Question: Why does the first tripod kill every human in sight if that just leaves the others with not so many humans to harvest? The only purpose of the heat ray would be in defense.
Question: Why were the people walking towards the ferry so desperate to get Ray's car? Considering the power was on in that area, the ferry was operating, and the army were driving round in humvees, tanks, and trucks a few scenes earlier, then surely Ray wouldn't have been the only person with a car?
Answer: He may not be the only person with a car, but you can imagine there are fewer cars than people around, since a lot of the people there came from areas where the cars had stopped working. Or else they wouldn't be walking. That's why they were going on the ferry, for transport to anywhere.
Answer: Agree with the other answer, but would add that Ray had figured out that cars were not working because the starter solenoids were knocked out by the alien's technology. He and his friend fixed Ray's car. Unlike military mechanics or marine engineers, most people were likely clueless about what caused the problem, didn't know how to fix a vehicle, or lacked the means, particularly in a crisis. People were desperate to acquire any car they could.
Question: What are the internals of "the blood-sucking device" from The War of the Worlds?
Answer: If you are talking about the tripod machines, I saw two kinds. One had a long tube that pierced the bodies and sucked up the insides, and the other captured the humans whole and put them in baskets for retrieval one at a time to the inside of the machine. I can only guess what processing they used, but it probably included a macerator to fluidize the "raw stock", and addition of the alien plant spores. The mixture was ejected in a fine red mist.
Question: Manny replaces the starter motor on the car Ray steals, and it works fine. Once the engine is running it doesn't need the starter motor, so how did all the cars suddenly stop if all the aliens did was fry the starters? Any cars already running wouldn't have been affected. Yes you could argue that it affected their ECU's, but not all cars have ECU's and some still rely on good old mechanical engineering.
Answer: I got the impression that all the cars had dead batteries. There are even some people who have their vehicle's hood raised and appear to be checking their batteries. Ray asked Manny, "What is it? They dead?" Manny replied, "All of them. Everything. Look at this. The starter's fried." Having dead batteries does not mean that all the cars had fried starters or bad solenoids. Conversely, having a fried starter does not necessarily mean that the battery is bad/dead. Since Manny was working on the vehicle, the vehicle was not running - this may have prevented the vehicle from also having a dead battery. Maybe the bad solenoid was not at all related to the attack - it was just the reason it was at the garage to get fixed. Once the solenoid was replaced, the car would now start because the battery was spared because the motor was not running during the attack. (I'm not sure if my answer makes sense; I never heard the word solenoid until I watched this movie!).
Question: I've been looking all over for this answer and can't find it. I know this has been asked, but it has not been properly answered to what I can find. At the end of "War of the Worlds", Tom Cruise saw the birds and realised the shields were down. How did the shields deactivate? I understand that the aliens got sick and died from bacteria, but there must have been something else. Even if there were designated aliens to control each tripod's forcefield, there is no way that every "Shield duty" alien died before the other members of their crew, leaving their tripod mobile and vulnerable... Were they getting low on resources because they had eradicated too many humans too quickly? Did they decide that since the majority of people died, that they could focus on using more of their "fuel" towards mobility and capturing instead of combat?
Answer: I believe its supposed to be the tripods work on the alien's biology, so its powered by the presence of a Martian inside. So if the martian is sick, the tripod is sick.
That's always what I believed. This is further evidenced by the fact the tripods themselves have actually been on earth for millions of years, but they get "sick" when the Martians do. It has to be tied to the Martian's own health for that to make any sense.
Answer: Bear in mind if memory serves we only see that one tripod with no shields - other than that we're just told another one "behaved erratically" then went down. So there's no evidence that all the shields on all the tripods went down by default. Could well just be that with the one we see the alien inside was seriously ill, flailing about and deactivated the shields by mistake not long before becoming completely incapacitated.
Answer: It's unknown if the aliens needed to harvest every human, and doubtful the heat rays were only defensive. It appears to be a two-pronged attack: 1. Harvest the necessary number of humans or other lifeforms needed for their blood; 2. Eradicate all other life on Earth.
raywest ★