Corrected entry: After Ray gets the gun from under his bed, we are shown a close-up of Ray putting the gun in the back of his pants and untucking his shirts to hide the gun under them. Later on, when Robbie, and Rachel have arrived at their mom's house with Ray and are about to sleep in the basement, Ray pulls out his gun to put it behind the pillow. However, both his shirts are tucked in, and the gun is in front.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Cruise and the neighbours run into their back gardens to watch the storm, Cruise comments that it is unusual that the wind is blowing towards the storm. The eye of the storm is an area of low pressure, which means that the wind would naturally blow towards it, in order to equalise the atmospheric pressure.
Correction: Cruise's character is hardly a meterologist. The wind direction may seem strange to him, but character ignorance is not a movie mistake.
Corrected entry: Near the beginning, it's revealed that all electronic equipment within about a mile of the lightning storms stop working. Yet a camera crew was able to film lightning striking the ground multiple times during such a storm.
Correction: The recording merely caught a portion of the lightning storm, which they rewound and repeated multiple times. We don't know how stable this EMP is, if it is intentional or just a byproduct of their transportation system. If it isn't a weapon, and just a byproduct, perhaps it doesn't project evenly. Many news crews must have tried. Perhaps this is the one that lucked out and their equipment survived at least SOME of the recording time.
Corrected entry: The aliens buried their machines some thousands of years ago. Precisely when isn't clear but well before human civilization got going. Yet they just so happened to bury them in and around major cities that would be built many thousands of years later. And by complete chance they put one right under the middle of an intersection in New York. The speed of the attack makes clear that these things didn't emerge randomly in the countryside, forest or jungle. They were marching through major cities from the word go.
Correction: First of all, it is only the ones we see who are "marching through major cities", and only one of these is shown breaking out of the ground so conveniently near an intersection. There are thousand of tripods that are never shown on screen, and most of these could easily have been emerging in more desolate areas. It just would not be very interesting to see. Secondly, human settlements follow certain patterns. We are reliant on fresh water (so we settle near rivers), we prefer temperate areas (and avoid deserts and the arctic), and we want to settle close to food sources and the natural resources we need. If the aliens knew this much about humans (which they could easily learn by studying our ancestors), it would be easy to calculate where the major settlements would be built.
Corrected entry: When the family arrives at a small town where they catch the ferry, there are loads of missing persons notices. However, the fact that electrical equipment works in that town suggests the aliens had not reached that part yet. As such, nobody in the town would have gone missing and placing a missing person notice in a town where the person hasn't gone missing is completely useless.
Correction: Of course not. As we can see in the film, thousands of refugees have been fleeing that way, and thousands more are coming. These fleeing people would still hope that their loved ones were alive, even if they were separated earlier on, and so would leave these notes in a desperate hope that someone could reunite them. A very faint hope, that they should still be alive and arriving in the same town as their family, but better than leaving no clue and thereby abandoning all hope.
Corrected entry: When Ray throws the peanut buttered bread at the window it sticks peanut butter facing outside. When the camera angle changes to outside the window we see the bread side instead of the peanut butter side as if it were stuck on the outside of the window.
Correction: This shot is a reflection of the inside, not the outside looking in.
Corrected entry: The aliens are definitely from a much more highly advanced civilization from ours and it's implied that they've been studying us for a vast amount of time. Yet, they don't have a clue that there are probably diseases or organisms that they aren't used to and could kill them?
Correction: They were watching *us*, not the world and atmosphere around us. They never really thought Earth would be any threat.
Corrected entry: A plane crashes, disaster is all over, but where are the bodies of all the passengers? They are nowhere to be found.
Correction: Since the plane crashed, it could be assumed that one of the tripods took it down. If this is the case, then it can also be assumed that the tripods probably used its lasers to vaporize most of the passengers. Also, keep in mind that there are still some bodies on the plane.
Corrected entry: Tom Cruise and family emerge from the basement where they have holed themselves up through the night of the initial tripod attacks. A jet has crashed. Destruction is everywhere, yet the van they've been driving has been unscathed, sitting where they left it, among the ruins of the house, the jet, and everything else around it.
