I didn't feel like Independence Day needed a sequel, but it might be good.

I don't know wouldn't it be hard for any film or book like this not to have a sequel. The same goes for Mars attacks and even War of the Worlds.

Massive Alien invasion force attacks earth.
Earth very nearly get wiped out but are saved at the last minute by some fluke.
Aliens "Oh well we see what you did there but, well give up and never come back."

All these films always leave me wandering what happens next.

This isn't a random sequel either, there's been talk of an ID2 movie for at least the last 10 or 15 years and the script was in "development hell" with the folks involved wanting to do a sequel but unsure where to take the plot.

I really liked the first movie, it was shlock, but it was fun block-buster summer movie schlock. I'm pretty sure the sequel won't rise much above that, but I've been looking forward to this movie for a while now :)

The new Star Trek on the other hand, looks like a complete and utter abomination.

Completely agree. I don't have a clue I watched when I saw the trailer. Wasn't a big fan of the first (reboot). Villain made absolutely no sense to me. I thought the second one was better than the first, but it was just ok.

The new Star Trek on the other hand, looks like a complete and utter abomination.

Completely agree. I don't have a clue I watched when I saw the trailer. Wasn't a big fan of the first (reboot). Villain made absolutely no sense to me. I thought the second one was better than the first, but it was just ok.

Actually I felt the same way. But swap the first and second movie.

Wasn't a big fan of the second (reboot). Villain made absolutely no sense to me. I thought the first one was better than the second, and the first was pretty good. The second not so much.

I don't know wouldn't it be hard for any film or book like this not to have a sequel. The same goes for Mars attacks and even War of the Worlds.

Specifically for War of the Worlds, in the original book the Martians were catapulted towards earth in various intervals. They probably had little to no communication with home (especially after they became sick), so it's conceivable that there wouldn't be a second attempt because of uncertainty.

On the other hand, if they're anything like humans, there would have almost certainly been a second attempt that was just that much better prepared.

Massive Alien invasion force attacks earth.
Earth very nearly get wiped out but are saved at the last minute by some fluke.
Aliens "Oh well we see what you did there but, well give up and never come back."

All these films always leave me wandering what happens next.

Well, ID4 could have been left without a sequel. It is made clear when they inteorrogate the captive alien that their entire civilisation travels from planet to planet like locusts in city ships. Taken to the extreme this means that their race exists only as the large force (we see multiple millions of them about to board landing ships as a huge invasion force minutes before the protagonists blow up their mothership) and that they had a spaceship so vast it would generate its own gravity field and was for all intents and purposes getting towards the size of a small Dyson Sphere if you went ahead and put a dwarf star inside it. Would such a civilisation have any need for a planet to call home?

If this was the case and someone took out their mothership, this would be a genocide, and the race would be extinct with no chance of reprisals. However, any race capable of launching such a crusade would think ahead, and putting all your eggs in one basket, your entire civilisation into one fleet of ships, would be stupidity. There would surely be other nomadic swarms out there, waiting to pick up where their failed comrades left off...

Massive Alien invasion force attacks earth.
Earth very nearly get wiped out but are saved at the last minute by some fluke.
Aliens "Oh well we see what you did there but, well give up and never come back."

Of course that depends on the nature of the aliens in question. A simple and rather reasonable outcome is that the aliens in question are more akin to nomadic wanders rather than a centralized government, with various unconnected groups of their species slowly spreading out across the galaxy, moving from system to system to gather resources, expand their tribe/fleet, and then push off to the next 'watering hole' they can see from their current location.

Nothing really needs to happen after their defeat. Any survivors just keep moving on, possibly marking 'the demon planet' down as part of their cultural history and appearing as a thing in their literature. A horror story from generations ago where the last 'golden age' of their society ended and they fled to rebuild as best they could and continue on their way, harvesting new planets and spreading their species. There really isn't a reason to 'go back', as everything near earth that was worth harvesting has been harvested/settled/whatever, and the last time they showed up here things didn't go well.

Why would you risk a second attack if you knew that they had already defeated your forces once and nearly wiped you out, and now know even more about you and have more of your technology? Far better and more logical to just run as far and fast as you can, and hope that you never meet a member of that species again. (Maybe fling a few massive rocks towards the system to destroy the planet to be sure, but that might still be stopped, and maybe the pesky humans might use that as an excuse to devote resources to building a fleet of their own and coming after you... Probably just running like mad and hope they forget is the best option. They seem pretty stupid and happy to live on their one little rock in space anyway, and are more interested in killing each other when there isn't some external threat that forces them to band together anyway.)

And of course that assumes there ARE any survivors from that group. Maybe the humans defeat every last one, utterly destroying a whole civilization that was so advanced that the failure of their systems was completely inconceivable to them, and therefore unrecoverable from when things suddenly went so badly. Even if there are other groups of that species out there in space going on their own paths, well, they're basically locus spreading out through systems, and even if they had remained in contact with ultra long range communications, having one fleet suddenly go dark might not be a huge issue to everyone else. Those nearest to them might worry that it was an external threat of some kind, but lacking an actual update or report from them before the end the others could assume that it was some kind of accident, the core of the mothership overloading, or a civil war breaking out, or even just their communications system going dark. Everyone else could have their own problems and things to worry about, so why spend resources to go look at what happened to some random isolated incident with people you don't really care about?

When was the last time YOU drove up into some remote part of Alaska to go knock on doors and ask why some old prospector died?

@Luckless, that's a great way of describing why the aliens might not come back.

Even if there are a million 'locust fleets' out there, and they all went in random directions from their home system millions of years ago, the chances of any two fleets being within easy travelling range would be improbable beyond reason. It would be like dropping a grain of sand in the pacific, and another in the atlantic, and hoping that they might collide next year...

I didnt understand the end of Independance Day.

It looked like they lost to me. Many cities destroyed, Military crippled, still 10's of thoasands (if not 100,000's) of Aliens to kill.

I mean they only downed 1 of their main attack vessels and the mother ship. There were dozens more which probably learnt very quickly not to fire their main weapon.

How long would it have taken them to fix there power issues and restore shields? Not long imo. It was game over from the end.

It looked like they lost to me. Many cities destroyed, Military crippled, still 10's of thoasands (if not 100,000's) of Aliens to kill.

I mean they only downed 1 of their main attack vessels and the mother ship. There were dozens more which probably learnt very quickly not to fire their main weapon

They said at the end that the ships around the world were coming down. Basically even though you only saw the United States battle, the rest of the world was basically doing the same thing right after we proved it would work. Also, since the mothership was taken out, it was likely the ships were not able to communicate with each other anymore due to the line of sight communications (big plot point).

So most of the world was left devastated, but in the sense that the aliens were defeated, the humans won. Also the new movie suggests we greatly upgraded our defenses afterward, using the alien technology.

As far as the other ships in other solar systems, unless they had some method of instantaneous communication, I would have said it was likely no other ships would have even known they had lost a mothership at Earth. In fact, they might not ever head to Earth, thinking it had already been harvested.

The sequel is a little feasible if one of the ships managed to send an SOS before it was taken down and it just took years to be received and even more time to get a ship to Earth. If this was the scenario, almost seems unlikely you would bother. Would seem like a potential waste of resources to attempt to take a planet that already took out a mothership.