Battle: Los Angeles

[Shroom Man 777]

Hmmm, true. It gives them less incentive to surrender, and more incentive to fight back and murder you in your sleep by sticking a sword in your face.

Turns out fat idiots have no idea about these things and just hurf and hurf to make their squishy fats sound tougher.

[PeZook]

I actually agree with Andro on his point about this particular situation: As far as we know, the population of Earth was being exterminated en masse ; Learning how to fight back was top priority, and justifications for employing the laws of war were simply not there. How were they even supposed to detain the alien, when they didn't know what it was capable of? Disarming it would've required chopping off a limp, for fuck's sake!

But yeah, applying the circumstances of an alien invasion to war in general is just inane. Better yet, pretty much everyone in history knew that, even the goddamned Mongols under Genghis Khan: if you surrendered, you were spared. If you didn't, you were brutalized.

Why? Because you want to ENCOURAGE THE ENEMY TO SURRENDER. If you kill prisoners (because hurf durf they cost resources), exterminate the population you occupy (because hurf durf they are in the way) etc. then prepare to fight every unit you face to the last man. Every civilian will fight or support the fighters, knowing they're dead otherwise. Your soldiers will be in hostile territorry 100% of the time, anywhere they go, whether or not it's their barracks, a foot patrol or a cafe. That makes things way, way harder, not easier.

And that is ignoring the fact wars don't happen in vacuum, and people are watching, and might decide to destroy you after seeing your rampage.

As illustrated by this:

Again, idealistic but not practical. What happens if the combatants start masquerading as civilians? How do you determine friend from foe? Best to shoot first, ask questions later.

And this

This assumes that the purpose of the warfare is not to wipe out the opposing side entirely. The only true peace would be the total elimination of one side (if you ask for my opinion). Any other peace runs the risk of a "resurgence" of conflict.

Andro does not understand these simple truths...

[Shroom Man 777]

I guess this is why the British annihilated all the Indians to colonize India, and why the Americans killed all of the Iraqis to achieve victory over Iraq. Winning hearts and minds and gaining local collaborators to aid you in occupation and conquest and so on is idealistic but impractical.

[NeoGoomba]

Did anyone else get the impression that the aliens were cobbling together their heavier equipment from materials they scavenged on Earth? They didn't have any air or mobile artillery units for a few hours as they advanced and made beachheads across the country, and what they eventually deployed on the battlefield looked like heaps of (albeit functional) garbage.

It was just a thought that struck me, since the longer the aliens were Earth-bound, the more their forces seemed to increase. I could be wrong, since they could have still been landing forces up to and after the "bomb drop" time and our POV just didn't show it.

[PeZook]

They did look like space hobos, but I seriously doubt they could cobble together dozens of UCAVs in a few hours, what with their advanced small thrusters and control systems not really being available near Los Angeles beaches

More likely, it just took some time for them to unpack, assemble and deploy the aircraft and their C&C.

[Sarevok]

I guess this is why the British annihilated all the Indians to colonize India, and why the Americans killed all of the Iraqis to achieve victory over Iraq. Winning hearts and minds and gaining local collaborators to aid you in occupation and conquest and so on is idealistic but impractical.

Well speaking of India the British could not have conquered the subcontinent without collaborators. Local political and military forces provided much of the manpower needed. Actual numbers of Europeans in combat were tiny. If they tried to ship soldiers from England to wage war they would have been utterly swamped.

India is a brilliant example of how winning hearts and minds and local help can let a small force gain control of a massive empire.

[Gil Hamilton]

The makers of the movie specificed they designed all the aliens equipment to look entirely function over form, which in their minds is "giant heaps of metal plates haphazardly arranged with wires and cables everywhere", even though that is a misunderstanding about what functional means.

[Simon_Jester]

I guess this is why the British annihilated all the Indians to colonize India, and why the Americans killed all of the Iraqis to achieve victory over Iraq. Winning hearts and minds and gaining local collaborators to aid you in occupation and conquest and so on is idealistic but impractical.

Well speaking of India the British could not have conquered the subcontinent without collaborators. Local political and military forces provided much of the manpower needed. Actual numbers of Europeans in combat were tiny. If they tried to ship soldiers from England to wage war they would have been utterly swamped.

India is a brilliant example of how winning hearts and minds and local help can let a small force gain control of a massive empire.

As I understand it:

In a lot of places I'd hesitate to even call it "collaboration," at least at first, because that implies a powerful occupying authority. At least until the Seven Years' War (1760s), the British weren't anywhere near powerful enough in India to operate on those terms. From the point of view of Indian states, the British were just offering them help against local rivals, dealing with them on roughly equal terms.

It wasn't until Clive that the consequences of this became clear- that by establishing themselves as a roughly equal local ally of potentates everywhere in India, the British had created a web of alliances and authority that made them far more powerful than any individual Indian political figure.

[Zinegata]

ok. I just finished watching the movie, and reading the thread.

No one's going to say anything about the marines basically vivisecting a prisoner of war? Really?

That was kind of a jarring moment for me, especially since no one says anything about it ever again, even the guy who want's to become a doctor. Hippocratic oath? What the hell is that?

The action scenes were good when the camera was steady enough to see what the fuck was going on, but every time someone started a long-winded speech about the U.S. marine corps I found myself rolling my eyes. A good popcorn flick if you turn your brain off, worth seeing at least once.

On another note, there's supposedly and XBOX live arcade game based on the movie, has anyone played it?

It was a little squeamish, but it's kinda hard to feel sorry for the aliens when they were mecilessly gunning down helpless beach-goers in the opening scenes of the invasion.

So can we go back to discussing what the movie is really good at - which is blowing shit up?

[Metahive]

Interesting to note, this movie is a reverse-Avatar (okay, Avatar was a reverse War of the Worlds) but the people who then argued that the RDA was fully justified to mistreat and exploit Pandora and its inhabitants for various imperialistic reasons are not making the same excuses for these invaders although they have more or less the same goals though they are also able to pursue them more ruthlessly. Hey, maybe they really need water to maintain their space-faring empire and their quality of life, that's good enough. Time to BDZ fucking humanity who's too primitive to even use its most abundant resource efficiently! That'll teach 'em to resist their superiors. Bring in the asteroids, gentlemen! At least those aliens had the goody sense of not putting glass canopies on their remote controlled drones, kudos!

Yes, I'm still bitter about that whole debate, sue me.

[Shroom Man 777]

At least those aliens had the goody sense of not putting glass canopies on their remote controlled drones, kudos!

But their stupid fucking spaceships had VTOL instead of taking off dirt runways like a MiG-15!

Yes, I'm still bitter about that whole debate, sue me.

Yes.

The aliens should've dropped a Tunguska at Los Angeles or just nuked America from orbit just to be sure.

[aieeegrunt]

Well played sir, well played.