Could anybody tell me the exact time and whereabouts on the screen Steven Spielberg appears?
Great sites
Mistakes
Mary Ann and Tim's basement, and Ogilvy's cellar are the same set, just dressed differently; note the positioning of the windows, the stairs, even the little room off to the side. Also, some items in both the basement and cellar are the same, for instance the chair. While they are in the basement and the plane is crashing, before they run into the side room, Ray grabs his gun off of that chair and later in the movie when they are in Ogilvy's basement, Rachel is in that chair when the aliens are in the cellar. See more...
Trivia
When a group of aliens are exploring in the cellar, one of them spins the wheel of an overturned bicycle, and all are startled when the bicycle falls, making for a moment of comic relief. There's more to it, though. The H.G.Wells book mentions that the aliens probably had no concept of the wheel, as not a single rotating part was found inside the captured tripods. So an upside-down bicycle must have puzzled them a great deal. See more...
War of the Worlds (2005) - 15 questions
Directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto, Tim Robbins, Tom Cruise (add more)
Genres: Action, Adventure, Sci-fi, Thriller
The "questions" section is for any random questions that occurred to you while watching this film, or anything you didn't entirely understand, and which Google or the IMDb can't help with. Submit them as a question, and hopefully someone will answer (the bold comments in brackets) - check back regularly. If the answer is wrong, or missing information, please use the "clarify answer" option. Don't feel limited - want to know what music played in a certain scene? Whether this was the first film to use a certain effect? Here's the place to ask!
Could anybody tell me the exact time and whereabouts on the screen Steven Spielberg appears?
Several other answers and corrections state that the reddish liquid sprayed by the tripods was what essentially grew the red vines. However I thought I heard someone in the film say something along the lines of "using us (i.e. blood) as fertiliser". Can someone please clarify? [Since the tripods tended to spray the red fluid shortly after pulling a human into themselves, it seems a good assumption that the red fluid is essentially blood. Given this, it seems likely that the "spore" of the vines is spread in the red fluid.]
Aside from puzzling the heck out of aliens who never invented the wheel, was the bicycle in the cellar bit perhaps a little directorial homage to ET? [This is probably a bit of a stretch. I have two old bicycles in my basement.]
Answered by wizard_of_gore
In the scene were Tom Cruise and co. are in the tripod's 'basket', a man is sucked up into the tripod and no-one does anything, but as soon as its Cruise's turn everyone grabs him to try and help, why? [As there is no audio commentaries its hard to know for sure why this is, but when the guy is sucked up the people in the basket are trying to get out and most are panicked. Add to that they weren't sure what was going to happen to the guy might have made them unsure of helping him out. The next time they would know what was going to happen and perhaps were now prepared to help.]
Answered by Lummie
How exactly were the birds involved in the death of the Tripods? [They were not involved as such, but the fact that they were able to land on the tripods told Ray that the shields were down and the tripods could be destroyed.]
Answered by Twotall
When Rachel is laying on the couch in Harlan's basement and Ray is holding her hand, she shows him a medal that she won. What did she win it for? [She was showing him a third place ribbon that she won at a horse show.]
At the end, a tripod collapses after behaving erratically for an hour, because the aliens inside were dead or dying. If so, wouldn't the tripod just stop moving and stand there because the aliens were too sick to operate it? [Depends on exactly how the disease affected the aliens. They might have entered a state of dementia and started piloting erratically, or even just have muscle spasms that knocked the controls around inside the cockpit.]
Answered by Gary O'Reilly
During the course of the film we see the "Tripods" spill out an orange colored liquid. What is that fluid supposed to be? [The reddish liquid is a defoliant that eradicates indigenous vegetation and reseeds the planet with alien plant life.]
Answered by raywest
Near the beginning of the movie during the lightning storm Ray says "wheres the thunder?", Isn't thunder just the sound lightning makes and if you were close enough to the lightning wouldn't the sound occur at the same time as the flash? [Precisely - Ray is seeing the lightning but there is no sound of thunder at all - there is also no sound of the thunder as the lightning is getting closer too, it's just the lightning itself and that 'whooshing' sound, but the sound doesn't sound like thunder.]
Before Tom Cruise is ushered into the tunnel in Boston, he tells the army man, "______ is the key." What does he say; what is the key? [He says "the shield is the key." He notices that there are birds perched on the alien machines and correctly deduces that the shield must not be functioning for the birds to be able to land.]
Answered by Guy Brigman
In the scene at the ruined house, what is Ray doing in the closed room while his daughter is closing her eyes and singing? [Tim Robbins was shouting quite loud (and losing his mind) and Ray did not want the aliens to discover their hiding place. He therefor had no choice but to kill (or possibly beat unconscious) Robbins in order to keep his daughter safe. Rachel was told to sing so she would not hear what her father was doing.]
Why did the aliens need the human blood, and why did they spread it around? Also, when Ray and Rachel are in Boston, he breaks a white thing off a statue. What was it? And why was it dying? [They didn't spread blood around. That was a red fluid seeding the planet with the red vine. The red vine was the first stage in making the Earth suitable for Martians. At the statue, Ferrier broke off a piece of the red vine - dead and brittle. It was the first clue that Martian life wouldn't survive on Earth.]
Why didn't the aliens take over earth for their own means millions of years earlier? And why send machines millions of years before any humans or life that could be considered a threat? [It's not known when the aliens sent the machines--the 'millions of years' comment was just one bystander's speculation. The machines could have been sent well after humans evolved and for whatever reason, the aliens did not journey to Earth until much later. Obviously, humans were never considered a threat--just an incovenience to be eradicated. Because we don't know who the aliens are or how their society and technology works, many questions will remain unanswered.]
Answered by raywest
What were the red vines for? [If my memory serves me correctly from the radio play and the musical (as well as other sources, although I've never read the book), the reason Mars is red is not from the "rust" that we accept now, but from red vegetation. The aliens came and brought this vegetation with them, perhaps to give the earth a more suitable atmosphere (for them).]
Answered by Gary O'Reilly
I was a little confused. Why did the aliens die? I know it had to do with micro organisms but the answer doesn't come clear to me. Can someone please explain this for me? [It's similar to how the Native Americans were decimated by smallpox and other diseases when America was colonised by Europe - They had never encountered that virus before, so they had no immunity to it whatsoever, and many of them died. The aliens would have no immunity to any diseases, or even a basic hereditary immunity to default earth viri. Basically they all caught some disease or other (maybe even a cold), and died because they had no immunity at all to it.]
Answered by Gary O'Reilly
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