With the advancement in tech , it should be easy to bait them and kill them since a shotgun can take one down at the end of the movie. Drop an atomic bomb somewhere remote then when all of them gather there drop another one and kill of of them ezpz.
Still I guess its not as far-fatched as slow moving zombies causing apocalypse lol
The backstory for this movie involves an asteroid impact in Mexico, the asteroid being a fragment of a destroyed extrasolar planet. The aliens are armored in material harder than diamond that makes them almost indestructible unless they open themselves up - as the painful high pitched sound made them do. These creatures survived in hibernation for possibly millions of years and were barely fazed by the trip through our atmosphere and subsequent explosion of the rock that carried them. They are extremely tough. A nuke would kill them but probably only in the primary blast zone (the diameter of the crater) where temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees are sufficient to vaporize any solid matter. Being hurled into the air and coming down a mile or two away would be easily survivable for these things.
Remember how that one in the grain silo sliced through a thick steel door with its talons like it was paper? Remember how fast they move? Imagine a thousand of them swarming a division of soldiers, ripping tanks open like cans and tearing the crews apart, while hits from bullets and helicopter fired missiles did little more than piss them off. Why the military wouldn't have tried using sound as a weapon against creatures with super-acute hearing is a good question. I expect they would. It's a logical thing to try once you've determined that sound is how they hunt. And who knows, maybe civilization hasn't fallen everywhere. This family never traveled far because of the danger. We may see more of their world in the sequel and get a better picture of the overall situation.
According to the film's creator the aliens are sentient, but were still pretechnological when their world perished. So they have no understanding of science and technology but are very smart, speak a fully articulated language, cooperate, and pass information to others of their kind. According to the interview I read the father, before he died, was listening to their vocalizations and trying to decipher them. Perhaps for a later attempt at communication. That has plot potential if it's handled right.
Great answer.
Some people can't seem to get their heads around the concept that armies of super-fast (easily able outrun a human), super-strong (can shred steel with their talons), nearly invulnerable (harder than diamond armour), intelligent creatures (able to coordinate, search and sweep areas), attacking by surprise, would quickly overwhelm conventional human ground forces and be too quick for air forces.
We saw that the aliens were sensitive to sound and could be discomforted by it (as the humans were aware), but we can assume that nobody had stumbled upon that one lethal frequency (that the father only discovered via a fluke).
well the newspapers indicated that they had figured out sound is the key so they should have already adapted their strategy to combat those creatures. Sound proof all their operations and working out ways to defeat them would be the next course of action.
shareSoundproofing a house under those circumstances would be fraught with difficulties. You'd have to find a store or warehouse somewhere with a large stock of acoustic tiling. That might mean traveling hundreds of miles. Then you have to come up with a way to transport enough for your home (or at least certain areas of it) back with you, quietly. Even a group of people going back and forth with backpacks would have to carefully pack them with towels or bubble wrap or whatever, to avoid the tiles shifting around as they walked and sounding the dinner bell for the creatures.
Then once you finally had enough (after who knows how long) you'd have to install them, also quietly. The most silent way would be adhesive. Nailing them up would be suicide of course. Screwing them into place would probably be the best option. You'd have to work slowly and carefully to avoid making any noise at all but you wouldn't need a large amount of glue along with your tiles. Glue that would also have to be brought to your home from somewhere else.
The good news is, any hobbyist with access to components - which can be obtained by disassembling common consumer electronics - could work on sonic weaponry to use against the creatures. The father in this movie seemed to have all the necessary skills. Needless to say you'd require good soundproofing in your "lab" to do that work.
Almost all Sci Fi gets the science wrong! Monsters are usually supernatural.
Diamonds can easily broken with a hammer. All materials will melt with a torch or IR laser. A shaped charge of hi explosive will shatter all known materials.
