War of the Worlds
The original film had an effect on me as a small child, to the extent that I would always be afraid of the street lamps on the freeway. Watching it later as an adult, I found it no more impressive than any other 50s B-movie...those films are classics only to the people who were around to remember when they were considered good. To my generation they're MST3K fodder. Still, I have nothing against it and if it's one of your favorite movies, then good on you.
I've also indulged in the original radio production, which is quaint and appreciable as a pivotal moment in American culture, when the mass media first had an instantaneous impact on society. The first "water-cooler show", as it were.
Now comes Spielberg's version to DVD, and watching it for the first time I was blown away. Spielberg never makes mistakes, always knows exactly what he's doing, and I looked at this and my visceral reaction was that it was one of his finest non-prestige efforts. Cruise knows his way around an action picture, and here he plays a character so flawed that it's nearly impossible to like him, which works out fine since it's nearly impossible to like Cruise anyway. So as the credits rolled I thought, wow. Just wow, what a movie.
Then I sat back and let it sink in and started to think about it some more. And naturally, one or two questions began to creep into my cerebellum.
**Spoilers Ahead** (but really, who doesn't know the plot of War of the Worlds)
Martians decide to take over Earth. To do this they send killer machines to our planet and bury them beneath the soil, wait a million years, and then send their fighter pilots to enter the machines and start frying everybody.
- If Martians can send machines to Earth and bury them so deep that no one ever finds them, why didn't they just take the planet a million years ago? They clearly didn't want our technology, because they fried all of our cities, and there's no way they could possibly have known back then that we, or any other terrestrial species, would make it this far, and even after a million years our technology is nothing compared to the impenetrable tripods they've had all along.
- How many machines were there? Did every single pilot catch the flu? It's reasonable to guess there were a limited number, so they'd have to disperse them evenly throughout the planet to make sure that they got everyone. How big a coincidence is it that at least one machine was buried on the east coast of a continent that, at the time, had no populations of humans or anything close, but would someday become the center of the largest metropolitan area in the most powerful nation on the planet?
- If they wanted to harvest our blood or what-have-you, why did they keep frying us with the laser? Did they want to keep human meat at a premium?
- If these machines are a million years old, how do they match up with "modern" Martian technology? Are the Martians just slower than us at innovation, or do the pilots have to put up with ridiculously outdated weaponry? It'd be like if the French suddenly ran into Europe and grabbed the cannons that Napoleon had left behind. It would certainly catch the Polish off their guard, but so would the nuclear stockpile they've developed in the meantime.
- Similarly, it's been a million years, and they still have the exact same plan? They didn't come up with anything better? Untold generations of Martians stirred and stewed and not one of them ever piped up and said "hey, why don't we build a giant death ray and just fry them from here?"
- Most importantly, if this exact same plan has been in place for a million years, and they've been waiting all this time...did they do NO further research into terrestrial life? Not one of them thought to check whether it was safe for them to start running around on an alien world? First of all, what do these cats breathe? It ain't oxygen, because there isn't enough on Mars for a species to depend on it. It ain't CO2, which is 95% of the Martian atmosphere, because there isn't enough on Earth for a species that's dependent on it to live. Perhaps they get by on nitrogen, or perhaps they have some sort of air mask that blends in with their bodies. It probably isn't a mask, of course, because if it was then they wouldn't be breathing in the microbes that killed them off. The microbes they seemed to completely miss on whatever ridiculously unsuccessful survey missions they must have taken. What kind of species is intelligent enough to build and operate sophisticated weapons, blockheaded enough to coldly exterminate the entire population of a planet, and stupid enough to start walking around an alien environment unprotected and start drinking the blood of an animal they clearly know nothing about? Does Dubya run Mars too? It is the god of war, after all.
But yeah, it was a good flick.
I've also indulged in the original radio production, which is quaint and appreciable as a pivotal moment in American culture, when the mass media first had an instantaneous impact on society. The first "water-cooler show", as it were.
Now comes Spielberg's version to DVD, and watching it for the first time I was blown away. Spielberg never makes mistakes, always knows exactly what he's doing, and I looked at this and my visceral reaction was that it was one of his finest non-prestige efforts. Cruise knows his way around an action picture, and here he plays a character so flawed that it's nearly impossible to like him, which works out fine since it's nearly impossible to like Cruise anyway. So as the credits rolled I thought, wow. Just wow, what a movie.
Then I sat back and let it sink in and started to think about it some more. And naturally, one or two questions began to creep into my cerebellum.
**Spoilers Ahead** (but really, who doesn't know the plot of War of the Worlds)
Martians decide to take over Earth. To do this they send killer machines to our planet and bury them beneath the soil, wait a million years, and then send their fighter pilots to enter the machines and start frying everybody.
- If Martians can send machines to Earth and bury them so deep that no one ever finds them, why didn't they just take the planet a million years ago? They clearly didn't want our technology, because they fried all of our cities, and there's no way they could possibly have known back then that we, or any other terrestrial species, would make it this far, and even after a million years our technology is nothing compared to the impenetrable tripods they've had all along.
- How many machines were there? Did every single pilot catch the flu? It's reasonable to guess there were a limited number, so they'd have to disperse them evenly throughout the planet to make sure that they got everyone. How big a coincidence is it that at least one machine was buried on the east coast of a continent that, at the time, had no populations of humans or anything close, but would someday become the center of the largest metropolitan area in the most powerful nation on the planet?
- If they wanted to harvest our blood or what-have-you, why did they keep frying us with the laser? Did they want to keep human meat at a premium?
- If these machines are a million years old, how do they match up with "modern" Martian technology? Are the Martians just slower than us at innovation, or do the pilots have to put up with ridiculously outdated weaponry? It'd be like if the French suddenly ran into Europe and grabbed the cannons that Napoleon had left behind. It would certainly catch the Polish off their guard, but so would the nuclear stockpile they've developed in the meantime.
- Similarly, it's been a million years, and they still have the exact same plan? They didn't come up with anything better? Untold generations of Martians stirred and stewed and not one of them ever piped up and said "hey, why don't we build a giant death ray and just fry them from here?"
- Most importantly, if this exact same plan has been in place for a million years, and they've been waiting all this time...did they do NO further research into terrestrial life? Not one of them thought to check whether it was safe for them to start running around on an alien world? First of all, what do these cats breathe? It ain't oxygen, because there isn't enough on Mars for a species to depend on it. It ain't CO2, which is 95% of the Martian atmosphere, because there isn't enough on Earth for a species that's dependent on it to live. Perhaps they get by on nitrogen, or perhaps they have some sort of air mask that blends in with their bodies. It probably isn't a mask, of course, because if it was then they wouldn't be breathing in the microbes that killed them off. The microbes they seemed to completely miss on whatever ridiculously unsuccessful survey missions they must have taken. What kind of species is intelligent enough to build and operate sophisticated weapons, blockheaded enough to coldly exterminate the entire population of a planet, and stupid enough to start walking around an alien environment unprotected and start drinking the blood of an animal they clearly know nothing about? Does Dubya run Mars too? It is the god of war, after all.
But yeah, it was a good flick.
posted by Anti at 11:30 PM
2 Comments:
Hi Anti. Are you a tranny?
^^^
I wish you could delete comments like this guy's...
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Great review and valid points about the story. Like most movies, it has some holes. I wasn't all that interested in seeing this movie before, but I think I'll check it out now.
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