Films: War of the Worlds (2005)

Alias: Tripods

Type: Alien

Location: Civilized Area

Height/Weight: Slightly larger than that of average humans. The tripods are as big as large buildings.

Affiliation: Evil

Summary: Adaptations of H.G. Wells' acclaimed novel about alien invaders never seems to stop getting adaptations, be it scary radio story or silver screen effects-fest. Well, now Stephen Spielberg is taking a jab at it, and needless to say...we're impressed.

History: Millions of years before mankind even existed, the Martian empire had its sights on our world. Their goal? To rid it of any irritating life forms and terraform the planet to something more of their liking with an organism known as the Red Weed. Being rather patient, they waited until the modern day to travel back to Earth via lightning strikes, and reactivated their Tripod war machines. And despite eons of dormancy, they proved to be utterly superior to whatever we had to fight back. Humanity is looking rather doomed...

Notable Kills: The secret ingredient of Red Weed is human blood. Guess how the tripods extract it...

Final Fate: Just when the aliens seem to have the drop on us all, they are all brought down by earthbound illness. It seems that the Martians were destined to fail due to how we coexisted with nature's creations, and they just didn't. That's harmony for you, ya conquering bastards!

Powers/Abilities: The Martians themselves seem to be able to travel through electricity, if their method of getting back here was any indication. Their Tripods also have force fields, disintegrator guns, tentacle probes, and injectors to ensure that the Red Weed spreads.

Weakness: Anything conventional, though they also have had no concept of vaccines.

Scariness Factor: 4.5-Sure, the weaksauce weakness remains, but these might be the most twistedly powerful Martians to date. The Martians themselves are a far cry from their 1954 counterparts, looking unnatural and ghoulish, if not just a bit adorable. Just a bit. The same can not be said for their Tripods. Gigantic, imposing machines that let out a horrible foghorn-like noise when they're about to destroy everything. Also, Red Weed. Just...Red Weed.

Trivia: -This is actually the first film adaptation of the novel to use the Red Weed that was present in the original story. It is often believed to symbolize how colonists introduced invasive species/diseases to foreign environments, and destroyed them as a result.

-Originally, J. J. Abrams was approached for this film's script, but he was too busy working on "Lost" for the first time. The amount of hypothetical lens flares and confusing plotlines his draft could have included is no small number.