Flawed diamonds I assume you mean. Solid plates of nearly flawless (or monocrystalline) diamond would be impossible to break with a hammer. And this armor would have to be a lot stronger to survive riding a kinetic projectile as it slices through the atmosphere and slams into the ground. Various forms of carbon fiber or nanotube composite could theoretically achieve the necessary strength and be reasonably lightweight. Remember how quickly they came running to grab the little boy and the old man in the woods? They can move pretty damn fast. Their attack is like facing a pack of starving wolves. Wolves bigger than a man, possibly as smart, with bulletproof armor plating, claws and teeth that can cut steel.
If you somehow managed to sedate them, yeah - you could use a cutting torch or laser on their armor and penetrate it. But the conscious creatures aren't going to stand still and let you do that, or slap a Claymore on them. Lucky missile hits or artillery shells that detonated in direct contact with one of the aliens would likely kill them. The question in an all-out melee is, can you kill enough of them before they tear your men and equipment to shreds? Nuclear weapons could take out a whole bunch of them at once. But they'd have to concentrate in one spot to make that effective, a mistake they're smart enough not to keep making over and over. And how many nukes are you going to drop on your own territory?
I find it hard to believe the military wouldn't have come up with the idea of trying sound as weapon. Terrestrial animals with "super hearing" usually are vulnerable, by virtue of that very ability, to high volume high frequency sound. Having the deaf girl discover that the implant her dad tinkered with is capable of hurting the aliens so they open up is just a dramatic plot device. I thought this movie was well done overall. Not everything is totally plausible, but no lapses I'd consider unforgivable. :)
>The backstory for this movie
Is never provided for us.
>The aliens are armored in material harder than diamond that makes them almost indestructible
actually we have bullets that can shatter diamonds and diamond armour would actually be horrible idea.
>nless they open themselves up - as the painful high pitched sound made them do.
they opened themselves up before that too actually.
>A nuke would kill them but probably only in the primary blast zone (the diameter of the crater) where temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees are sufficient to vaporize any solid matter.
actually the worst temperatures are outside of the crater. But yes, people highly overrate the actual power of nuclear weapons. Instead we can use things like bunker buster ammo that could easily go straight through a diamond the size of that monster.
>Remember how that one in the grain silo sliced through a thick steel door with its talons like it was paper?
and the completely failed to even break a window of a pickup truck. The silo walls are not strong btw. its usually cheap metal.
>Imagine a thousand of them swarming a division of soldiers, ripping tanks open like cans and tearing the crews apart, while hits from bullets and helicopter fired missiles did little more than piss them off.
Hahahaha. These things could not even damage light armored vehicles, let alone tanks.
>This family never traveled far because of the danger.
this family has attmepted to contact all countries through shortwave radio, as was shown. No response.
>According to the film's creator the aliens are sentient, but were still pretechnological when their world perished. So they have no understanding of science and technology but are very smart, speak a fully articulated language, cooperate, and pass information to others of their kind
then the film's creator has completely and utterly failed to display this.
> then the film's creator has completely and utterly failed to display this.
Actually the father in this movie (who is also the writer and producer, playing opposite his real life spouse) has given interviews where he discussed these things. That's where I got it from. We see only a few bits in newspaper clippings because he took a fog of war approach to the backstory. The audience only knows as much as this family knows.
> and the completely failed to even break a window of a pickup truck.
Remember that the aliens can't see the way we do. They don't see a vulnerable piece of glass, it's just part of the car's surface. For some reason they seem to prefer climbing and attacking from above when faced with a tough nut. They do it a number of times. Instinctual perhaps, based on the prey they evolved hunting?
> this family has attempted to contact all countries through shortwave radio, as was shown. No response.
The fact that shortwave bands where you get skip off the ionosphere are empty doesn't mean much. Twenty or thirty years ago there were a lot more people dabbling in ham radio, now most communication is shorter range.
If there are intact cities (some people were bound to figure out the sound trick and rig perimeters to keep the monsters away) they may have a few shortwave rigs functioning. But you'd either have to be listening to their frequency when they were transmitting, or they'd have to be listening to yours while you were. Throw in any element of human-on-human competition for resources and most people would be listening a lot more than sending.
