FAQ

Might have been to rub it in Ray's face that he's a Boston fan now. Often, people wearing baseball hat will wear them backwards when indoors, as they don't need the brim to keep sunlight out of their eyes. So he may have also flipped it around because he was going inside.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).