War of the Worlds

I've just watched good old Tom Cruise failing to save the world from the Martians.

Not a bad film. To be honest, rather better than I was expecting, but just one thing bothered me (Well, one main thing)

Just how deep were these tripods buried?
They are, after all, fairly chunky machines, and there are a fair few of them. You'd have thought we might just have run into them at some point during the last couple of centuries.

Why did they bury them anyway? They supposedly did that long before our history, but what for? Either they looked at evolving humans and thought "You know, one day there are going to be enough of those things to make it worth farming there", or they thought "Lets bury a few tripods, just in case something interesting evolves on that planet."

If they had the technology to build/transport these machines, why did they wait so long to send the drivers over?

I guess there is no fathoming the alien mind!



Now I just have to wait for someone to make a decent film version of "The Kraken Wakes".

I've watched both versions of the movie (older and newer) and I just can't help but think they just only skimmed through the book. It was like The Scarlet Letter with Demi Moore.

EvilHippyEmperor wrote:

Just how deep were these tripods buried?
They are, after all, fairly chunky machines, and there are a fair few of them. You'd have thought we might just have run into them at some point during the last couple of centuries.


If they had the technology to build/transport these machines, why did they wait so long to send the drivers over?

With the way in which we had pretty much dug up and developed the whole world, it seemed odd that one of them wasn't smacked with a shovel or an oil drill sooner. So maybe they were buried pretty deep.

As to why they emerged when they did, I guess you'd have to ask Spielberg but the impression I got was that they were waiting until we had reached a certain point in our evolution, where we had become urbanized and increasingly compact as a population? The shots of crowded cities in the beginning, the threat that we were using up the resources on the planet at a rate that would leave them nothing to bleed dry if they didn't emerge soon. How they seemed to gun for densely populated areas first is also interesting. Maybe it says something about the state of the world. Shape up or we'll be attacked by tripods.

It just kind of bothers me that they were going all over the world killing and farming, eating whatever it was they were eating from the humans and yet they seemed to die around the same time from our germs. I would think if they go eating a bunch of sick people or are in a country on the high end of polution or where the health risks are higher then you'd see those ailiens dropping off pretty quick but, nope... same time all over the place

Morella wrote:

How they seemed to gun for densely populated areas first is also interesting.

I think it is logical to go for the 'quick wins' first. High reward for minimum effort. Once the 'farm' is established, then you can worry about picking off the odds and sods.

endless dark wrote:

It just kind of bothers me that they were going all over the world killing and farming, eating whatever it was they were eating from the humans and yet they seemed to die around the same time from our germs. I would think if they go eating a bunch of sick people or are in a country on the high end of polution or where the health risks are higher then you'd see those ailiens driopping off pretty quick but, nope... same time all over the place

You'd think the ones on the junk food diet should have died first.

I guess it is just a narrative device that they all pop their clogs at the same time. The only way it would be logical is if they were most susceptible to one of the non-lethal (for us, anyway) bugs that is endemic throughout the world: Gum disease, perhaps.

That does seem a little embarrassing for them though. Survive smallpox, cancer, cholera, tumerculosis etc, but die because you haven't discovered Listerine.