With the holiday season upon us, Hollywood is gifting us with trailers for the summer of 2016’s potential blockbusters. Last week, we got Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 (I kind of wish that one came with a gift receipt) and now, 20th Century Fox has released the first trailer for Independence Day: Resurgence.

The long-awaited sequel to the 1996 epic sees the return of many characters, including President Whitmore, played by Bill Pullman, stripper-turned-Mom Jasmine, played by Vivica A. Fox and computer expert David Levinson, played by Jeff Goldblum. Other familiar faces from the first film include Judd Hirsch and Brent Spiner. Joining the cast are Liam Hemsworth, William Fichtner and Sela Ward, who plays the president. The official synopsis for the film sounds promising:

Independence Day was just the beginning. We always knew they were coming back. After that film redefined the event movie genre, the next epic chapter in the Independence Day universe delivers global spectacle on an unimaginable scale. Using recovered alien technology, the nations of Earth have collaborated on an immense defense program to protect the planet. But nothing can prepare us for the aliens’ advanced and unprecedented force. Only the ingenuity of a few brave men and women can bring our world back from the brink of extinction.

[From Cinema Blend]

The trailer has everything you’d expect – ginormous alien spacecraft, mass destruction, dramatic looks – but there’s one thing that is evidently missing here. Where’s Will Smith? Captain Steve Hiller was instrumental in the alien takedown last time around. How can the earth survive?

In a press event for the film held back in June, director Roland Emmerich (who directed the original ID) said he had planned a father and son story for Will’s character – with Survivor’s Remorse star Jessie Usher playing Dylan Hiller.

So what happened? After Earth happened. Don’t worry, I had to Google it myself. The 2013 sci-fi flick starred Will and his son Jaden Smith. The forgettable movie, another nail in the coffin of director M. Night Shyamalan’s career, earned a whopping 10% positive score on Rotten Tomatoes. and David Edwards of the Daily Mirror is representative of the critical reception for the movie, writing, “Calling After Earth the worst film ever made may be overstating things, but it’s a disaster zone of Chernobyl-esque proportions.” Ouch. A promotional website for the new movie explains that Captain Steve perished due to “an unknown malfunction” during a military exercise back in 2007. Jessie Usher and Vivica A. Fox will be representing the Hiller family in the sequel.

Did you notice who else is missing from ID2? Randy Quaid’s crazy-pants pilot. Sure, he died by sacrificing himself and crashing his plane into an alien ship, but maybe the alien technology they left behind in 1996 included cloning? I guess it doesn’t matter, because Randy’s got a full plate of real crazy – but, in the spirit of the holidays, let’s remember the good times. Independence Day: Resurgence hits theaters on June 24, 2016.