Why does everyone in the future live in Adelaide?

Independence Day: Resurgence is only 15 days away. That’s not a long time to wait for a movie, but it is an absolute eternity to wait for a movie with Jeff Goldblum in it.

Disaster/apocalypse movies love to squeeze in quick shots of international landmarks being destroyed — it’s great for tailoring publicity drives to specific audiences and gives moviegoers a bit of a kick to see something they recognise violently destroyed. Think the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge constantly getting annihilated in the promotional material for X Men: Apocalypse, Pacific Rim, World War Z, and the original Independence Day itself.

To that end, Resurgence has just come out with a new poster featuring a continent-sized alien spaceship looming ominously over the whole of Australia, presumably to ruin our collective days. But the slightly-future Australia Resurgence imagines seems to be a little off-kilter.

There’s a lot to take out of this image of a not-so-distant Australia. For one, Sydney seems…not to exist. There’s a big old dark patch where Sydney should be. And that’s okay! Maybe, in the Independence Day universe, Sydney was destroyed when that giant spaceship crashed down on the eastern suburbs. Continuity-wise that would make sense, and it would also endear the aliens to everyone in Melbourne.

More distressingly, everyone in future Australia appears to live in Adelaide, which has swollen to what appears to be Australia’s largest city. This is a terrible vision for our country. Maybe the worldwide anti-alien alliance heard about Adelaide’s reputation as a heavily subsidised manufacturing hub and contracted to build the next generation of fighter jets there? Christopher Pyne will be stoked, at least.

Continuing our proud tradition of destroying precious natural wonders, we also appear to have bulldozed and developed the Daintree Rainforest. That’s actually a pretty realistic scenario, so I’ll pay that one. Finally, Darwin does not exist, but Papua New Guinea appears to be going great guns. Good for them!

Hopefully this new Australia is realised in the movie itself, even if Karl Stefanovic’s cameo was cruelly cut by the directors. Adelaide needs this.