Well, jeez, if it has to be germs, have someone engineer one unbeknownst to the invaders, maybe have some fantastic weaponized strain waiting in cryogenic storage in Fort Deitrich to be serendipitously unleashed, catching the aliens by surprise, something other than interstellar numbskulls who can teleport to Earth but somehow overlook the fact that it’s literally covered in microbes.
I suggest that the aliens die if they come in any contact with water.
At least have it be resolved by something that the people do, the movie was a lot less exciting after knowing that the invaders would have lost anyway.
You mean like finding a crashed alien ship, back engineer their computer technology so that you can write a virus which will enable you to lower their shields so that a washed up pilot from 'Nam can make a kamikazi run up the belly of the ship and then blow it up using a fighter way more sophisticated than anything he would have used in Nam, right? Lousy idea, IMHO.
Wells’ original book was an attack on the European expansion into places like Africa and India. The death by microbes was an allegory of European hubris being responsible for it’s own destruction. For an updated tale to work, it needs to have something similar.
Hey I liked it. Sure the ending was sappy and it never sat right with me with the original how all the aliens just up and died of deusexmachinatis. But the tripods were scary as shit in the theater and ther ereally was some disturbing imagery.
Besides, it was a refreshing change from Spielbergs usual bitch-ass aliens in ET and Close Encounters.
I beg you, break your promise for this in 2007.
As to War of the Worlds, it wasn’t bad. Would’ve infinitely preferred something more faithful to the H.G. Wells version (and imagine if they could’ve pulled off something like Orson Welles unwittingly did!), but it wasn’t bad.
I am guessing, hoping and praying that this will be one where a main character gets killed. If not, he’ll have some ‘splainin’ to do. 
Not a change so much, since Speilberg practically lifted whole scenes from his previous movies for this steaming pile.
I don’t have particularly high standards for being entertained by brainless action flicks (I loved “The Core” and “The Fabulous Four”), and this one still didn’t make the grade. I wrote a thread about it about six months ago if anyone wants to go see other people bitching about this movie. We seem to feel the need to bitch about this one every six months or so. 
The special effects were indeed amazing, however. The train scene was heart-stopping.
There was nothing “unwittingly” about what Orson Welles did. He set out to create exactly the kind of thing that happened, and if you llisten to Welles’s “apology” that he did afterwards, you can hear the amusement in his voice as he says that they had no idea it would cause such panic.
He knew when the most popular radio show at that time went to commercial and that when they did, people would be spinning the dial looking for something else to listen to, so that’s the moment of the “news break” in his program. He did it to capture the largest number of listeners, since people would stop to hear what the “breaking news” was. From then on, they were his puppets as he spun his tale.
And I’ll just bet that you’ve already bought the Ruby Slippers that go with that line.
My wife and I saw the movie at the theatre last summer. She went into labour part way through it - not sure if that means we thought it was good or bad.
And I still don’t know how it ended…
The aliens get sick and die.
I think they meant Signs and not Oz. Either one works, tho.
Alan Moore got there before you see the inevitable wikipedia entry for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (volume II).
The germ used in Moore’s version has been engineered by Dr Moreau as a biological weapon and it kills humans as well as Martians
Now *that * would make a great film, oh wait.
I’m going to have to ask you for a cite for this.
Jeff Wayne’s The War Of The Worlds is set for a 2007 release.
It’s wholly CGI, but even if it’s Rhino Crap, I’m more than prepared to shell out $15 just to sit in a theatre and listen to the music in SenStadium Dolby Digital Sound.
No-one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th Century, that Human Affairs were being watched from across the timeless gulf of Space…
Cue The Eve Of War
I can’t wait!
[spoiler]Minority Report, of course, ends in a dream-of-a-good-ending; he’s actually still imprisoned.
The main character dies in Saving Private Ryan. Actually, most of the characters die.
Munich isn’t a very happy movie.[/spoiler]
I thought the acting was OK for what this movie was supposed to be. I hate TC’s politics and religion, but I think he can really act when called upon to do so. Which wasn’t the case in this movie. And I’m something of a DF fan.
While I agree with most on the horribly stupid ending, I thought the beginning was awesomely frightening. Well don on Spielberg’s part.
But those aliens – sheesh! For once I’d like to see an alien invasion movie where the aliens can actually rub two quzwrlk cells together and come up with a real gameplan.
I imagine that each blast of that death laser came at an enormous cost of energy. And yet the laser was used to gun down individual humans in the streets. One. At. A. Time. One would think that they’d run out of ray-o-vacs long before they’d gunned down, say, 6 or so billion Earth-folk.
An open message to aliens monitoring our primitive Earth communications: You’ll do much more by taking over strategic economic and military headquarters first. Killing the rest of us after that should be cake. Gunning down every Guido in the Bronx is a far less efficient strategy.
Um, and I welcome our new tripedal overlords.
Well there must be something to the movie if we feel the need to discuss it almost a year after release. How many other movies of last summer are we still starting threads about?
I thought the acting was OK for what this movie was supposed to be. I hate TC’s politics and religion, but I think he can really act when called upon to do so. Which wasn’t the case in this movie. And I’m something of a DF fan.
While I agree with most on the horribly stupid ending, I thought the beginning was awesomely frightening. Well don on Spielberg’s part.
But those aliens – sheesh! For once I’d like to see an alien invasion movie where the aliens can actually rub two quzwrlk cells together and come up with a real gameplan.
I imagine that each blast of that death laser came at an enormous cost of energy. And yet the laser was used to gun down individual humans in the streets. One. At. A. Time. One would think that they’d run out of ray-o-vacs long before they’d gunned down, say, 6 or so billion Earth-folk.
An open message to aliens monitoring our primitive Earth communications: You’ll do much more by taking over strategic economic and military headquarters first. Killing the rest of us after that should be cake. Gunning down every Guido in the Bronx is a far less efficient strategy.
Um, and I welcome our new tripedal overlords.