> Instead we can use things like bunker buster ammo that could easily go straight through a diamond the size of that monster.
He never said the armor was actually made from diamond. In fact he said it was a lot harder, and less brittle. The creatures' talons are also made from this material and are about as close to monomolecular edged as you can get.
>Actually the father in this movie (who is also the writer and producer, playing opposite his real life spouse) has given interviews where he discussed these things. That's where I got it from. We see only a few bits in newspaper clippings because he took a fog of war approach to the backstory. The audience only knows as much as this family knows.
I know, hence why i said the movie failed to display this. You need an interview with the author to find out the creatures are completely different than what they are displayed in the movie. This is poor writing.
>Remember that the aliens can't see the way we do. They don't see a vulnerable piece of glass, it's just part of the car's surface. For some reason they seem to prefer climbing and attacking from above when faced with a tough nut. They do it a number of times. Instinctual perhaps, based on the prey they evolved hunting?
Nevertheless, they failed to break through the window when hitting it directly. If that is their usual tactic then it is easily countered.
>The fact that shortwave bands where you get skip off the ionosphere are empty doesn't mean much.
Theres actually still a lot of shortwave used, especially in cases of emergency due to broadcast distance. He went through the list of frequencies for all cities that are standartized as we were shown. While its certianly possible he has missed some due to timing, he couldnt have missed everyone.
> In fact he said it was a lot harder, and less brittle. The creatures' talons are also made from this material and are about as close to monomolecular edged as you can get.
nonexistent materials aside, you cant have harder and less brittle at the same time. Also if these talons were anywhere close to monomolecular edged they would not be able to touch anything with them as it would just slice through it. Once again not only none of this was displayed in the movie but it displayed the opposite.
> I know, hence why i said the movie failed to display this. You need an interview with the author to find out the creatures are completely different than what they are displayed in the movie. This is poor writing.
Definitely agree they should've provided more backstory. From what he said in the interview, plus the newspaper snippets we see on the wall, the family would've known these things were extraterrestrial. He also said the father (his character) was recording the aliens' vocalizations in hopes of communicating with them. Now that would've been an interesting plot thread, I don't know why he left it out.
> Theres actually still a lot of shortwave used, especially in cases of emergency due to broadcast distance. He went through the list of frequencies for all cities that are standartized as we were shown. While its certianly possible he has missed some due to timing, he couldnt have missed everyone.
In the aftermath of an apocalyptic disaster a lot of equipment would be destroyed. Or the people in possession of it might not have a reliable source of power. And like I said, if hostile groups of humans were out there in addition to the creatures anyone with a radio would be very careful about transmitting.
> nonexistent materials aside, you cant have harder and less brittle at the same time. Also if these talons were anywhere close to monomolecular edged they would not be able to touch anything with them as it would just slice through it. Once again not only none of this was displayed in the movie but it displayed the opposite.
Porcelain is hard but brittle. Steel is harder and not so brittle. Known carbon composites can be ten times harder than steel, even less brittle, and lighter too. As far as the sharpness of the talons though, you're right - the movie wasn't consistent there. Sometimes they sliced through things like warm butter and other times barely left a scratch.
I seem to keep running into character limit...
>In the aftermath of an apocalyptic disaster a lot of equipment would be destroyed.
There wasnt that much of an apocalypse there, at least the surrounding area including the town does not seem to have any damage to it. The monsters overran the army, sure, they didnt irradiate the land or released toxic gas though. If anything, given that most humans are supposedly hunted-out, there would be more equipment than people to use it. The movie made a point of showing the farm used solar panels for power. There would be plenty of places where that would be done. In a situation of societal collapse solar would be a very good option because its low maintenance and you dont need to understand it to use it, whereas combustion based generators would be only a short term solution since petrol goes bad in a few years even if kept properly sealed.
