‘War of the Worlds’: New twig in an old tree

I just went to the cinema today for this movie. I must say for the thrill it gives in two hours, the price of ticket is worthy. Though people may be disappointed that Spielberg made another snack-like movie, I think, after he gained fame by 'Schindler's list' 'Purple' and 'Saving Private Ryan', now is the time he come back as a SF movie director who choose titles he likes, instead of that most critics like.

Surely, this movie will not bring you much thinking. However, I think it is a stylish Scientific thriller. And that's enough. Based on H. G. Wells' famous masterpiece 'War of the Worlds', this movie provided a scene of outer-space intrusion quite different from 'Alien' or 'Independent Day'. From the scene of the street, the panic crowd and burning crash site, we can well regard Steven Spielberg as a detail-focused director. There are horrible explosions in the movie, but he doesn't use these to blind you, you can also notice many subtle details that make the movie more realistic. This is what previous 'space intruder' movies couldn't provide.

Spielberg also used many settings borrowed from other SF works. The pilot of alien killing machine is surrounded by red-orange liquid, sounds like Neon Genesis Evangelion; the blood thirst aliens are like from 'ID4' and 'Starship Troopers'; and you cannot forget Tim Robbins, his role is planning digging a tunnel to the subway and raise a resisting army, reminding us of 'Shawshank's redemption'.

There are a few paradoxes. One is how the aliens put their machines on the earth. Ray (Tom Cruise) and other people say they were buried underground even before human emerged. Then how can the alien tolerate using so old devices? How can they exist for over a million years? Therefore I tend to believe those vehicles are compressed under extremely high pressure and they grow back to normal size when they come out of the ground (some kind of memory alloy, maybe).

The other is why they are defeated? H. G. Wells may failed to think out a better way to defeat them, so he let them all get killed by Terran virus. But how can we believe such an alien army designed for intruding other planets do not have any immune measure against viruses they may encounter? One explanation may be that it is their first time marching to another planet than their home, and they failed to get antibodies from human blood in time. Any way, I like the ending, which do not employ so much human-pride and nobody else would think out except Wells.