War of the Worlds (2005 film)/Fridge

Fridge Logic
"Zapp: "Damn it Kif, where are the human resources?" Kif: "Sir, you killed several hundred million of them during the opening attack. You should have harvested FIRST while we had the element of complete surprise." Zapp: "Kif, you naive fool, they would have expected that right after the lightning!" Kif: *SIGH*"
 * This film suffers from some scientific inconsistencies, particularly when it comes to the EMP that knocked out most of the electronics around each "storm." For example, when the first tripod emerges, someone is clearly seen operating a video camera, which should have been rendered useless by the EMP. Later, a news crew managed to film one of the lightning bolts.
 * If I understand it correctly, EMP only knocks out devices that have a current running through them at the time, so any electronics that weren't on when the EMP hit should operate after.
 * You are incorrect, an EMP is dangerous because the magnetic pulse will disrupt any and all electronics within its range.
 * The '50s version had this too, except the EMP thing was a byproduct of the Heat-Ray rather than the landing. Sci-fi and monster movie historian Bob Burns pointed this out on the DVD--everything was shut down, but cars were still able to get to the scene. ("Made by GM," he said.)
 * Cars of that era had no EMP-vulnerable electronics in their power trains. This was decades before embedded processors.
 * My dad, being the armchair survivalist that he is, owns a "farady case" for his digital camera that claims it can protect any electronics inside it from the effects of EMP. Of course, I have no idea if such claim is true or he just bought some expensive crappy case that really does nothing.
 * More Fridge Logic regarding this film. When the aliens show up in their tripods, they start incinerating a crowd of civilians with heat rays. Consider the following. First: that is insanely inefficient for a race capable of interstellar travel; even the original novel had Black Smoke, an instantly-lethal airborne chemical weapon (I say chemical because the aliens clearly didn't have a solid enough grasp on biology to make biological weapons). Second: the slack-jawed crowd posed absolutely no threat to the tripod which was apparently invulnerable to modern weaponry (except when its crew is sick...somehow). Did the aliens have an inferiority complex or something? Third: later on in the movie, the aliens are rounding up live humans to sap and impurify all our precious bodily fluids. Why then, did the aliens spend the first two hours completely disintegrating humans one at a time? If the aliens used a machine gun or something, there at least would have been a harvest at the end of the massacres, but the heat ray doesn't even leave a body.
 * I picture an alien Zapp Brannigan planning this thing.


 * I presume that the invaders knew at least enough about the planet Earth to know how overpopulated parts of it are. Since they managed to grow so much on the handful of humans they'd captured, I assume that they didn't need billions of them. As for the crowd, well, what did the invaders really care if the humans posed a threat or not? They were pretty much shooting to kill at that point, sort of like swatting a bunch of gnats even though they're little more than nuisances. And for the argument about aliens failing at biology, they seem to fail at that more than once.
 * If you think that it was a Headscratcher in only the movie version, then it means you must not have read the book. The invaders massacre the clearly inferior Englanders for several days before bothering to harvest them.
 * Yeah, I recall that at some point the narrator actually comments the aliens' tactics made no sense. They would absolutely demolish a city block for no real reason but leave the next one intact.
 * The invaders send themselves to the already-planted spaceships by traveling via electricity. So how long were the freaking ships there, why did we never find them, and why in the name of Kyle MacLachlan didn't they just stay on Earth the last time they were here, planting the ships? And on top of this, wouldn't their technology have advanced in the intervening 50,000,000+ years to something infinitely far more devastatingly advanced than the weapons they left behind? And then there's the matter that the story he made up about help waiting for them, to stop his daughter from crying, turned out to be oh-so-conveniently true, and Robbie, who was last seen running over a hill to join the army right before everything on that side of the hill was blown up, has beaten them to the imaginary safehouse, and is completely unharmed. This movie is bad for your walls.
 * The obvious answer about the Tripods is that the invaders aren't the ones who built them, they're just scavenging Lost Technology that had been left on Earth by some other aliens. Probably Xenu.
 * It's also been suggested that the Tripods weren't buried at all, but the "lightning" was actually injecting Nanomachines into the ground which built the mechs in-situ using underground mineral deposits as raw materials.
 * That leads to a second layer of Fridge Logic if the aliens are that far advanced in nanotechnology, but still have no apparent grasp of microbiology.
 * Maybe their technology makes a leap from macrotechnology to nanotechnology, and microscales are a bit of a blindspot? In the original novel, Wells explicitly states that the Martians had no immunity or defense against microbes because they eradicated them millennia ago, so something similar may have happened to these aliens. This is complete Fan Wank, of course.
 * This theory is actually quite realistic. One of the big post-9/11 concerns was that terrorists would reintroduce diseases such as smallpox which had long ago been eradicated in the West, and to which most Westerners had never been vaccinated or developed an immunity.
 * Who knows how the aliens percieve time? To them, thousands of years might be like a few months (both in terms of lifespan and rate of technological development).
 * Bear in mind that the theory of the war machine being buried was presented by a TV reporter that had no other proof than a record of a lighting transporting something underground. For all we know that "capsule" as she calls it WAS the war machine suprecompressed thanks to some unfathomable tech.