Punchable, hackable squidaliens to return in upcoming Independence Day sequel

One of these actors has signed up to be in this film. Guess which one.

20th Century Fox

Cinephiles, rejoice: director Roland Emmerich has announced details on his long-anticipated sequel to 1996's summer blockbuster Independence Day. Sequels, actually: according to Entertainment Weekly, Emmerich and co-writer Dean Devlin have penned two full scripts for the follow-up, which will be set twenty years after the events in the first movie and will again feature the return of Independence Day's IT-challenged squid-headed monster antagonists.

"The humans knew that one day the aliens would come back," Emmerich explained to EW. The invading tentacular horde from the first movie managed to send out a distress signal before being implausibly hacked by Jeff Goldblum's PowerBook and... actually, you know what? I'd probably better just stop using words like "implausibly" right now, because otherwise this article is never going to get written.

Twenty years after the first movie, Earth is a changed place: glowy-blue organic alien technology from the vast ships implausibly knocked out of the sky by plucky human resistance fighters...damn it, there I go again. Um, alien tech has been incorporated into the everyday lives of the people of Earth, but not without difficulty: the technology can be scavenged and used, but not recreated from scratch. "We don’t know how to duplicate it because it’s organically grown technology, but we know how to take an antigravity device and put it in a human airplane," explained Emmerich. Emphasis added by me, because in a fascinating twist, Emmerich has created a future where portable electronics actually represent a legitimate threat to commercial aviation.