congratulations anonymous!

you get your own post in response to your comment!!! WHEEEEEEEEEEEE!





acutally - i understood the movie perfectly.

i didn't draw an iraq analogy because it is the "hip thing to do." i did it because i believe, after studying many sci-fi films, that each and every one of them is a reflection of how we as americans view "alien" threats and war. i understand that this is an adaptation of a piece of literature about alien invasion. the concept of alien invasion has been around... oh pretty much forever. often times humans create pretend situations to deal with their fears about real life. did you ever stop to think how ridiculous it is that some people are afraid of alien invasion when it is like a cajillion more times likely that we get nuked by someone across the pond (either of them)?

movies like this are an outlet for that fear. almost as if it is too terrible to think of the potential horrors in our everyday life, we watch horrific films to release some of that underlying tension. this is why the entertainment industry will never die. even in times of suffering, people love the movies.

in terms of "tons of blood," in the scene where lame-o tom cruise comes out from the farm house to find the landscape covered by alien god-knows-what, if i remember correctly, there is a pool of blood right by the house. you yourself said you didn't know why they were pulling people from out of the cage, i interpreted that they use humans (specifically their blood) as fuel. whether they fuel their machines or their red vines (again with the blood) is moot. the fact is, human blood is a facilitator of their existence while on the earth. and yes, in that case, it seems pretty dumb to kill all of us if they need us to thrive… another reason why they should have explored the aliens’ motivation.

given that the concept for this story isn’t new, what is new are the visuals (and awful, terrible dialogue). it is pretty naïve as a viewer to believe that filmmakers come up with most of the things we see from divine inspiration. they draw and expand on everyday imagery. there were some pretty literal scenes of war, complete with the american military in fatigues, in this film. although it may not be conscious, it is no mistake. this movie is playing on all our fears and comes complete with a late-teenage male risking his life to enlist and defend “us.” if you didn’t at some point think to yourself during the combat scenes, “i wonder if this is what it is like in iraq?” then “i’m not entirely we [sic] saw the same movie.” (how trite of you, btw.)