War of the Worlds starring Tom Cruise

[ivanjs]

"what I wonder is how he pulled out TWO grenade pins with one hand while in the middle of that tug-of-war. "<br /><br />With his teeth. That's why he spit them out.<br />

 

[wmdragon]

spoiler continued<br />really? I forgot that detail, I thought he had the pins in his fist <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#993366"><em>The only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate, and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.</em> <br /> --- James Clerk Maxwell</font></p> </div>

 

[chriscdc]

As a geek, and the relative boredom of the second half, I spent a long time working out how the ray guns and the tripods worked.<br />I reckon that the ray guns worked on a microwave system. The people appear to be sucked dry before disintergrating and the clothes were not harmed. Therefore i think that the beam was so intense that it super heated water in the victims body. The water would have so much energy that it would pass straight out of the body.<br /><br />I actually think that we could build something like the tripod. Build one of those uber powerful nuclear jet engines to power it. Shape memory alloy for the legs and tendrils. Can't see how to build the shield but small lasers to defend against rockets and bullets.<br />So it would be possible to build such a vehicle for around 2 billion dollars.

 

[Leovinus]

I don't buy the whole concept of the machines being buried for millions of years and having gone undiscovered. They should have just stuck with HG Wells and had the aliens bring their machines with them.<br /><br />A lot of geological upheaval can happen in millions of years. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[wmdragon]

not to mention lots of underground construction and mining <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#993366"><em>The only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate, and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.</em> <br /> --- James Clerk Maxwell</font></p> </div>

 

[wmdragon]

thats something I considered too, the rays affect water and flesh in some particular way. microwaves are the obvious candidate.<br /><br />microwave blasters may be sent to Iraq for riot control. who knows, in some far future we may have more powerful versions that are lethal, and this movie's alien rays may not seem like bad scifi anymore. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#993366"><em>The only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate, and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.</em> <br /> --- James Clerk Maxwell</font></p> </div>

 

[wvbraun]

But the rays would be invisible...

 

[flynn]

HG Wells described the weapons as heat rays so I guess the effects work quite well.<br /><br />as for invisable, well that wouldn't make good SFX.<br /><br /><br />... or would it.<br /><br /><br /><br />good job they buried those machine under major cities, and weren't effected by tectonic drift. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <font color="#800080">"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring" - <strong>Chuck Palahniuk</strong>.</font> </div>

 

[arconin]

Good Movie, saw it today.<br /><br />What I don't buy is the idea that they buried the machines for millions of years. If they wanted our planet for its resources, certainly they would have had a much better time of taking it a million years ago. <br /><br />Or are they just Homicidal serial murdering aliens that wanted a developed civilization to destroy for the fun of it.<br /><br />And how would they have known that such a civilization was going to develop?<br /><br />No, much better to have left it the original way and have the aliens bring the tri-pods with them. <br /><br />Keep it faithful to the original and eliminate a silly plot hole.

 

[crowing]

G'day avaunt,well to me the movie was a B-, take the special effects out and that was a very average movie indeed.<br /><br />Far from liking the kids in the movie,they were so obnoxious that I was hoping the martians would catch them and then stuff them down their gulletts,right before my eyes!!!<br /><br />Batman begins was great!<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />PS we can talk cricket now.................much better!!!

 

[Leovinus]

I saw WOTW first and BB on the same day. BB was indeed better. Cruise and his son were both obnoxious.<br /><br />SPOILER<br /><br />When Cruise got sucked into the thing, I was rooting for the Martian. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[crowing]

Hahaha,unfortunately cruise was bound to survive till the end,I was actually waiting for him to save the world and not the germs and bacteria!<br /><br />Actually I suppose it's not a surprise that his son was obnoxious.............................because as you pointed out,look who DAD was supposed to be!

 

[tom_hobbes]

<font color="yellow">What I don't buy is the idea that they buried the machines for millions of years</font><br /><br />A lot of people keep expressing this view but it just isn't the case. You hear one whacked out character express it as an opinion but it’s never definitively established why they came out of the ground. Virtually every opinion regarding the invaders in the film can be considered fallible in my view. So don't let that small element spoil the movie for you.. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font size="2" color="#339966"> I wish I could remember<br /> But my selective memory<br /> Won't let me</font><font size="2" color="#99cc00"> </font><font size="3" color="#339966"><font size="2">- </font></font><font size="1" color="#339966">Mark Oliver Everett</font></p><p> </p> </div>

 

[flynn]

True, I did take Tim Robbins claim that the Japanese had brought one down as his mentalist ramblings. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <font color="#800080">"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring" - <strong>Chuck Palahniuk</strong>.</font> </div>

 

[arconin]

well, I will have to see it again, because I seem to remember that premise being established before Tims character was around. <br /><br />Overall the movie was good and quite enjoyable.

