Corrected entry: When the lightning storm begins, it is made very clear that an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) has disabled all electronic equipment, including Tom Cruise's watch. However, when the aliens begin disintegrating people, one man is seen holding up a video camera recording the events before being disintegrated himself. An EMP effectively destroys electronic equipment, causing circuit breakers in the device to overload, making such an "instantaneous" repair impossible. In fact the effects of the EMP are never even referred to again throughout the rest of the movie, with people using lights, televisions, phones, cameras and radios as if nothing happened to them. Can't be due to things being turned off - every car we see (except Tom's) is broken, and they can't all have been running during the storm.
Corrected entry: In the scenes where Tom Cruise, Tim Robbins, and Dakota Fanning are in the basement and the aliens are looking at stuff, one of them spins the front wheel of a bike, yet the freewheel can be heard ticking. That part is only on the rear wheel hub.
Correction: It was not the freewheel itself ticking, it was something ticking against the spokes as the wheel turned.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Tom and his kids get on the ferry, it changes from heavily raining to snowing and back again throughout the shots.
Correction: The weather can go from snow to rain and back to snow in a very short period of time. Nor is it ash from the bodies. Firstly, the tripods are nowhere near the town when the snow first appears. Secondly, the ash from the dead people is much finer than that.
Corrected entry: In the scene where everybody is trying to get onto the ferry, there are a bunch of cars on it. Since they are obviously functional (we can see the headlights on when they fall into the water) how did they get through the angry mob if Cruise didn't make it past the 2km mark?
Correction: Those cars could have been on the ferry when it was on the other side of the river, which may not have been hit by an EMP. Or perhaps the cars arrived before the mob (as people would have ignored the dock as a dead end until a ferry arrived).
Corrected entry: When Tom and Dakota are sleeping in Tim Robbins' ruin, an eye-alien watches them. Rachel wakes and gets out from under the stairs screaming. Ray destroys the eye and straight away he goes out to search for Rachel. Where is the destroyed eye? We suppose we should see a huge tripod with a hundred eyes and one destroyed.
Correction: Why are we supposed to see this? Other than the basement scene, we do not see these things elsewhere. We have no clue how it attaches, how many of them a tripod has, or if it is even part of a tripod (rather than some independent probe).
Corrected entry: In the scene where they look at Tom Cruise's watch after the EMP, it has stopped. However, his watch (an Omega Speedmaster) is a wholly mechanical watch, and would not have been affected by the electronic storm.
Correction: Some models are battery powered.
Corrected entry: EMP bursts only affect things within a limited range. Yet when Ray drives down the highway we see cars all the way down the road crippled for miles. This could have only happened if an EMP burst had struck at regular intervals down the road to affect cars for such a distance.
Correction: Maybe it did strike at intervals. Besides how do you know the range of the alien EMP weapon?
Corrected entry: In the scene where Tom Cruise throws a grenade at the tripod to get its attention, it explodes as soon as it hits the shield. A grenade will not explode from hitting something, it explodes when the fuse runs out. It would simply stop and fall or bounce off a little.
Correction: When Cruise meets the reporters after the plane crash, she explains that the tripods have a shield around them that cause weapons to explode early.
Corrected entry: When the storm makes all the cars stop Ray tells the mechanic to change the solenoid. Ok, then where did he get one that worked? If the one in the car was zapped all of them would be. He did not have to go get one it was less than 15 minutes between the conversation and them getting the van to crank barely long enough to change it much less walk miles out of the blast zone and get a new one.
Correction: EMPs shut down only electronic devices which are in use. If the aliens' technology is similar to this, then all he had to do was get an unused one; quite easy if you're a mechanic.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Tom Cruise is driving in the minivan out of the city, We see all the disabled vehicles out the windows. Within them we see a coach bus and a large truck. They filmed this scene on Richmond Parkway. Richmond Parkway does not allow any Commercial or truck traffic at all.
