The War of the Worlds Movie SPOILERS Thread

It also contains a line from Cruise that I don't remember in the film: "I don't know what they expected to find when they got here, but they found us"

-- Andrew Farrell (afarrel...), July 3rd, 2005.

Not true. Not to derail the thread, but most Israelis, including Sharon, consider it an occupation. Most also "oppose" it in the sense that they want a two-state solution.

I agree -- it was a rather convoluted explanation for a rather cool cinematic device (having the lightning storms first, THEN the things coming up from under the ground).

a) son dies

b) daughter snatched, tripod runs merrily away, no grenade scene

c) cruise wanders numbly into boston, a murderer, attends a sunrise church service on a burning block.

d) there he finds the woman and girl he abandoned in the hudson river scene! SHE SURVIVED! they forgive him for abandoning them.

d) tripod arrives to blast the church into smithereens, soldiers show up in chase, tripod keels over from bacterial infection, smashing the church into rubble.

e) gasping alien tripod-pilot crawls from tripod, wheezes out his death rattle, freeze frame for ten seconds, followed by intertitle: "FIN."

I really don't see Tom winning a fight to the death with Tim Robbins. TC does cry better now than he did in Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut.

I love how it's established early that the little girl's a screamer, then she stops screaming for an hour of the film, including when the ugly-ass aliens are 3 feet from her. (btw, that Dakota kid is a slightly more skilled version of the standard precocious sitcom moppet)

i just read the Wells book today, i never realised the red weed wasn't part of the original story.

I agree. It doesn't look like TC is getting the worse end of a cattle prod when he's winding up to cry.

As to why all the tripods were buried under cities: it seemed pretty clear that they weren't. Some had even been covered by water in the interim (the ferry sequence), so obviously the terrain wasn't what it used to be. Or else they came back to retrieve their booty because global warming was threatening the coastal locations (i.e. most of the world's cities), and so that was the impetus for their retrieval. Yay environmental message overload!

But so soon as this strangeness had been realised it passed, and my dominant motive became the hunger of my long and dismal fast. In the direction away from the pit I saw, beyond a red-covered wall, a patch of garden ground un- buried. This gave me a hint, and I went knee-deep, and sometimes neck-deep, in the red weed. The density of the weed gave me a reassuring sense of hiding. The wall was some six feet high, and when I attempted to clamber it I found I could not lift my feet to the crest. So I went along by the side of it, and came to a corner and a rockwork that enabled me to get to the top, and tumble into the garden I coveted. Here I found some young onions, a couple of gladiolus bulbs, and a quantity of immature carrots, all of which I secured, and, scrambling over a ruined wall, went on my way through scarlet and crimson trees towards Kew-- it was like walking through an avenue of gigantic blood drops--possessed with two ideas: to get more food, and to limp, as soon and as far as my strength permitted, out of this accursed unearthly region of the pit.

The film can be a little hard to hear at times, it was only on the second viewing that I heard what Tom Cruise was saying after "The birds!" ("No shield")

yeah i totally had to guess what he said here too.

the car conversation on the freeway is brilliantly done.

http://www.bigempire.com/filthy/waroftheworlds.html

indeed, how tf did they do it? it looked like one take!

"I dismissed the 9/11 references and began to see the aliens as metaphors for Cruise's homosexuality: no matter how many children he surrounds himself with, no matter where he runs, he's going to be pursued by long, snake-like things that will suck him up into a big sphincter. It was a much more enjoyable way to engage the movie than on its own terms."

He's a little fulla shit, but I laughed.

I liked how tom cruise took time to put on his Cool Leather Jacket right before going out to find his daughter

it was cold out!

also what was up with the dude filming in the beginning with a camcorder, I thought the lightning EMP knocked out all the electronics

I guess when the aliens buried their machines with the cool heat death ray &c they forgot to build into their eyes infra-red imaging or Sony NightVision™ ability

-nobody was on that plane?
-lol @ convenient news van w/ vhs tapes of aliens zapping themselves into the machines. like if you didn't believe that it's okay, news lady is gonna go through it frame by frame
-lol @ aliens perving over a photo of the girl

also lol @ tom cruises's all mechnical, very expensive Omega© watch stopped by the EMP

ok maybe it was a canal street fake

oh the "plausibles," Hitchcock woulda loved ya ;)

There were bodies on the plane! Strapped into seats!