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.
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.
Corrected entry: Ray's family is headed north, along the west bank of the Hudson River, attempting to cross and get to Boston, but, in every scene by the river, they are travelling in the same direction as the current, which would put them on the east bank, headed south.
Correction: The Hudson is a tidal river. As the tide rises the current reverses, something which the old ship captains used to take advantage of.
Corrected entry: As they main characters walk to the ferry, there is a blood donation lady explaining that they are full for certain types of blood. Why are they taking blood donations? The aliens vaporise every part of the human body. The only reason they would need blood is if limbs were torn off (And people shooting people would not be the cause to ask the Red Cross to call for a national blood drive during an alien attack).
Corrected entry: After Ray says to Robbie that the next time he takes the car without permission he will call the cops, he says "Robbie" and slaps his hands together. As he is doing the clapping a car is driving by, but the cars are all supposed to be down so no one should be driving.
Correction: There are people pushing all of the cars that are seen moving.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Ray is taken by the alien Tripod, at the part where he is taken into the Tripod interior, it is shown that he pulled the pins of a few hand grenades while he was inside. The hand grenades shown in the movie are M67 grenades, the standard US hand grenade, which has a 4 second delayed fuse. In the scene, it takes about 20 seconds from him originally getting taken in to the part where the grenades actually detonate. If it was realistic, it would have detonated earlier, before he was pulled out. (01:35:30)
Correction: Incorrect. Pulling the pin on a grenade does not arm them, releasing your grip on the safety lever arms the grenade. At no point does Ray let go of the grenade until he's ready to, and at the point he releases it, is when it arms.
Corrected entry: As Tom Cruise yells , "Get off the car" to the mob in Athens NY and the guy in the red flannel jacket is on the roof. In the next shot he's standing next to the driver's side door. (00:54:20)
Corrected entry: The same silver Mazda station wagon appears in numerous locations in the background during the attack on Ray's neighborhood. Though it is possible that that car in that color is very popular there, it is obvious the film-makers used the same car.
Correction: You said yourself it's possible the car was very popular, so no mistake unless you're able to find something (i.e. license plate) proving it's the same car.
Corrected entry: When Ray comes upon the news cameraman scouring the wreckage of the crashed airliner, the cameraman does not hear Ray's questions. The female reporter explains that he's deaf from a shell that exploded near him, and demonstrates this by yelling at him only inches from his head. A couple of shots later, a tripod is heard trumpeting off in the distance (and is certainly less loud than the shouting demonstration) "Hear that? We gotta go," exclaims the deaf cameraman.
Correction: The deaf guy never says anything. It's a different camerman who says that.
Corrected entry: At the very end, when Tom's son appears and they hug, there is no explanation whatsoever as to how he survived the explosion that engulfed him earlier. When he runs over the hill all we see is fire rising into the sky, incinerating anything that was near. It is impossible for any normal person to have survived a blast of that magnitude.
Correction: Just because there is no explanation offered in the film, does not mean it doesn't fall within the realm of possibility. Yes, there is a huge fireball at the top of the hill, but obviously Robbie had just barely made it past that specific area, before it was consumed by fire.
Corrected entry: Most of the way through the movie Robbie is wearing sneakers. After the ferry disaster scene when they are all walking through a field towards the battle he still has sneakers on, but when he runs off up the hill and Ray goes after him and struggles with him on the ground you see Robbie stand up and he is wearing what seems to be heavy duty military boots.
Correction: When Ray, Robbie and Rachel swim to shore they are soaked as they watch the tripods' massive destruction. In the next shot, as they walk amongst the large crowd of refugees, a considerable amount of time has passed; they are all completely dry, Rachel is now wearing a long wool hooded cloak and Robbie is wearing the combat boots. Robbie does wear the boots when "they are all walking through a field towards the battle" and when he runs up the hill. So Rachel and Robbie found the cloak and boots during the time offscreen.
Corrected entry: If the aliens planned on taking over the Earth and planting vines to colonize the planet then they would have done some testing to ensure the planet was hospitable. It makes no sense that they would expend such effort to take over a planet without testing for or protecting themselves against deadly bacteria or viruses. Can you imagine a movie where humans simply land on an alien planet without testing the air and environment then proceed to run around naked?
Correction: Character mistake, not a movie mistake, the ending was taken from the book. The aliens may be a arrogant race and thought they could survive anything.
Corrected entry: Near the beginning of the film Robbie is lying down listening to his ipod when his mother is trying to speak to him. Loud music can be heard and this stops when she pulls out the earphone plug. Having had her say, she plugs the headphones in and the music immediately resumes. Anyone who has an ipod will know that the music stops playing when you pull the plug out - and does not immediately restart until you press play.
