FAQ

Might have been to rub it in Ray's face that he's a Boston fan now. Could just be that he did it unconsciously and likes to wear his hat differently from time to time.

It appears that the lightning storms do not happen simultaneously all over the world. At the beginning of the film we seen numerous news reports talking about lightning storms in different locations. One of the very first news reports talks about lightning storms in the Ukraine but as of that time in the film, Ray and his family have not experienced any lightning storms themselves.

The lightning storm also changes position when it strikes near Ray's house. When he first starts watching the storm with Rachel it is behind his house and behind the Bayoone Bridge but after the strikes have happened, the storm in the next scene has moved to the front of the houses and is in the distance while still quietly flashing. So this suggests that the storm passes over the Earth depositing the aliens into the tripods one by one.

This is further clarified by somebody that Ray speaks to at the plane crash who says once the tripods start to move, no more news comes out of that area. This shows that people are able to communicate to say certain areas have gone off-line first. This wouldn't be possible if the attack was coordinated to happen at exactly the same moment. There would be just a complete communications block out if it all happened at exactly the same time.

When Ray makes the decision to move himself and his children out of the town and drive to his ex-wife's house, we see that the lights are still on in his ex-wife's house and the phone still has a dialtone although Robbie is not able to reach the number he contacts. This shows that either a tripod has not emerged near this property or a tripod has not travelled close enough. Most probably the one that emerged near Ray's property is currently making its way along whatever path it's following but as of yet has not come close enough to interfere with electronic and technology so everything is as normal. The scene is very serene, everything is very peaceful and there are no signs of the tripods devastation yet.

Rays house is in Bayonne, New Jersey and his ex-wife's property Is in Ashbury Park, New Jersey. When they are driving on the expressway it is daytime but they don't arrive at the ex-wife's property until it is dark so it shows that it's not a quick two minute drive between the two properties.

When they are driving on the expressway and Robbie asks why there are no aeroplanes and helicopters, all of the cars around them are dead because their starters have been fried. This would also mean that any aeroplanes and helicopters in the immediate area when the lightning strikes happen would have died and fallen out of the sky effectively. However the aeroplane that's in the sky above the ex-wife's property has not currently been affected by any of this so it's still flying.

In the morning when Ray is talking to the news reporter, you hear the siren of a tripod go off quite near to them which causes the reporter and her group to leave. Evidently a tripod has travelled close enough that whatever it sends out to short-circuit vehicles, affected the plane during the night. A plane at that height that suddenly goes dead at the controls will just fall out of the sky nose first and then unfortunately landed in the street right outside Ray's house.

It's not entirely clear what the Martians in the 2005 film War of the Worlds would do if they saw the people in the basement. The Martians in the film are portrayed as ruthless invaders who are intent on destroying humanity, so it's possible that they would attack the people in the basement in order to eliminate any potential resistance. However, it's also possible that the Martians would simply ignore the people in the basement and continue on with their larger mission of destroying humanity. The Martians are shown to be heavily armed and armored, so it is also possible that they would not care if there were people in the basement or not, they would just proceed with their mission of destroying the human race.

While his ex-wife Mary Ann () and her new husband Tim (David Alan Basche) are visiting her parents in Boston, New Jersey dockworker Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) is looking after their two children-teenage son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and 10-year-old daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning)-when the planet is attacked by aliens, starting with catastrophic lightning storms and followed by the emergence of huge three-legged war machines. Ray tries to protect his children and flee to Boston to rejoin his ex-wife.

War of the Worlds is also an 1898 novel by English science fiction writer H. G. (Herbert George) Wells (1866-1946). The screenplay for the movie was written by American screenwriters Josh Friedman and David Koepp and updated to be set in our time.

In the original novel, the story was situated in Victorian England, which was the technological superpower of that age. It made the alien invasion that more dramatic, since the Martians were able to defeat the strongest country in the world with relative ease. Also, author H. G. Wells was from England, so he wrote about the country he lived in, purposely situating the action in places and locations that were known by his family and friends. The movie, however, is a US production made with an American cast and crew, and therefore it is primarily geared towards the US. Setting the film in the States would make it more relevant to that audience. Also, in this setting, the US effectively takes the place of England as the modern superpower that gets easily defeated by an alien attack force.

