Trivia / War of the Worlds (2005)

• Backed by the Pentagon: The film included military units from the US Army and Marine Corps.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Those who criticize plot points that are faithful to the source material, particularly the "cop-out" ending of the aliens being defeated by common illnesses that are merely an inconvenience to us, demonstrating that they never read the original book by H. G. Wells.
• Creator Backlash: Downplayed. While Spielberg liked the film, he admitted he was disturbed by how dark it was.
• Missing Trailer Scene:
  • The neighborhood scene from the first trailer is never shown.
  • Rachel's line, "Am I ever going to see Mom again in my life?" was cut.
  • A scene between the ferry attack and the hilltop battle showed the family walking through an abandoned Massachusetts neighborhood and having a close encounter with a tripod.
• Playing Against Type: Steven Spielberg is no stranger to films about aliens coming on Earth with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. But this time, the aliens are not benevolent and it's a disaster film.
• Reality Subtext: This film came out less than two years after the 2003 Northeast blackout and the prelude to the aliens' initial attack is very reminiscent of it, minus the lightning strikes.
• Referenced by...:
  • LEGO Alien Conquest has a nearly 1:1 copy of the Harvester Tripod, a betentacled jail cell on legs that captures people as Human Resources.
  • Scary Movie 4 prominently parodies this adaption of War of the Worlds right up to utilizing the same Plymouth Voyager that was used in filming.
• Saved from Development Hell: Spielberg hoped to make this film in the 1990s, but the success of Independence Day, which follows much of the same plot as the book, made him push it back for nearly a decade.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise approached J. J. Abrams to write the script. He declined, as he was busy working on the pilot for Lost.
  • In the final scene with the Tripods, the last Tripod shown on screen was supposed to be on the verge of collapsing on its own. Due to input from the US military the scene was rewritten to portray the tripod as mostly functional aside from its shields, presumably to portray the troops in a more heroic light for bringing it down (though in the final film the Tripod is still clearly unstable, moving unsteadily, and its lights flickering) . This change contrasted the film's overall ambiguity as to what the aliens are supposed to represent- the terrorists, the American military, or both.
• Written-In Infirmity: Miranda Otto was pregnant when Steven Spielberg cast her as Ray's ex-wife and was afraid of losing the role, but Spielberg rewrote the character to include her pregnancy.

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