Corrected entry: It becomes quite obvious as the movie progresses that the aliens want to capture and use (or digest) humans, so it defies logic that the first one to appear immediately starts vaporizing every human in sight. Since the people posed no threat, the only reason to vaporize them would be if the aliens simply wanted to be rid of them - which they obviously didn't. So this initial vaporization was simply a manufactured plot device by the movie makers.
lionhead
2nd Jun 2022
War of the Worlds (2005)
Correction: Doesn't defy logic in the slightest. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the initial "invasion" (vaporizing every human in sight and starting battles) was to disrupt and take control of the human population. Thus making it easier to harvest human blood/tissue from the remaining population. (Which, from my memory at least, were implied to basically be used to fertilize their terraforming efforts/the red weed.) If you wanna take somewhere over, you can't just wander in and say "Ok, this is MINE now!" That's not how war works. You have to show force, assert dominance and then get rid of any possible opposition.
Correction: "So this initial vaporization was simply a manufactured plot device by the movie makers." This 'manufactured plot device' was written by Herbert George Wells, 110 years before the 2005 movie. While there are differences between the original novel and the 2005 movie, there are a number of similarities. One identical plot detail being that the aliens' tripods started by incinerating countless humans before harvesting them to fertilize the red weed. I can't recall if the novel explained why.
13th Jul 2005
War of the Worlds (2005)
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.
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.
17th Jan 2020
War of the Worlds (2005)
Question: So I know this was asked but I'm going to go a little deeper, How were the aliens killed by microbes/bacteria? They are so much more advanced then we are that they didn't think to protect themselves from this possible threat? They were ready for battle with the lasers how did they not think about what is in our environment?
Answer: I think the issue of they're more advanced than us therefore how would they not know about Earth's diseases is a bad assumption. Having knowledge of space travel and weaponry doesn't mean having knowledge of microbiology, even if we think it must because of our own advancements. We know when Europeans came to the Americas, the diseases they brought over were devastating to the indigenous people who had no immunity. There's a theory that the Americas never had such plagues or diseases because they didn't live in overcrowded cities like the Europeans. Had the indigenous people carried unique diseases that they were immune to, their diseases could have easily wiped out of the Europeans, despite being "more advanced." Mars may simply never had experience with plagues or diseases that required the concept of immunization or they may have thought they were protected.
Answer: They had never been to Earth and test out of the biological nature of the planet and its life. They just assumed to be protected in their machines from any hostility against them and never thought to protect themselves from the bacteria. They thought that if they would just destroy the life they wouldn't be affected by it.
So you said they had never been to Earth, but how did the machines they are using get here? If they are so intelligent and have these fancy machines how did they not think to look more closely at the life on this planet first when they brought the machines?
They didn't bring them, they sent them. A long, long time ago too. Who knows why they didn't think of it? That's just the story. They want the planet and kill everything on it to gain it. Why study an inferior species?
7th Apr 2018
War of the Worlds (2005)
Question: I'm still a bit confused on the tripods' actual height. I can't find it anywhere and I just wanted to make sure how tall the tripods are. Preferably in meters but any measurement is fine.
Correction: There are plenty of humans to go around. They don't need all of them. What they first wanted to do is collapse human society. That usually works if you start killing indiscriminately.
lionhead
Maybe they needed 20 billion people. So we don't know that there "are plenty to go around." And again, the people they vaporized were no threat. And they didn't need to "collapse human society" (and you have no way of knowing what they "wanted" to do); they merely needed to remove threats. So, again, it defies logic to unnecessarily vaporize what's later shown to be desirable to them, if not required by them.
ReRyRo
You don't know what the wanted to do either. Seeing them kill so many people, logically shows that they don't need all those people.
lionhead
Maybe they didn't need 20 billion people. Maybe they didn't have the "human harvesting" equipment ready. Maybe they just felt like it. Who knows. Either way, I'm not sure we can't apply our concepts of logic to an alien race.
You might try reading the original novel. While I don't disagree that it defies logic, the fact is that the only person that could address the why of this was H.G. Wells. While the filmmakers changed a number of details to base the story in the present (2005), in the U.S., from a family's point of view, the tripods being buried...the basic story itself, on the aliens illogically torching lots of humans before they began harvesting them, is pretty much the same as in the novel.