 

[Grok]

I read the book prior to seeing the movie so that it would be all fresh in my mind. I have some observations, which I'm sure others will make, but I wanted to make them prior to seeing what everyone else is saying so that you get my best response. There are spoilers coming up.<br /><br />First observation, the lightning bolt delivery of Martians was lame. I didn't see anything wrong with the way the Martians were delivered in the book, via good ol' rockets. <br /><br />There's no little kid in the book.<br /><br />I thought the modern adaptation was very good. I was wondering how they were going to do this. They did a good job. For one, in this modern world, everything has to happen much quicker than the timescale on which the invasion occurred in the book. The aliens were just as menacing. The terror just as real. They never call them Martians, mainly because we now know that Mars probably has no life, especially not of this magnitude and complexity. The idea of switching off the electricity to make it nearly similar to the 1890s was a stroke of genius. <br /><br />The basement scenes weren't nearly as creepy as in the book. I attribute this to the fact that in the book they were trapped down there for 15 days with the building tension of the man going mad. Hard to get that same tension in five minutes. <br /><br />The cages the people were held in were cool. <br /><br />We didn't have any real military victories. In the book, we have one Martian taken out by artillery, and then we have the attack of ThunderChild which takes out two by ramming them. I thought that was an exciting element. We had the minor skirmish at the end, but that was after the aliens had already caught the disease. <br /><br />I thought the scene at the end of the book was much more haunting, with the martian making the same HOOM - HOOM - HOOM noise as the narrator walks the empty streets of London trying to find the location of the sound, and then coming upon a field of them all stand

 

[Grok]

rhodan,<br /><br /><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p><br />I haven't read the book, so I don't know whether Spielberg was merely sticking to Wells' descriptions of the aliens, but I thought the aliens were one of the many weak points of this film. Not the best film in Spielberg's repertoire, but also not quite 1941 too. <br /><br /><p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br /><br />The aliens (Martians) in the book were described as being very sluggish. Remember, they are going into a much heavier gravity. Also, they are described as having mostly brain and head and not much body. They aren't really very menacing. In fact, in the book, the main character doesn't think much of them. He thinks they will never escape the sand pit because they are so lethargic.

 

[Grok]

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p><br />True, I did take Tim Robbins claim that the Japanese had brought one down as his mentalist ramblings.<br /><p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br />In the book, they had not struck all over the world, just in England, and the English had managed to take out three of them in combat. One with artillery and two by being rammed in the water.

 

[flynn]

They took out 3 that the Narator saw, they could well of downed more. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <font color="#800080">"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring" - <strong>Chuck Palahniuk</strong>.</font> </div>

 

[avaunt]

Grok, I thought Thunderchild had not taken any of them, and had to re-read that part of the book. She was what was called a Steam-Ram, but it was her GUNS that brought "the mighty Martian Warlord, crashing down in flames" .<br /><br />Well, I just saw it, and I have to say, it was pretty damned good. I have bitten my fingers to the quick, and felt pretty sad in a few parts, but I have to say, "Hats off" to Cruise, he did quite a good job of being the piece of flotsam that was the key image of "The Narrator" in the book.<br /><br />That terrible feeling of being a pawn, left to the vagaries of fate if you wore people dust, or became it.<br /><br />That little kid is SCARY, how can any child act so well?. And the boy was reasonable, young men are arseholes, eh?.<br /><br />SPOILER<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />What I didn't like was it being up to a civilian to tell a sargent in time of war, that a ***** had appeared in the enemies armour.<br /><br />Why didn't they have Cruise say, and point "Look at the birds" and the sargent INSTANTLY say "Javlin team, FIRING POSITION".<br /><br />I liked how with nowhere to run, people tried to save eachother from the feeding tentacle.<br /><br />I DIDN'T like the feeding tentacle <img src="/images/icons/frown.gif" /><br /><br />Be a good sequel, I think. As fast as they can assemble a "Bang-Bang" SONTO* assembly line, filling near space with sentinal war stations. Making a "We might only have time for the first wave" attack fleet with captured alien ships, and going to <br /><br />KICK SOME TENTACLE!.<br /><br /><img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /> <br /><br />*Series Of Nukes To Orbit. <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" />

 

[Grok]

Avuant,<br /><br />I was pretty certain the Thunderchild took out at least the second one. I'll have to reread that part. What I find amazing is that this book is 107 years old! My god the man had an imagination and was nearly prophetic. Look at how he describes a rocket but the age of rocket science is not yet upon him. Death rays that no one could have possibly known about back then, and now we're talking about how they may be possible. The tripods engineering is not that different from what we might call a robot now. He talks of poison black gas before poison gases were used in WWI.

 

[flynn]

I too remember it as shooting the first with cannon and crashing into the second as it is vapourised with the heat ray.<br /><br />If <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <font color="#800080">"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring" - <strong>Chuck Palahniuk</strong>.</font> </div>

 

[avaunt]

Have you ever read the short story "The Land Leviathans" by Wells?<br /><br />The TRUELY amazing bit about it, wasn't that he developed a "tank", because after all, people had tried to do so in reality since ROMAN times.<br /><br />The NUMBING bit, was the mental attitudes of the two sides in the war. If you can read that, and not say " WOW, the Tank drivers are _ _ _ _ _ _ s, and the Tank drivers' prey are _ _ _ _ _ _ s ". I will be utterly surprised. He pinned EXACTLY, the mental adjustments that two great peoples made, to mechanised warfare. Sure, LATER the adjustments co-incided, because of the pressure to survive, but, MY DOG !, he could have been writting from a transcript of WW1.<br /><br />His understanding of the KEY function of science fiction, which is to look at Mankind, and say "If this changes, ( some scientific discovery, or advance ) how will men adapt to the change", just beggers belief, because he didn't even realise it was science fiction he was writting.<br /><br />One of the greats. Wells, Dickens, Doyle, Austen, we will never see their like again, because THEY had no like Giants to be standing on. Imagine what THEY could have acchieved, if they had THEMSELVES as literary history to build on.