>Porcelain is hard but brittle. Steel is harder and not so brittle. Known carbon composites can be ten times harder than steel, even less brittle, and lighter too. As far as the sharpness of the talons though, you're right - the movie wasn't consistent there. Sometimes they sliced through things like warm butter and other times barely left a scratch.
Steel is actually less hard than porcelain. Hardness of alumina ceramics is nearly three times that of stainless steel; silicon carbide is more than four times harder than stainless steel. Notice how we have no porcelain covered tanks, yeah? They are hard, but they are brittle. Steel bends before breaking and this is why its better for the purpose. We do have ceramic bulletproof vests. They break when they get hit. the breaking absorbs the impact and the person does not get hurt. It doesnt work twice in the same spot though (its why dragonscale design is considered the most efficient, you have multiple layers to break).
Gasoline powered generators would be a poor solution. Even the quietest ones make noise. And the fuel is an extremely limited resource, given that you can't use motor vehicles to transport it from somewhere else. Radios would only be transmitting from places that had the equipment, the power, and either soundproofing or a secure perimeter as I described in a previous post. Meaning they discovered the right sound frequencies and rigged shriekers to motion sensors so the creatures would trip them if they got too close. Those who aren't in a position to speak out loud will be receive-only. So will those who might otherwise be talking, if things evolved in the direction of it being a bad idea for people who have stuff (i.e. food and other supplies in quantity) to let other groups of humans know where they are.
My main point in discussing materials was that you can have something that's simultaneously very hard and not brittle. Assume the aliens' bodies are armored in some variant on carbon fiber composite, or a material of even more extreme durability. They spent probably millions of years in cryogenic suspension in space, then endured a trip through the atmosphere inside an asteroid, then survived the impact and were scattered over a wide area instead of being vaporized. They would have to be much, much tougher than any terrestrial life form - living or extinct. To the point of being implausibly tough.
Even if you were wearing a suit of armor that could withstand the direct impact of a naval artillery shell, the kinetic energy transfer when your body went flying would puree your guts inside the super-suit. Extracting what's left of you would be ... unpleasant, for whoever had to do it. The aliens' internal anatomy would need to be almost as tough as their armor for them to survive a meteorite impact riding ON the impactor. Even the weakest parts would have to be that strong. Which would mean shooting them when they opened up wouldn't kill them. Oh well. It's a movie. A little suspension of disbelief is required.
Yeah, the character limit is a pain in the aѕѕ.
Yeah i didnt mean gasoline generators for that situation but in general post-collapse survival. Like the farm in this movie (and a few other movies are starting to pick up the idea) the most likely power source would be solar panels, as they are low maintenance, does not requires specific knowledge to install beyond basic electronics and will produce enough for the low power use requirements when you dont have to worry about things like AC or computers.
There is actually a known radio signal when you cannot speak out loud often used by military nowadays. You dont speak. you just open your channel and close it. The others hear that, but you make no noise yourself. There have even been some attempts to transmit morse code messages this way when you are unable to speak for whatever reason. The mere fact of doing this would be enough to alert the other end that you are in fact present though and that would be a good start.
>you can have something that's simultaneously very hard and not brittle
Well, no, you cant, actually. Unless aliens are from universe with different physics.
Then again the film fails to tell us even that they are aliens so who the fuck knows.
Actually when it comes to meteorite impacts its very interesting in how they land. The enviromental pressure forces them to literally explode before they reach the ground. They also have parts fall off and slow down at significant difference as well as burnouts (that people often mistake for "lights following the object", cue alien theories). I got lucky to speak with a meteorite scientist last year and it turns out they fall very differently than what i imagined. The largest impact happens when they hit lower atmosphere, not when they hit the ground.
But yes, to survive that impact with just your body, you cannot be organic.
>A little suspension of disbelief is required.
I would prefer better writing.
>you can have something that's simultaneously very hard and not brittle
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*Well, no, you cant, actually. Unless aliens are from universe with different physics.*
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I realize I'm late to the party, but: how about Amorphous fused silica?
