dikembe Jr. the dictator of the country and son of the previous president, who after the war of 96 continued to battle the alien survivors of the crashed ship for years afterwards. After repeated contact with the Aliens he eventually went insane and formed a cult worshiping the aliens, trying to sacrifice Dikembe jr, who also has powerful visions regarding the aliens.
David and the others find that, unlike the other City-Destroyers, this one was drilling all the way down to the Earth's core to harvest its energy. They also discover that a distress signal had been sent by the ship.
Meanwhile, on the Lunar station, we're introduced to Jake, Liam Hemsworth's character I'm assuming. Along with his friend Sam, they're a couple of washouts from the ESD who now pilot tugs from the moon to Earth, are constantly butting-heads with the Chinese commander of the Lunar defense station. Jake has a beef with Dylan as he blames him for being scrubbed out of the ESD pilot program after a training accident. He is also Patricia's old boyfriend though they haven't spoken since he washed out.
On July 3rd, the Lunar stations looses contact with the Rhea station and discovers the immense wormhole created there. Soon, an immense ship comes through the wormhole. The Lunar station prepares to destroy it with the City-Destroyer canon, but David tells them to stop, as the ship does not look anything like the Alien's vessels and may well be from an entirely different race. The current US president (though ESD is a multinational organization the US and to a far lesser degree China basically call the shots), a woman named Lanford, considers his advice but decides that its better to be safe than sorry and orders the canon to open fire. It does and the ship is disabled and crashes onto the moon. The whole world cheers in celebration as this is seen as proof that Earth is ready for the Aliens.
However, David is convinced that the ship is from another race and commandeers Jake and his friend to sneak them up aboard the down ship to find answers. While this is going on, the City-Destoryer canon mounted on Olympus Mons on Mars is utterly destroyed by the REAL alien, which if you've seen the trailers you already know what it looks like.
As the Aliens arrive, Whitmore, who was preparing to interrupt a victory speech by the president to warn them that what they shot down was not the real Alien threat, essentially becomes comatose as the powerful alien visions return. Meanwhile, Dr. Okun awakens from his coma and immediately sets to work scribbling down alien symbols.
So from here, things happen pretty fast. The Lunar Station fires at the new Alien Harvester (what the massive new mothership is called) but it has no effect. The Harvestor obliterates the Lunar Base cannon along with the dozens of other cannons stationed all around Earth with no effort before settling down on the top of Earth like a hat (again, like in the trailer). David and Jake barely escape the devastation on the moon and try to go back down to Earth to meet with the President and coordinate a plan of attack. The immense gravity of the Harvester conflicts with the Earth which results in massive chunks of earth along with cities and people being sucked up towards the ship. David and Jake are also sucked up but manage to survive. This essentially annihilates the entire US east Coast along with London, much of northwestern Europe, and basically anywhere else where the Harvester touches down and lands. Eventually the gravity conflict ends and everything comes crashing down again (scene from trailer where Berj Khalifa crashes into London and whatnot). Dylan flies to his mother's hospital and starts to evacuate it. However, Jasmine slips and dies just as Dylan is about to pull her up into the helicopter.
As David and Jake escape the Harvester and rush back down to Earth, Whitmore, who is being treated for his collapse at the Area 51 hospital, wakes up and heads to the holding area where dozens of Alien PoWs are being held (mostly to be experimented on as after the mothership in the first one was destroyed they essentially became catatonic though they of course awoke when the new Harvester arrived.) Whitmore locks himself in with the aliens so that one will take control of him and speak like in the first film in an attempt to gain some answers. As the aliens control Whitmore, we learn the following:
-The Aliens are lead by a Queen, like bees
-They didn't want Earth for its surface resources, they wanted to drill to its core and harvest that energy to refuel their ships. They only have 12 hours before the core is breached and planet Earth is fucked.
The Aliens release Whitmore and attack but are subdued. Dikembe who is there with David, takes out an Alien in a biosuit armed with ONLY TWO MACHETES. Whitmore is again comatose where he has powerful visions regarding a large, perfect silver sphere...
Meanwhile, and attack plan is drawn: David developed a special energy ray called the Okun Ray which when it collides with the Alien's energy shield cancels it out. The plan is a repeat of the first film: Disable the shield, send a fuckton of fighters and take out the mothership with a ton of "Cold Fusion" bombs.
Dylan of course leads the assault in the fighters along with Jake, his friend, and Chinese pilot names Rain who is the niece of the Lunar commander. Everything seems to be going well, the shield to the Harvester is disabled, Dylan, Jake, Rain, and several other fighters make it inside. Just then however Whitmore wakes up screaming:
"She knows! She knows!"
An EMP-type device is fired inside the Harvester which disables all the fighters within. Outside, the Aliens launch another specialized EMP that disables all of the satellites which were firing the Okun Ray. It then releases all of its fighters (millions of them) and begins to massacre the ESD forces. An alien ground force breaches the Preisdent's command center in the Cheyenne Mountains and abducts her to the mothership.
Jake, his friend, Dylan, and Rain are the only pilots who survive inside the mothership. All of their fighters released their Cold Fusion bombs but that aliens sent small devices to disable them as well. As the aliens inside the ship kill the remaining pilots, Jake, Dylan and the others try to make their way to a hanger so they can steal some Alien fighters and escape.
