Blood spray, red weed, and thou

[Tripod Bait]

My wife and I were discussing the blood spray and the red weed last night. My personal feeling is that the spray was waste material, possibly even combined with seed/spore material - making it rather like the seed fertilizer mix that's used in landscaping. The first thing that brought me to this conclusion is the amount of spray seems disproportionate to the amount of blood drained from a single human. In the instances where Ray witnesses a man being killed from the window of the farm house, and when the random guy was pulled out of the basket both subsequent sprays contain a far greater volume of fluid than could have been drained. The color also seemed to be a little more orange and the fluid was more viscous than human blood (looking at the fluid that pours out of the downed tripod at the end of the film).

The aliens would logically need to deal with their own waste material as it builds up in the tripods. The waste chamber could only be so large, and therefore would need to be "flushed" periodically. An efficient way of dealing with this waste would be to use it as a vehicle to grow the red weed (which I'm presuming is somehow linked to their existence either as a source of oxygen production, waste absorption, atmosphere filtration... Or what have you).

...Just a thought.

[Lensman]

In Hammer's horror films from the '60s (for example) movie makers deliberately used fake blood that was rather orange because they didn't want too much realism; they wanted to limit the gruesomeness. Of course I don't know if that's why Spielberg made the "blood" look less like real blood than it could have been. But it's a possibility.

Like you, I found the sheer volume of "blood" thrown around to be rather over-the-top, both in the scene you mention and also at the end where it gushes out of the Tripod hatch. There are many descriptions in Wells' novel where the author clearly is trying to be as repulsive as possible in his description of the Martians. Perhaps Spielberg was trying to do the same in throwing around tons of blood. It does seem that Spielberg does try to re-create the *spirit* of the novel, without using the details, in several or many ways. Perhaps this is one of them. That's just speculation, of course... unless Spielberg addresses this point directly I don't think we will be able to give a definitive answer.

[redmag]

Im inclined to agree with Tripod Bait on this one. Watching the film I was also under the impression that most of blood being sprayed out from the tripods was waste mixed in with red weed seeds. It would make sense to use whatever materials you can get from your 'resources'. I think the aliens basically filtered all the blood and fluid from their victims and ran it all through a filter system and removed the good stuff and then collected the excess, mixed it with seeds, fertilizer and other chemicals and then dumped it. It fullfills 2 purposes - food and home world re-decorating.
Did anyone else think that perhaps the tripods themselves were partly organic? I got the impression that they also filtered and used the blood and perhaps this would affect the way they seemed to loose control too. Maybe I'm wrong but I think those tripods were sybiotic with their 'masters/pilots' and that the blood and desease effected both of them.

[Refugee]

The blood was disproportionate to the number of people we SAW get drained but I think their was a constant supply brought in, people being captured, survivors being picked up durring the advance, like a farm, possibly what they were up to over the hill where the army was holding them off.

Who say's these aliens excrete waste matter?

[RustiSwordz]

Like the end credits suggested: over a billion dead: thats a lot.

[BrutalDeluxe]

A very interesting theory. I think there must be some organic components to the tripod given the amount of orange goo that gushes out of them and the weird alien sphincter.