Not everything about this movie is believable. Surprise, it's not a documentary! Like I said before, I find it hard to swallow that the military wouldn't have tried using sound as a weapon. If you look at animals like dogs that have super-sensitive hearing they tend to be vulnerable to high volume, high frequency noise. It hurts like hell. Turn their strength into a weakness. And the aliens do open up a little sometimes when hunting, they know their prey is in the area and need a little extra sensitivity. A sharpshooter (with a silenced weapon!) could put a bullet in their head when they do that. Or someone about to be eaten could feed them a little lead surprise when they open their mouth.
You'd expect the countryside to be crawling with special ops teams equipped with sonic lures and weapons, hunting the hunters. There are directional mines that could probably penetrate even the thick armor of the monsters. A complement to their marksmen. Cheyenne Mountain and other such bunker facilities would still be up and running, in communication with their counterparts here and overseas. They'd be doing research to try and find chemical or biological agents that killed the aliens - and being from a different biosphere increases the odds you could find something lethal to them but harmless to other life (including humans). Those are just a few of the reasons we'd have the advantage against such creatures.
Another thing I don't get. What's with the whole walking barefoot thing? Sneakers are actually quieter on most surfaces - and protect against stepping on sharp objects.
I didnt ask for documentary. I asked the movie to have competent writing. If you are making an alien threat then a) actually let us know its alien and b) make it credible. The way these things were displayed they would be less of a threat than human insurgents to an actual military force.
Yes, the barefoot thing was silly, but i guess at least they got to make nice sand roads so who cares about the logic? :D
I get why you don't see the invasion in the original movie, to make for the economy in the storytelling. But, I want to see it anyway! It looks like we might get to in the sequel coming up.
shareYeah, it was to keep the plot tight - and of course the budget under control. The trailers seem to show the beginning of the invasion, so I'm guessing the success of the first one has gotten John Krasinski a much higher budget for the second.
He revealed a lot about the aliens in interviews and I found myself wishing a little of that had made it into the original film. For instance the fact that they're sentient but pre-technological is pretty important. He even said the father was recording their vocalizations hoping to eventually attempt communication. Another significant factoid they didn't mention (or was cut out). Apparently the creatures were originally subterranean and lived in pitch darkness. Their lack of sight makes sense in that context, animals on Earth which live in deep caves often have no eyes. We didn't really need to know any of that watching the movie. It just would've satisfied our curiosity.
I get what you're saying, but take a step back: That's not the story he's telling. You can want to know more about the backstory of Anything in a work of fiction. . .that doesn't mean it's a weakness in the narrative.
Just sayin'.
What bothered me at the end was why didn't others figure out their amplified feedback as their weakness? It's similar to the Mars Attacks card/comic story. We all hate that feedback, too. Maybe fingernails scratching a blackboard bothers them, as well. Maybe some music will put them to sleep. While others will make them go crazy like someone blasting their car stereo too loud.
shareSuch a retard with your atomic bomb solution. Sounds like something a child would come up with.
sharejust a half baked suggestion, it does feel like they didnt try anything or have even any idea to fight back, so wats your brilliant ideas then?
shareLiquidOcelot are you seriously calling someone names and then saying they are not smart? That is hilarious.
shareWhen you've got parents being stupid enough to let their youngest offspring walk well behind them out of their view, in a world as precariously dangerous as this one, then it isn't that hard to believe they wipe out humanity. I mean you wouldn't even do that with your young son in a park under normal circumstances, would you?
shareBasically, the way "The Swarm" (1978) ended: Lure the bees into a large oil slick in the ocean. Then, fire missiles at them, killing the swarm.
Yeah, you would think that someone would at least have killed off a whole bunch of the aliens using the method you described.
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shareIt’s a pretty fuckin stupid concept honestly. A fleet of Apache helicopters would shred these things. Also AC-130 gunships.
share