Meanwhile. Whitemore tells David and the others to get to the first other ship that crashed onto the moon as their only hope lies there.
While all this is going on, David's dad Julius has managed to escape the devastation and is now driving an old school bus along with several other survivors, mostly kids. They are trying to make their way to Aea 51 since Julius knows David will be there.
David and the people at Area 51 manage to get back inside the crashed ship on the moon where they find what they're looking for: A large, perfect silver sphere, the exact one Whitmore, Dikembe and Okun all saw in their visions. Bringing it back to Area 51, the sphere reveals itself to be the last survivor of an ancient race that was destroyed by the Aliens long ago. His race essentially shed their physical bodies and uploaded themselves into virtual reality, and this sphere is the representation of all of this species' knowledge. The sphere reveals several things:
-The Aliens have destroyed thousands of worlds to harvest their cores
-The mother ship from the first film budded out of the Harvester body (Organic tech and whatnot) and was sent to subdue Earth. The Aliens didn't think that they needed anymore since Humans are such a "primitive" species.
-Humans are the first species known to ever defeat them.
-The sphere was coming both to warn Humans and to evacuate as many of them as it could to a hidden fortress world bristling with weapons where countless other species whose worlds have been destroyed are mounting a resistance.
-They don't have 12 hours until the core is breached, they only have TWO
-By activating the Sphere, they have alerted the Queen to its location, and no doubt she will now come for it.
The sphere asks them to destroy it because if the Queen captures it she will learn to location of the resistance planet and destroy it. Instead, Okun and David formulate a plan: since the Queen is locking on to the Sphere's "RF frequency" they can duplicate he frequency seal the Sphere in a room where she can't detect it, and trick the queen into capturing the decoy in a tugship, which will be loaded with Cold Fusion bombs. As cold fusion bombs as powerful (A general mentions just one will level everything "From here to North Dakota") There first have to place a shield around the Queen's ship when it arrives to contain the blast.
As all this is going on, the current president is brought face to face with the queen. She is ENORMOUS, at least 200 feet tall, and has her own powerful biomech suit which makes her look like a demonic praying mantis. The Queen interrogates the President about the Sphere's location but the President basically tells her to go fuck herself. President is killed as the Queen is alerted to the sphere's location and heads down in her personal ship.
As David and Okun prepare their last ditch plan, they run into a problem: The pilot of the tug is going to have to sacrifice themselves in order to blow up the queen's ship as it captures it. Patricia Whitmore, who has been with her dad the whole time, volunteers. However as she is headed towards the tug, Whitmore orders his Secret Service agent to lock her in an office so that he can pilot the tug. Patricia screams and begs him not to because he already saved the world once. He replies:
"I'm not doing this to save the world. I'm doing this to save my daughter."
The Queen's ship arrives along with hundreds of fighter escorts. The few remaining fighters try to hold them off while Whitmore in the tug flys off. The Queen eventually takes the bait and her ship begins to draw in the tug with a tractor beam . As it does so however, the Queen reads Whitmore's mind and discovers that it is a trap. It is too late however as the shield is place around the Queen;s ship before she can escape. Whitmore flies the tug to be face to face with the queen and before he blows the bombs cries out:
"HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!"
No, I'm not making that up.
The Queen's ship is destroyed and the blast is contained. As everyone cheers, they receive word that fighters are still attacking armies around the world. Just then, from the rubble of the ship, he Queen emerges in her powerful exosuit. Turns out she had a personal shield on her suit which just barely managed to save her from the fusion bomb.
The Queen, now knowing where the sphere really is, heads to Area 51, enveloping herself in a swarm of alien fighters to protect herself as he shield is flickering on and off. David, Okun, and the others try their best to bring her down, but the fighters are too many. She eventually digs deep down into Area 51 and takes the Sphere, killing Okun's boyfriend in the process.
Just then, three Alien fighters break off from the rest and begin to attack the queen. It is Jack, Dylan, and Rain, who manged to escape from the Harvester. Firing off their fighter's afterburners (which are only meant for use in space) they wipe out most of the fighters destroying the queen, damaging their own fighters in the process. The queen is eventually brought down, dropping the sphere as her exosuit collapses. However, she crawls out of the suit and begins crawling towards the sphere, while calling another ship to pick her up. As there are no more fighters left to fight her, and the Earth;s core is only seconds from being breached this looks like the end.
Just then, however, David, who met up with his father on the bus with the kids, Charges forward in the School Bus and crashes it into the head of the Queen at full speed.
The Queen's head is run over and explodes.
By a school bus!
All other fighters plummet to the ground as the Queen dies. The Harvester itself detaches from the Earth and retreats into deep space. Humanity wins once again. The novel ends with the Sphere telling David and Okun that it wants humanity to lead the resistance and launch a counter offensive against the Aliens. It divulges the secrets to interstellar travel (which humans were never able to figure out from the alien tech). David is hesitant, but Okun, still furious about his boyfriend's death, is pumped. The last words of the novel is Okun looking up at the sky and proclaiming.
"Let's go kick some Alien ass!"
Well there it is. I got to say, this is either gonna be really good or just mediocre. It all depends on how the action is handled and the performances. The sequel hook at the end leaves me excited as all hell, though.