Because this is a movie about Ray and his struggle to survive and grow as a character. It is a first person narrative. Director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp were adamant that this movie should be a family drama within a disaster movie, so no scenes of landmarks getting destroyed or authorities forming a plan of attack were to be shown. The only times we see the military, destruction or other cities being attacked are when they interact with Ray and his family.

Probably because they weren't switched on at the time. An EMP (electromagnetic pulse) causes an overload of electrical systems through which electricity is flowing at the same moment. Consequently, switched-off devices will be less affected or possibly unaffected. In the case of military vehicles, EMP doesn't affect diesel engines (for loosely similar reasons that it doesn't affect firearm rounds), and it's likely that they were braced against electromagnetic disruption anyway. If they were affected, the military would have had plenty of time to fix the problem with their vehicles just as the van was. However, digital/computer memory systems (besides optical media) can be damaged, blanked, scrambled or reset to factory defaults from the interference of strong/nearby magnetic forces (whether fixed or fluctuating); so in regards to the camcorder and cellphones (even various kinds of walkie-talkie/CB/HAM units), it is definitely possible that the filmmakers ignored factual accuracy in favor of (suspense-invoking) artistic license. Also, strong/nearby electric forces (whether fixed or fluctuating) can cause batteries to be damaged or discharged, along with photovoltaics and piezoelectrics. Lifeforms can be affected in certain contexts too, as a matter of electrophysiology in general but especially in the context of needful magnetoreception (of Earth's magnetic field). Ultimately, the level of destruction or disruption depends upon the fields strengths (volts per meter, and teslas) of the pulse (the strength values being strongest at the spatial center of an event and weaker at distance), along with frequencies/bands of the signals and noise, as well as the amount of shielding in/around electric or magnetic devices located within the path/range of the pulse. For instance, a nuclear EMP is much stronger and spans more electromagnetic bands than a man-made, non-nuclear EMP, since the nuclear radiation (much like solar radiation) itself can actually cause material to heat up (melting, evaporating, decomposing or changing state in other ways).

If you'll notice, all the cars have stalled on the highway in such a manner that created a handy little pathway for Ray to drive steadily without stopping, taking sharp curves or being forced onto the median. It's not totally unbelievable that most people, if their car suddenly lost power while driving on a freeway, would choose to pull off the road. And most of the cars probably had enough momentum left after the engines lost power to get to the shoulder. The van was being worked on by a mechanic, and Ray had told him the problem with the van was the solenoid, the mechanic replaced it with a new one which should not have been affected by an EMP since it had no electricity going through it.

There is a basement sequence in the movie because much of the novel took place in basements. The main character in the book spends time first with a sniveling, drunken cleric who makes a lot of noise and endangers them. Later he spends time in a basement with an artilleryman who is something of a survivalist. These characters are combined into the character Ogilvy (Tim Robbins)-in screenwriting terms, Ogilvy is often referred to as a "composite" character. In a disaster/action movie, a relaxed pace is often used for explanation, speculation and plot/character development, things that are hard to establish during action sequences. Also, it is necessary to prevent the story from becoming a blurred succession of events steadily increasing in intensity by which the audience gets emotionally exhausted. This sequence allows us to discover exactly what Ray will do to survive and, more importantly, to protect his daughter from both the invaders and someone who he perceives as dangerous.

If looked at closely enough, it's clear that there actually are a few bodies still on the plane. Why there are so few is not clear. The tripods/aliens may have already harvested them. Another explanation is that the plane's roof, which is clearly missing, had blown off at high altitude and most of the passengers simply flew out of the aircraft (especially if their safety belts weren't fastened). A third explanation is that, if hit by a heat ray, many of the passengers may have just been incinerated. On several occasions, the ray is shown to incinerate biological matter while simply passing through or pushing aside inanimate objects, like the cars we see in the initial attack in Ray's town.

They were looking for food. The large container that they removed from the plane crash is a food service cart used by the flight attendants while the plane is in flight. One or both of the TV crew realized that there might be at least one cart with its contents still intact.