Correction: There was also a house nearby that wasn't destroyed. Therefore, it is not impossible to think that the van escaped.
Corrected entry: When the train goes speeding by with its interior ablaze, how is this possible? The aliens use one beam to kill living creatures and another to destroy structures and vehicles. Even if the aliens use their human killing beam instead of the more powerful beam, there is no way that the train could still stay on the track at that speed.
Correction: The aliens couldn't possibly wipe out everything made by humans - in fact, Ray's wife's house in Boston is almost intact. We don't know the train's destination, nor when and where it left. For all we know, it could be destroyed as soon as it got out of sight. As for being on fire, the station it passed through could have been destroyed as it went through, causing the fire and the death of everyone on board.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Tom Cruise meets the news crew after spending the night in the basement with his kids, the man climbing on the crashed plane is deaf but when they hear the tripods approaching the deaf man looks up towards the sound as if he can hear it and runs away.
Correction: The deaf man felt the strong vibrations from the tripods walking, which caught his attention and made him look.
Corrected entry: Viruses and other infectious and lethal microorganisms have existed for millions of years in this planet. However, the aliens weren't killed by them when they hid their machines on this earth in the past.
Correction: The aliens didn't come to earth then, they only sent the machines. If they arrived with the machines they would have just conquered earth then.
Corrected entry: When Tom Cruise exits his ex-wife's house where the plane has crashed, you see one of the rotors turning slowly. The plane crashed late the night before, that rotor would surely have stopped turning by now. It didn't look like it was that windy outside and even if it was; it would take a big gust of wind to keep it turning.
Corrected entry: In the scene, where the tripod rises from the ground after the EMP pulse has been triggered, the camera follows a young man filming the tripod with a digital video camera although the camera should be out of commission after the EMP.
Correction: EMP's only knock out equipment that is turned on. If a computer is turned off at the time of the EMP then it won't be affected.
Correction: He could have had the capacity to fix it, or we don't know if the EMP is a weapon or if it is just a side effect of their transport, which might mean it has uneven coverage and the camera was 'missed'.
Corrected entry: The 'aliens' buried their vast army of complex machines thousands of years ago in many different locations throughout the planet. With all the mining and tunnelling we've done, and all the seismic and geological activity that has gone on, and all the scientific investigation of the Earth's crust by oil and mining companies (amongst others), not one was ever found? Exploration for oil reserves is carried out by bouncing extremely low frequency shock waves off the mantle which can be 3,000 kilometers deep, and that is just one industry carrying out one type of research - and not one of the Martian machines was ever detected? Given the size of their craft and the sheer numbers involved, that is utterly impossible.
Correction: How deep were these things? What were they actually made of? And where WERE they buried? Certainly in some cases they could have moved to the right position before the aliens transported themselves in. Maybe they were all buried under the ocean and they burrowed themselves into position when they received a signal from the aliens when they arrived.
Nonsense. Exploration for oil reserves is carried out by bouncing extremely low frequency shock waves off the mantle which can be 3,000 kilometers deep, and that is just one industry carrying out one type of research - and not one of the Martian machines was ever detected? Given the size of their craft and the sheer numbers involved, that is utterly impossible.
The correction simply ignores the facts. Oil companies routinely scan deep beneath the ocean for potential drilling sites, and mining companies do the same on land. They scan huge areas every day of the year. The chance of every single one of the Martians' huge vehicles and other machinery escaping undetected is absolutely zero.
Unless the aliens added special technology that helps avoid detection. Also the average thickness of the earth's crust is about 15 KM. Way too deep to be detected by those surveys.
Correction: Just because Ray first put the gun in the back of his pants doesn't mean he wouldn't reposition it at some point during the trip to his kids' house. He had any number of opportunities and reasons to move the gun, readjust his shirt, etc., and it would be uncomfortable and dangerous to drive a vehicle with the gun in his back pocket.
raywest ★