Corrected entry: In the final scene where the military begins to fire Javelin anti-tank missiles at the tripods, the missile flies a straight path. But; a Javelin is a "top attack" missile, meaning it goes vertical and comes down at a steep angle to hit a tank in the weakest part of the armor, so they would do the same thing to the tripods instead of a straight flightpath.
Bishop73
15th Sep 2007
War of the Worlds (2005)
7th May 2018
War of the Worlds (2005)
Question: Do we know the human casualties by the end of the war?
Answer: No such numbers are ever discussed in the novel or in the subsequent radio and movie treatments. What we may surmise, however, is that the human casualties were comparatively minor. Once the Martians were exposed to earthly microbes, they were wiped out pretty quickly.
Voiceover by Morgan Freeman at the end of the movie: by the toll of a billion lives.
Morgan Freeman says "By the toll of a billion deaths, man had earned his immunity, his right to survive among this planet's infinite organisms." He is saying that Mankind evolved with microorganisms for countless generations on Earth, making Mankind immune to most of those microorganisms. Perhaps a billion humans or more died of bacterial and viral plagues throughout human history; but, as a species, we gained immunity. Freeman's quote has nothing to do with the number of Martians that died because they had no immunity.
Answer: The ending dialog states a death of 1 billion.
The billion deaths spoken of don't refer to those that died in the alien attack but the billion deaths from the microorganisms that killed the aliens. "By a billion deaths man earned his immunity."
I feel that he meant that the organisms that killed the aliens killed a billion humans first before we got our immunity from them.
They are saying that.
Exactly.
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Correction: The Javelin missile has both a top attack mode and a direct attack mode (as documented in the publicly available U.S. Army, FM 3-22.37 "JAVELIN MEDIUM ANTIARMOR WEAPON SYSTEM"). With no evidence that the top armour on the tripods is particularly weak, the military have apparently decided to try the direct attack mode, possibly in hope of immobilising the tripods by damaging the leg structure.
Tailkinker ★
As a Javelin operator it's drops always.
Via Wikipedia: "The Javelin's HEAT warhead is capable of defeating modern tanks by attacking them from above where their armor is thinnest (see top-attack), and is also useful against fortifications in a direct attack flight." If you've got evidence that Javelins are incapable of direct attack, please post it.
It should be noted, the source cited on Wikipedia is not an official US military or Lockheed site and there's no indication where that page got their information. Lockheed Martin's website about the Javelin does not mentions direct attack, only top-attack (nor does Raytheon's).
Bishop73
The direct attack capability is widely documented, most officially in U.S. Army, FM 3-22.37 "JAVELIN MEDIUM ANTIARMOR WEAPON SYSTEM": http://www.survivorlibrary.com/library/fm_3-22x37_javelin.pdf, which is where the two graphs on the wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGM-148_Javelin) documenting the top attack/direct attack flight profiles come from.