Posted on 07/06/2005 4:04:26 AM PDT by GermanBusiness
Was from 1956-1986. Now in Maine.
There's a reason the re-definition of words to mean something different or even the opposite of what common sense would dictate is such a prominent part of Orwell's 1984. He understood the left and their methods very well. H.G Wells was a liberal in the old sense, as are most people today who describe themselves as "conservatives".
LOL! You sure went from one extreme to the other!
I suspect that society melted into disorder so rapidly simply because there was no other choice. With no electricity, no information and those machines literally popping up everywhere, running was the only choice. It would have been nice to have a little narration (a la the 1953 film) to tell us how many machines there were - it seemed like there must have been hundreds in the US alone.
Militarily I doubt that there was much of a battle plan. Judging from the single engagement we saw ("No effect! No effect!") our end of the fight seemed to be mostly hit and run. I'll give Spielberg credit for this - he showed the military doing their duty heroically.
People did "clump together," they just did it on the road.
It's kind of hard to rediscover neighbors and community when a 100-ft Martian Machine is stomping both flat.
When the threat is advancing and unrelenting the only choice one usually has is to retreat, especially when the (earthly) military is powerless to stop it.
Apparently (and I wish this could have been revealed in the movie) the machines sprang up all over the world by the thousands. There was no front line to defend, and people were possibly being herded according to some plan.
Personally I wish the plot had paralleled the 1953 movie more closely, but that angle was covered in Independence Day.
People have to remember the movie wasn't about the aliens. It was about the characters and how they came to grip and survived the situation. Cruise's character being a jerk/wimp was able to come to a realization he had to get his daughter through the ordeal made it more realistic, more identifiable than if he was joe cool who had the situation under control.
"The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence."
Wells was really ahead of his time...
I find it hard to believe, even in New Jersey, that out of that whole herd of humanity, only Tom and one other guy had a gun.
If Spielberg's ETs had landed in Texas, they would have found a citizen army facing them.
Down here, if you don't have the firepower of a platoon... Well, you just ain't armed, pudnocker!
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