Correction: 1) Using that road for the film isn't necessarily a mistake if it's been used as a 'set' 2) People might have tried to flee the city and of course no one could care less then about restrictions.
Corrected entry: At the end of the movie, Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning and a whole bunch of other people fall over 50 feet from the sky in a small cage and land in a tree. The branches come through the holes in the pod, but no one gets hurt. Everyone is fine.
Correction: So nobody getting hurt is a plot hole? This can be referred to as simply having good luck and it actually happens in real life.
Corrected entry: While being sucked into the interior of one of the tripods, with a soldier hanging onto one of his hands, Tom Cruise (off camera except for the hand held by the soldier) somehow uses the other hand to pull the pins of two grenades, leave the grenades within the tripod, and retain the pins in his same hand.
Correction: No, he uses his mouth, hence why he spits out the pins into his hand.
Corrected entry: During the beginning when the kids are being dropped at Ray's, they say he was a half an hour late and it is now 8:30, but when Ray and the kids go inside shortly after, there is a brief shot where behind Ray's head you can see a clock displaying the time 5:00. Note: The clock is not digital).
Correction: It is possible the clock is broken.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Ray and the kids arrive at the mom's house, Ray decides to make sandwiches. He gets the bread and dumps the package out, which is about half a package. If you look, you will notice that the piece where one side is all crust, is missing. There is one of those on each side of a loaf of bread.
Correction: Yeah well, my mom loves the heel of the loaf and will take out both ends first.
Corrected entry: Why do advanced, space faring aliens seem to have no knowledge of basic microbiology. Wouldn't they have tested the Earth to see if there was anything dangerous to them before invading? At the very least why wouldn't they wear contamination suits? Its a little much to see an Alien drinking water out of a broken pipe in the basement. We don't even drink water from unknown sources when we go camping because we understand such risks.
Correction: The entire basis of the plot is that the aliens were overconfident in their domination of Earth. This overconfidence thus led to their downfall.
Corrected entry: When Tom Cruise and the two kids are speeding along the highway swerving through stalled vehicles, they always have a clear path. This would be highly unlikely because if an EMP just disabled all the vehicles, I doubt making a clear path would be on their minds.
Correction: EMP just short circuits electronics it doesn't physically stop things dead in their tracks. The cars could still coast and pull over.
Corrected entry: When the aliens begin disintegrating people, they destroy everything with the beam, including cars, wood houses, etc. Why do the clothes remain intact after people's disintegration?
Correction: They have two different beams- a biodestroyer and a matter-destroyer. The dust left by disintegrated people is made of dead skin cells and such.
Corrected entry: The wife's father (Ray's Father in Law), as seen in the final scene, is the same actor who played the hero in the original War of the Worlds film.
Correction: This trivia has already been mentioned. At the bottom of the trivia page it says that the wife's parents are the stars of the original "War of the Worlds".
Corrected entry: After Ray wakes up from his nap, he comes out to his living room to find Rachel sitting on the couch. When Ray asks her what's wrong, we see her with a fire-fighters hat on, but on the next shot, when she's getting up to show him, the hat has disappeared.
Corrected entry: During the movie, the aliens were seen with invisible shields around them that protected them from gun fire/bombs etc yet the long search/observation probe which comes into the basement is relatively easily broken simply by hitting it with an axe.
Correction: What we see, when a shell or missile hits the shields, indicates an ellipsoid shape of the force field. Maybe the probe was outside the shield. Or the shield was turned off since the aliens did not expect any heavy resistance in the otherwise "pacified" area.
Correction: The EMP seems to be caused by their transportation systems. It is likely this is a byproduct of their system, not an intentional weapon. This puts to question how constant it is. Does it really burst evenly out? Or does it fire off in different waves in some unstable pattern. It is likely that some equipment sitting in the right place at the right time could be spared. This would explain the news crews who were able to photograph at least some of the events (most likely using long range zoom).
Joshua Skains