I was just talking to a friend about the Wotw movie that came out this past summer. Since this movie has been out for a while I don’t think anyone will be upset over some spoilers.
What if the aliens didn’t get defeated by bacteria but kept up their rampage of destruction?
Now my theory is that Ray(Tom Cruise) now in Boston at the end of the movie, would have told the military about his nifty grenade trick he pulled on the tripods. I think then we would have gotten around using commando suicide bombers on the tripods. Imagine a scene where soldiers strapped down with explosives try to get captured and take into a tripod. now as soon as they are inside-Boom!-
Should of used the son for this part and keep the movie more interesting.
First, Ray’s success at killing the tripod on the farm was a fluke. The only way to do that is to get yourself captured, which bears an uncomfortable probability of getting all your blood sucked out. That would be bad.
Second, having Ray come up with the idea of how to defeat the aliens would defeat the basic idea of te film, which was to tellthe story of an alien invasion from the point of view of an Everyman. Admittedly, Cruise isn’t the best choice to portray such a character–too much heroic baggage–but that was what his character was meant to be. Hence his living in New Jersey rather than New York or D.C., so we didn’t see any famous landmarks get toasted. Hence his not being a soldier or warror at all, and being so intimidated by the Tim Robbins character’s madness. Hence his utter lack of knowledge of how to deal with his children, and his helplessness to prevent his son from going off to fight.
Well, the guy in the farmhouse mentioned a couple tripods in Japan being destroyed, so I presume the japanese managed to make the kamikaze trick work at least a couple times.
If the Martians had not been defeated by bacteria I have no doubt that they would have begun eating cars. This would have escalated to the point that they would eat up bars where the people meet. Terrifying as this would have been, eventually they would have stopped eating cars and eating bars and would have ultimately been content to eat guitars.
The movie was named WAR OF THE WORLDS, based on H.G. Wells WAR OF THE WORLDS. HGW’s WOTW ends one way- with the Aliens succumbing to Earth bacteria. Now, the movie could have added some twists along with that ending, but Spielberg instead chose to be very faithful to the ending of the book. I was expecting a twist, as I am sure did many others- that fact that there was no twist to the bacterial defeat of the Aliens was the twist.
Any other way to defeat the Aliens & you might as well change the name of the movie & put in the credits “Inspired by H.G. Wells WAR OF THE WORLDS”. Heck, the solution in INDEPENDENCE DAY was a parody of the WOTW solution (computer virus=bacteria).
One thing I’m unclear of from the movie… were the tripods actually powered off the humans or were they using them as fertilizer for their martian, terra forming, project?
I don’t think we’re supposed to be able to figue that out, because Ray doesn’t have enough information to figure it out. Remember, a major motif of thie movie was Ray’s LACK of information. He’s not a military commander, political leader, or scientific investigator with access to that sort of information, and possibly even persons in one of those categories wouldn’t know the answers to those questions anywhistle. The aliens’ ultimate intentions are obscure to the humans, and when it comes down to it hardly matter. Their immediate aims–killing off humanity–were obvious enough.
I’m not sure they were buried for millions of years. As people pointed out in threads at the time, that really doesn’t make much sense; had they wanted earth for such a long period, they would likely have attacked when there was no technological infrastructure that could even annoy them. It’s Tim Robbins’ character wwho makes that assertion, and he’s clearly a lunatic. I think the initial lightning strikes were the operations of devices like Star Trek replicators.