The airplane doesn't wreck the van Ray is using because it missed it. Pure dumb luck, fate, whatever you'd like to call it.

Yes, Robbie has on different shoes and Rachel is wearing a tunic she never had on before shortly after the family gets out of the river. There could possibly be a deleted scene where they pick up some of the clothes which are raining down from the sky after some victims are taken. There could have also been some clothes in the basement.

Probably because people have a high moisture content and cloth a low one; to take the term "vaporize" literally, in that "vapor" usually refers to hot moisture, a state of H2O. Again, this is an alien technology, so Earthly rules don't apply. Essentially, the "rays" were designed to disrupt molecular and biological integrity. In simple terms, the Heat Ray only vaporizes Organic things (Such as humans and not clothes).

One theory is that they came down with the lightning as the tripods did. Another theory is some kind of cloaking device the aliens had invented. The tripods could have been buried quite deep, there are very few places on Earth where we have an intimate knowledge of what lies even half a mile under the surface. The tripod 'heads' were also relatively small, the were probably buried in some kind of capsule that had buried itself with the legs curled inside. Another possibility is that the tripods were not buried very deep at all but were miniaturized even to a microscopic scale and not restored to their full size until the strange lightning hit.

They must have been killed by the aliens. As seen in the book, along with heat rays, the aliens also used a kind of black smoke that caused people to suffocate. In both the book and the film we also see the aliens taking people and killing them, which would suggest that this was how they disposed of the bodies. You could assume that these people were victims of this. However, you are left to your imagination, much the same as Ray is. In a practical sense, the bodies are shown dead this way to heighten the tension of the story: we don't know how they died and the filmmakers can let us imagine some horrific way in which they may have been killed.

Perhaps the engine room was still intact or at least operational. We don't know how it was set on fire. We assume it was a heat-ray, but anything could have happened. At any rate, it takes quite a bit of track for a train to slow down with the brakes on, even with no power, much less a train with the brakes off. In the book, it actually made sense that the burning train went by extremely fast, because the fire increased the pressure for the steam engine with which it was powered.

According to Ogilvy, the Martians were drinking human blood. Certainly a possibility, but another suggestion is that they were using human blood as fertilizer for the "red weed" that they were planting, a sort of terraforming, if you will. In the original book, the unnamed protagonist does manage to observe the Martians killing a man, and speculates that their way of nourishing themselves involved injecting blood from other life forms into their own veins. This possibility seems to be alluded to in the film, where people are lifted out of cages and pulled into the machine where they are presumably consumed.

Maybe there was an army camp over the hill and the tripods came at them much like they did at the ferries. When people are in a panic, they tend to look to authority for help. In this case, it's the army. Then, when the tripods appear and the army is helpless, people see that and run again.

It's unknown. Again it was a first person point of view. We don't know any more than Ray knows and we don't see Robbie after he runs over the ridge. Maybe he hid; maybe he made it to Boston with the military unit that Ray encountered there. Many people are seen running down the hill after the explosion. Maybe Robbie survived the way they survived. It could be homage to the original book. In it, the narrator learns that the town where his wife was hiding with family has been completely destroyed. When he finally makes it there at the end, he finds that several blocks of houses have been spared from destruction, and his wife and her family are alive and well at their house. Maybe Robbie joined the army and the surviving troops took him with them when they retreated. He also could have been evacuated with the other survivors.

It is believed to be part of the environment of the inside of the tripods, where the aliens work. This is shown in the end when the hatch opens up, and you see a large amount of the orange fluid escape, followed by the alien's arm. The orange color could be an indication of immunological compromise in the aliens or their vehicles, perhaps damage to the internal environment in which the aliens work.

Another theory suggests the internal damage of the walls separating the machinery from the martians causing the liquid they are submerged in to quickly comprise and rust. This orange colour may be attributed by Iron oxidising bacteria of the metals from the mechanics and electrics within.

