The Movie Inspiration for Reconquest: Mother Earth
I like to describe my novel Reconquest: Mother Earth as a
combination of the movies Independence
Day, Red Dawn, and Gladiator. Admittedly, that’s a strange
combination. In this post, I discuss how
these three movies relate to my novel.
Independence
Day
I remember when Independence Day came out, the trailers
and promotion for the movie were tremendous.
The buildup of the movie was so great that instead of releasing the
movie on July 3, 1996, they released it a day earlier, which coincided with
when the movie starts. The buzz was huge,
and the movie became one of the all-time biggest blockbusters.
It’s
not the deepest, most thoughtful movie ever made, and you had to suspend your
disbelief in many places, but it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the portrayal of human spirit that
the movie displayed, when against all odds, in an impossible situation, the
humans used intelligence and ingenuity against a far more powerful enemy.
Those
are elements that I adopt in my novel Reconquest:
Mother Earth. In my novel, I
incorporate a very different kind of large scale invasion that the movie uses,
but that is a small part of the novel.
The much larger part of the novel is the response by former Navy SEAL
Mitch Grace, who wakes up from a coma five years after the initial
invasion. He personifies that same
never-say-die attitude that even though the humans are badly overmatched, they
can still find a way to defeat the alien conquerors. Mitch must do so in a planet conquered by the
aliens, where humans are used as slaves in mine, but much like in Independence Day, he will not stop
fighting the aliens as long as he is still breathing.
Red
Dawn
I
was in the fourth grade when Red Dawn
came out in theaters. As a kid, this was
an amazingly cool concept for a movie, and I was psyched to see it. I didn’t get to watch too many movies in the
theater when I was a kid, so it was a few years later by the time I finally
watched it. Despite some of the
silliness in the movie, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Admittedly,
the execution in this movie didn’t always work.
There are many aspects of it that aren’t particularly believable, and
there were many testosterone filled scenes in the movie, but as long as you
don’t delve too deep, it’s a fun and enjoyable film. It fit the attitude of the time well, but it
doesn’t particularly hold up many years later.
My
novel, Reconquest: Mother Earth,
shares some elements with Red Dawn. In my novel, aliens take the place of the
Soviets, and they have now overrun the planet.
Mitch Grace is devastated to find that most the world’s population has
been decimated, and humans have been thrust into slavery in mines working for the
aliens. He can’t accept this and gathers
followers to start his own guerilla war against the aliens. They have vastly superior technology and
weaponry and he must go into hiding, but much of that never say die feeling is
captured in the novel.
Gladiator
Gladiator is simply put one of the best
movies I have ever seen. It is epic in
scope, the story of Roman general Maximus Meridius, played by Russell
Crowe. Maximus is loyal to the emperor,
but is thrust into slavery when Commodus, expertly played by Joaquin Phoenix in
one of the greatest acting roles I have ever witnessed, kills his father and
seizes the throne. Through his
incomparable skills as a warrior, Maximus becomes a renowned gladiator with one
thing on his mind – vengeance.
When
I first came up with the concept of my novel Reconquest: Mother Earth, before I even started writing it, I had
an image in my head of my main protagonist, former Navy SEAL Mitch Grace, in an
arena battling it out with aliens. I
didn’t know how I was going to incorporate this into my book, but one thing was
certain, somehow, someway it was going to be part of it.
In
my novel, Mitch Grace, during his guerilla campaign, is
captured and enslaved much like Maximus.
He becomes an intergalactic warrior, even taking the moniker of “The
Gladiator”. He becomes an intergalactic
sensation, a human that can kill aliens in single combat. Much like Maximus, he is single-minded in his
focus, which is to reconquer the planet.
SEAL Mitch Grace was among the first humans to see the aliens when they landed at the naval base in Coronado, California. Like the other humans, he was powerless to stop them.
Five years later, he awakens from his coma under the care of an alien physician to find that the aliens now control the planet. After Mitch heals himself physically and mentally, he starts a resistance movement to take the planet back from the alien conquerors. After his capture by the aliens he is forced to become an intergalactic gladiator, fighting for the human species and the redemption of Mother Earth.
You can find Reconquest: Mother Earth at: Amazon
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