I loved this movie growing up and still do to this day
I loved this movie growing up, it was incredibly visceral and real feeling to me throughout its presentation, how the people reacted and remained petty and aggressive toward each other through the panic and horror of the end of world; even after many viewings since I first saw it back in 2008 when I was 8. I've been so fixated on the design and personality that production crew gave to the invaders, and just how unorthodox and alien they truly are, with the use of pods coming down from lightning, the fact they were three legged and still came to life with terrifying animation and mannerisms, and the way this species had crafted their machines of harvesting and destruction and seeing the symbols and markings on them that gives the aliens a militaristic/industrialised identity, and letting the viewer relate these mass produced machine of war with similar tools of war used in our nation's military today. It's so cool to see in action and terrifying to imagine how hopeless and outmatched humanity was in that scenario. There needs to be a renaissance of writing and ideas like this, because nothing as of the past decade has enraptured me as much as this movie, Indiana Jones or even Anaconda back in 2004. one thing that makes this movie so interesting is the open endedness to the events in the movie and trying to use logic to give reasoning to the plot and mostly to the alien's tactics and way of thinking. for example you could theorise that the tripods have a sort of targeting system that automatically does math to default preferring larger groups of people for harvesting/elimination over smaller groups, as in the case with the one tripod going over the top of Ray, Robbie and Rachael on the hill. you could assume this was intentional and the tripod occupants were aware of the group, as going after the group would've have been an inefficient/potentially fruitless endeavor considering the conditions the machine would tackle doing so and the fact it was the choice between hordes of people on the docks, hillside and ferry, or a mere 3 survivors. Stuff like that is what is the soul of this movie, with it taking the curiosity and creativity of humanity of the writers commissioned to creating this movie and having the byproduct being a movie about destroying the very essence of that. It's fantastic. This movie has a lot of plot holes but the way its presented is just so cool to theorise about, and the horrifying nature and ambiguity adds to that.
share