NASA's Mars rovers?

[dragon]

I wonder how the Paramount movie will deal with NASA's two Mars rovers? Perhaps the rovers will be sending back photos of Martian tripods rising from their subterranean lair about to destroy them and then the transmissions end, thus, NASA will be getting a photographic preview of what awaits earth.

[Tripod]

I've thought about that too. A cool idea would be send a Probe into a crater which explodes, then you see a big green flair spurting out of the explosion.
Ofcourse the Probes gets destroyed and only some of the last pictures arrive at NASA.

Tripod

[AmD]

I like the idea of them not explaining it.

I think the film should focus exclusively on Tom Cruise and his family. No cutting to outer space, no cutting to the white house or national monuments being blown up etc. etc.

I have fallen in love with the idea of the invasion coming completely out of no where. Imagine if the film opens with life as normal. Ray goes about his everyday life when all of a sudden things start to go seriously wrong... cars stop working, planes fall out of the sky and all electronic equipment goes bust. Then 'they’ arrive ;D (of course they may not use the EMP thing - but I think it s a nice idea)

However I trust Spielberg a great deal and I am sure that whatever he does he will do it well.

[Necronmaniac]

They may just assujme that in the world in which the film is set, therre WHERE no mars rovers, after all just cos its set in what looks to b modern day america doesnt mean the history has to be the same huh?

[Curate]

I'm hoping for a story purely focussing on normal people. No scenes set on Mars or in space, no scenes set at NASA control or in a military base... just everything seen through the eyes of regular people. Perhaps a brief news report about 'something' before the power is cut.
Although a comedy, the recent 'Shaun of the Dead' did this quite effectively.

[themotile]

Tim Robbins (Ogilvy) could drop some bits and pieces of info into a conversation like "I hear nasa's lost both the rovers transmissions..."

[Gnorn]

Has it even been comfirmed by Spielberg & Co. that the aliens are Martian? I mean, they can be from planet Xjoosmi for all I know...? An updated and adapted WotW could involve different aliens (you know, just like everything else is different).

-Gnorn

[themotile]

there is the red stop sign in space on the trailer, kind of gives it away, Cruise did confirm that 'the martians are scary as hell'

[Gnorn]

Ah, okie. I was just wondering. I'm not catching up as much on this version as I do on Mr. Hines' movie, which I'm more excited about.

-Gnorn

[Herulian Martian]

I think NASA would have been aware of the Martians, but would have kept most of the stuff under wraps. A few leaks like Cydonia City and other places would have been known about before the Martians invaded.

One question is what will happen after the War. Mankind will certainly be affected by the war. Martian tech will be unravelled and an eventual counterattack will be launched.

Perhaps probes will be sent in which thousands of mini-bomblets filled with recombinant bacteria will be sent. If the probes fire the bomblets from far enough away, the Martians will not be able to get every one of them. They might end whatever threat the Martians would ever have!

[malfunkshun]

all of this talk about somehow using modern Mars exploration to tie in to the movie, in my opinion, isn't really feasable. for instance... if the attack comes from Mars, then we have to assume that the Mars in the movie is very different from the Mars we know. the movie Mars is inhabited by an advanced race with superior technology; I would think that it would have been hard for humanity not to have noticed that Mars is a planet that supports life and harbors an advanced civilization. i find it extremely unlikely that the exploration of Mars, which, to the extent that it might or might not have taken place in the movie, would have progressed exactly as it has in reality. most likely, Mars would have been discovered to be a far more interesting place, since it would obviously have to have had an active biosphere to support life on it, which in turn would probably consist of a similar atmosphere to Earths in composition and thickness, with lots of vegetation (a la the red weed) and lots of standing water or oceans to support all of this life. the red weed is what gives Mars its color after all, according to the book, and it is also a voracious consumer of water, so there would have to have been a lot of water on Mars to support enough red weed to actually give the planet a red hue noticeable from Earth.

so, the exploration of Mars would probably have taken a much different path in the timeline of the movie, and the rovers, in that different timeline, most likely would not have ever been planned or built. who knows what kind of Mars exploration will have been done in the movie version of reality? in my opinion, it would have been vastly different than what has actually happened, with the Mars of War of the Worlds being such a different planet. it will be interesting if Spielberg considers this at all if he decides to implement any type of 'mars probe' idea into the movie.

[Herulian Martian]

So you think before the War, mankind would have know that Mars was inhabited as well as being able to support life? Also, some of our history would me much the same including some Mars probes. Man in 2005 would not be ignorant of the surface features of Mars, even in the movie. Also, Mars would most likely have an above-ground civilization, so NASA would see some of it...in the form of the Face and Cydonia city (as I have mentioned before...sorry!)

