Last night I watched WotW again after having last seen it at the cinema six years ago, despite a decent sized TV and sound system it does lose something on the small screen, however it does show that Spielberg is king at big-budget action sci-fi films and he seems to get the best from Tom Cruise.
Anyway my question is this, if humanity hadn’t been saved by the planets microorganisms infecting and killing the aliens could they have won?
While the aliens and their machines were genuinely scary as phuck and apparently invincible what we were seeing were the opening days of the invasion with all the chaos that ensued, if the invasion had lasted longer would humanity have been wiped out or could they have rallied and begun to fight back.
A couple of thoughts.
Limited numbers - the aliens had their machines prepositioned and ready to be activated (how exactly that worked I don’t know) which suggests that there were a finite number of them and they had no immediate industrial base to make more whereas humanity had infrastructure in place that could be geared up to make weapons and defences.
Technology level - While the aliens appeared more advanced in some respects they weren’t so impressive in others, for example their sensors appeared to be pretty much visual and aural based with no obvious infra-red, radar etc and one weapon, the microwave beams, in addition apart from the ‘shield’ their vehicles were immediately vulnerable to earth-weapons, as the character said in that other classic alien invasion movie Independence Day (no joke I like that film as well) all humanity had to do was to find a way through the shields. I initially wondered if the shields were based on an objects approach speed but as they activated when Cruise’s character threw a low-speed grenade maybe not.
Kamikaze - He does however take out one of the tripods by detonating a grenade inside it and at one point a character states that the Japanese figured out a way to destroy them, was this an oblique reference to kamikaze style attacks? Did the Japanese have people volunteer to be collected by the tripods before detonating explosives while inside?
I kind of thought there were at least two types of tripods though, a harvester which would be vulnerable to the above technique and ‘battle-tripods’ which might be vulnerable to humans digging-in and hiding on their route of advance and letting them approach and come over them before detonating a large amount of explosive underneath, it may at least knock them over.
So, is humanity doomed or can they fight back?
Edited to add - were the tripods foghorn a means of communicating with each other or psychological warfare to terrify humans, like the siren on Stuka dive-bombers?