The grandparents had on clean fresh clothes because they still had some in the house. It didn't look like it took all that long for the aliens to start getting sick, and dying. It was probably less than a week. You don't go totally primitive in that length of time if your house is even partially intact. That part of America hadn't been attacked as badly as the other parts so their district may not have been attacked yet therefore they were clean and tidy as they didn't have to run away. A large part of Boston, Massachusetts, is on reclaimed or artificially created land. It is possible that there were no buried alien war machines near Boston so the city had not suffered as much during the attack.

Surprisingly, the concept is quite sound; assuming the shields were some form of electromagnetic shell, they would implement a premature detonation of any weapon entering its range but allow anything else to pass through; the spikes on the tripod legs and head are indeed suggestive of Electric Reactive Armour, an experimental countermeasure against anti-tank weapons. If the tripods were able to generate a large enough charge, an aura of plasma, similar to the one seen in the film would result. Another explanation is that they turned off the shields temporarily when they picked up humans, otherwise it would negate the bird-scene at the end, which indicated that the shields were offline. It's perfectly believable that the aliens, having become seriously ill because of Earth-born disease, simply didn't have the mental capacity anymore to keep the defenses of the vehicles operating properly. The clip in the cage where people are captured and stored was one of the entrances where the biomechanics meets the steel armour, consumed by a large rubber gasket that keeps the seal around the person to allow the vacuum pumps to the cavity to suck the person in. This gasket is nourished and kept wet by human blood that is extracted from people that are consumed by the blood extraction device.

The aliens were dying. They essentially had the flu, or some kind of virus they had ingested. Think about driving a car. Now picture driving it with a temperature of 105, while coughing and vomiting or suffering other symptoms of sickness like a headache or impaired vision. The only way to explain the shields being down is that the operator has already died, passed out, or doesn't have the strength or mental capacity to turn them on—if you're sick and not thinking straight, it's very easy to forget even habitual procedures. Another theory is that the tripods were bio-mechanical. The appendages looked like they may have been organic and the anus-looking thing that was pulling in Ray looked very organic. So maybe the virus/bacteria that killed the aliens had a similar effect on their equipment.

It is not made clear why the aliens chose to attack at the time they did, even though it is suggested that their tripods have been buried deep in the Earth for millennia. Possible explanations include: (1) the aliens used humans as a kind of "fertilizer" once they started their invasion, (2) they may have "seeded" several, or even many, planets with the tripods many years ago. (Ogilvy's estimate of "a million years" has no real support as the tripods could have been planted here as few as 10,000 years ago) and waited until they needed a planet, (3) the tripods have been put into place by an unmanned fleet that is sent out into the universe and automatically searches for useful planets; it just took the aliens that long to come after.

There is no evidence that they did not get those diseases when they left their tripods. Most bacteria or viruses have an incubation period before the host becomes symptomatic. Just because they did not become immediately ill upon leaving their tripods does not mean that they were not exposed. Also, there's a brief moment in the basement when we see the actual aliens where one of them drinks from a leaking pipe. If a human drinks contaminated water, it takes a while before they start to become sick. The aliens were obviously a biological life form like us, but with superior technology.

The tripods' protective shields were down, so the birds had no problem perching on them. Birds will perch on anything, especially something high off the ground as a form of defense or protection. The tripods simply offered them another perch and potentially consumed the red weed off the metal.

Because the Thunderchild is a British ship and this setting was placed in the USA. Besides, that bit of the novel itself is followed by the brother of the main character. This version of War of the Worlds was specifically written to exclude any other external characters and be a one-person narrative. However, there is still a boat scene very similar to the Thunderchild scene included in the film.

No. According to Box Office Mojo, War Of The Worlds was the 4th biggest grossing film of 2005 with a total worldwide box office of 591.7 million USD. Furthermore, the film scored a 73% rating on the review aggregator, Rotten Tomatoes, indicating that the majority of critics gave the film positive reviews.

Yes. As far as War of the Worlds (1898) is concerned, the most well-known of the movie adaptations is The War of the Worlds (1953), but there have been several others, including War of the Worlds (2005), and The War of the Worlds (2005). In addition, a TV series, War of the Worlds (1988), ran from 1988 to '90. Each of the following other novels by Wells have numerous movie adaptations: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The Invisible Man (1897).