[malfunkshun]

XuxaTheWhite said:

So you think before the War, mankind would have know that Mars was inhabited as well as being able to support life? Also, some of our history would me much the same including some Mars probes. Man in 2005 would not be ignorant of the surface features of Mars, even in the movie. Also, Mars would most likely have an above-ground civilization, so NASA would see some of it...in the form of the Face and Cydonia city (as I have mentioned before...sorry!)

well of course, just by measuring its spectral emission would have revealed a high presence of oxygen in its atmosphere; the observation technology to do this has been available for a long time. the mariner probes of 1964, assuming that the timeline in War of the Worlds at least sent some similar probes, took detailed photos of Mars up close and measured its atmosphere. enough data would have been gathered about Mars in the movie for scientists to easily deduce that there was life there, and you would think that an advanced civiliation would have been easily detectable.

[themotile]

The martians lived underground, living off the blood of small humanoids who inturn may have lived off some kind of plant life grown in some vast caves, maybe even the red weed? As the core cooled it also lost its spin and so lost its protective magnetic field, the solar winds burned off the atmosphere and scoured the planet of surface life, any intelegent life would have moved underground, they may have left great citys bahind but on Mars there are windstorms thousands of times worse than ours which would erase any trace of a civilisation, so it is plausable that before, during and after the invasion the rover still went about their buisness sending back the same dead images and results about dead martian soil. Think of this, if some aliens droped a probe into the middle of a vast desert on Earth how would they find out about a shuttle launch or a middle east skirmish, would they not just see sand?

[Herulian Martian]

True! But Earthprobes have become more and more sophisticated and would have dectected underground civilizations via senses other than visible light. We have IR scanners that would pick up telltale signs alla Phobos 2 of the Russians. Phobos 2 found a huge city underground at Hydraotes Chaos! Also, everthing else being equal, there would be Cydonia City and the Face. Also, if conditions were beginning to get bad, maybe the Martians would be so technologically advanced by now that they would not need to conquer another world. They could get all they need from the Polar caps and asteroids. If they were not advanced enough for that, then perhaps Mar's surface biosphere is still viable, but creaky. Then they might find a need to invade Earth, even if it means them tasting our really advanced weaponry!

[themotile]

Advanced weaponry? The martians are like a million years ahead of us I dont think our sticks and stones will bother them too much, as for finding them, just because we may be able to doesn't mean we did.

[Herulian Martian]

A few hundred years advanced, perhaps...and if they do fail, somehow, in their endeavor of taking Earth, we will have their tech to unravel...and they might eventually go the way of the dodo and the brontosaurus. One potentially fatal flaw of the Martians is that they may not consider the fact that they may lose the war...

[themotile]

Actualy it is millions, Wells compares us as being like the things that swarm and multiply in a drop of water compared to the martians and they have lived out the entire life of their planet, they have studied us closely and slowly but surely, they drew their plans against us.

[malfunkshun]

the said:

The martians lived underground, living off the blood of small humanoids who inturn may have lived off some kind of plant life grown in some vast caves, maybe even the red weed? As the core cooled it also lost its spin and so lost its protective magnetic field, the solar winds burned off the atmosphere and scoured the planet of surface life, any intelegent life would have moved underground, they may have left great citys bahind but on Mars there are windstorms thousands of times worse than ours which would erase any trace of a civilisation, so it is plausable that before, during and after the invasion the rover still went about their buisness sending back the same dead images and results about dead martian soil. Think of this, if some aliens droped a probe into the middle of a vast desert on Earth how would they find out about a shuttle launch or a middle east skirmish, would they not just see sand?

I don't recall Wells ever saying that the Martians lived underground. in Wells' short story "The Crystal Egg", he describes Mars as populated by the 'brain body' martians with tentacles and large eyes, along with other types of Martian creatures, and he describes machines which resemble handling machines or fighting machines walking about on the surface. He also describes a city, with lots of buildings and vegetation, and artificial canals... surely suggestive of a Mars which supports a thriving civilization on its surface.

some people may not think that "The Crystal Egg" is a qualifier for what Mars was like right before the invasion, but if you have read the story, it is impossible to ignore the obvious and deliberate tie in to The War of the Worlds.

so with that being said, if the Martians had that level of civilization existing on the surface, then it would have been glaringly obvious to any space probe launched by us, once it came within range to take high resolution photographs of the surface, that Mars was inhabited by diverse flora and fauna, with an advanced civilization which had developed the surface extensively with Martian cities, canals, and the usual 'walking vehicles'.

[themotile]

Yeah I know wells never said any of that in War of the Worlds, I have read the book dozens of times over the past twenty years, I was trying to fit a theory into the context of the conversation, the martian rovers and why we didnt notice the martians before, underground seems the more likely, although the crystal egg was the precurser to War, it was however a different story.