War of the Worlds, a review

[FearlessOne]

Just saw this last night.  I'm a military sci-fi reader, so the anachronisms and inconsistencies in the plot and in the aliens' technology were so jarring to me that I couldn't enjoy the movie. 

There are pretty obvious plot holes - how didn't we discover those things before, for one thing, and why would any invader with that level of technology (we're talking inserting the "pilots" at near-relativistic speed from total stealth) want our planet anyway, but there's tons of tiny stuff. 

Little things, like I said, but things that really got to annoying me after a while.
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Ok, first, how didn't we discover these things before? One would think that subway digging, mining, severe erosion, magnometers, any one of these would have uncovered some of the tens of thousands of these devices. Well, that assumes that they are completely 'dead' until reactivated by the lightning or emag pulses or pods. They may have nanotechnology to repair damage and use sensors to detect whether discovery is imminent. In that case, the buried tripod has to disintegrate or assimilate with nearby minerals. Nanotechnolgy involves assembly and disassembly.

Second, why isnt their technology better? Well, you know from the movie that it's very clear that they are quite primitive in alot of ways, brutal, and above all arrogant. Morgan Freeman tells us that they watched us from far away - and that probably means in this movie that they are NOT from Mars (where the heck in the movie did they even mention Mars? I see several posts here saying so.) He also says that at least some of them had 'vast intellects'. This may not mean the grunts we see transported across space and down the lightning pods or perhaps even hatched just a few years while in transit. Their technology may be in a state of stasis just as their home world is dying. Maybe the last time they fought a war was millions of years ago, and that military technology worked fine then. Arrogance = Ignorance here.

Third, why not harvest all instead of vaporize? I dont know why u asked this question. It makes perfect sense to me. Conquer and then unterraform. They transform from warriors to fiendish horticulturalists as soon as the threat is over, although I admit, we dont seem to be much threat.

Fourth, low tech spotlights. Well, they work. You might like to see infrared sensors, but remember they also seem to have big eyes and perhaps can see very well with only a small amount of illumination.

Fifth, why noisy tripods, no envirosuits/weaponry. Again and again, they are in many ways primitive, perhaps a dying culture that over the past few million years has lost sight of how far they have declined, just as it wasnt until the beginning of the High Italian Renaissance that people figured out we had been in a 1000 year decline. These may be grunts, another species enslaved, a subspecies specially bred. Disposable.

Their efficient primitivism gives this movie its scary tone.