Well thanks a bunch! I was going to watch that, but now I shan’t bother… 
I don’t know if anyone else has thought of this, but I feel a huge oportunity was missed to update the movie with an alternate ending and a very timely political statement/analogy.
The movie was all set up. Tom Cruise is being eaten by the machine and grabs the hand grenades. He miraculously survives, but there you go.
You need to get bombs through the machine’s shields and they’re eating people. They need to eat bombs, and that means suicide bombers, an army of them feeding themselves to the machines to save their families.
It would have been an etremely dark ending, showing the true desparation of the situation. Humanity saved by suicide bombers would be extremely unsettling. Probably would have offended 90% of the audience.
That was Earth?!
You maniacs!!
Boy, you’re not going to like some of Cecil’s upcoming columns then…
If Luke has already sensed that Darth Vader is his father in “The Empire Strikes Back”, why do we never see him mailing Dad a Father’s Day card? Or at least calling? He’s a sweet boy fresh from the farm. He wouldn’t be that rude.
In Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”, was the director inspired by Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” — a tale of a hero hallucinating escape even as he is completely doomed?
Is a totally immersive, virtual reality experience like that in “Total Recall” even possible, in principle? Could it really fool you to the point where you’re not sure which reality is which?
Was “Rosebud” a real brand of sled during the time of Charles Foster Kane’s childhood? Pretty good sleds, were they? Memorable?
Was Michael Caine credited for both his roles in “Sleuth”?
Cecil, your answer starts from a premiss that might not be correct: that an invading race of aliens (if existent) would be genetically different from humans. You are ruling out the possibility of us being at least partly descendent from them. As debatable as this theory may be, I don’t think it would be scientifically correct to disregard it. Thus, aliens could in principle be affected by earthly viruses.
The only thing earth has that most planets don’t have is LIFE. Anything else is something you could find elseware in the galaxy. I hope we’re tasty, because I don’t think the aliens would want to talk to us. Heck, human thought might be the virus that killed them. Mabey they all died trying to understand us, and what killed them was that they succeeded. Human thought is like a communicatical disease. Mabey the F.D.A. will ok a drug to cure it? Only to be used on the poor and disenfranchised, of course.