Correction: That's simply incorrect. I have a 3rd-generation iPod (and before it had 2nd and 1st generation ipods) all of which continue to play music regardless of whether or not a headphone jack is plugged in.
Corrected entry: The fact that alien weapons and vehicles were planted thousands or millions of years ago and no one detected any of them, even in the middle of cities, is quite a stretch but I'll accept it. What I can't accept is that these vehicles and weapons are literally eons of years old that they are using. That doesn't make any sense. We wouldn't go to war with equipment that is only 70-100 years old. why would they use equipment against us that is thousands or millions of years old? You mean they haven't improved on anything?
Correction: (1) The eons-old equipment is what's buried there for them to use. With no apparent method of bringing updated equipment along, they're stuck with what they've already put in place. (2) We wouldn't go into battle with 100 year old equipment because we know that said equipment couldn't possibly compete with the more modern stuff that our opponents would have available. The alien invaders, however, have no such concern - despite their equipment being millions of years old, it still outperforms human technology by a considerable margin, so it's simply not necessary to use anything newer.
The machines wouldn't even be operable if they were really millions of years old.
Pure speculation, if you don't even know how the machines work in the first place.
Corrected entry: In the scene when the aliens first arrive, all the electrical services, phones, mobile phones, cars, etc. cease to function, but when the aliens start moving and attacking, we see a woman taking photographs with a digital camera and a man using a video camera.
Correction: EMPs only work on running electronics. For instance, cars, cell phones and wrist-watches but if a device is not on when the EMP blast occurred it can still function properly. So after an EMP is triggered, you can still use digital cameras and video cameras. Assuming they weren't on.
EMPs destroy even turned off electronics.
Or they had a product placement deal with Hitachi...which they did.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Corrected entry: As to the initial EM pulse, it is unlikely that changing the solenoid on the van would have helped, as the one he has to change it with was in proximity to the van when the EM pulse disabled them. Unless he keeps spare solenoids in a shielded box then it is likely that all solenoids would have been equally affected, regardless of whether or not it was installed or not.
Correction: If an electrical object is completely turned off and not attached to a power source then it isn't necessarily destroyed by an EM Pulse. Therefore, if he had a spare solenoid on a shelf, it could have been fine.
Therefore, any car with the key off would be unaffected. This whole EMP thing is a reach.
Correction: There no solenoid on that car that could possibly disable it that way.
Corrected entry: As the three drive away from the bathroom stop, after encountering the Army for the first time, we can hear the sound of the EAS (emergency alert system) on the radio, then the announcer stating "This was only a test if this had been an actual emergency." If ever there was a time for the EAS to be activated for real, this would be it.
Corrected entry: When Ray arrives at his home to meet his ex and kids after he gets off work, his ex-wife is wearing a short green blouse with a long black skirt. When she's in the bedroom speaking to Ray and Robbie regarding his paper, she's wearing a long dress, then in the next shot walking down the stairs, it is a short blouse again.
Correction: Mary Ann is wearing the same outfit throughout these shots, including Ray's driveway, in Ray's kitchen, walking up the stairs, in the kids' bedroom, then walking down the stairs, to the last shots of her at Ray's front door. She wears a brown skirt, a green floral pregnancy blouse, a long blue knit sweater with a brown furled edged collar (sleeves are also furled and are visible under coat sleeves in some shots), and a long grey tweed coat.
Corrected entry: In one scene after their car has been taken, the three bunch together and Robbie has a bloody nose. You see him in the next shot and his nose is clear, in fact his whole face is clean.
Correction: They don't bunch together, and it's not in "the next shot" that the blood is gone. At the diner, Robbie has the bloody nose when the gunshot is heard, and Rachel runs to his arms, while Ray sits across from them at the table. Now there are three shots where Robbie's face is not visible, the first of which he buries his face into his wet jacket sleeve while he hugs Rachel. It's very reasonable to think that the small amount of blood was wiped away during the time his face was not seen onscreen.
Corrected entry: When Ray Ferrier walks to the area where the lightning struck 26 times in one place, he walks past a number of cars which are between him and the camera. In the window of the last one he walks past, you can see a cameraman looking into the lens of the camera filming the shot.
Correction: The reflection in the window of this car is a gentleman with a baseball cap simply walking past the car, along with the rest of the crowd on the busy street; he does not look into a lens, nor is there any lens or any other camera part visible in the reflection.
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.