War of the Worlds?

(preamble - I have no idea why watching this movie motivated me to do my first real full posting after my introduction, but I'm just going with the flow here)

There are 2 types of movies with aliens that are acceptable (I'm not counting movies that take place on other planets with other aliens, in this case it's hard to keep straight who really are the aliens in reference to the other beings in the movie, but these movies are not about mankind's alien encounters).

1) Aliens are friendly (ET) or at the most enigmatically harmless (Close Encounters of the Third Kind).
2) Aliens are powerful, mean, and in the end, get blown up by lots of firepower and the indomitable human spirit (Independence Day)

The way I see it, for an alien movie of type 2 to be a success, the atrocities performed by the invaders need to be counterbalanced by an appropriate amount of explosives and even the occasional one on one encounter where the human kills the alien, preferably with his fists or a lesser weapon like a leatherman. I will call this ratio the Independence Day ratio (or ID4r), as I believe it to be the greatest example of type 2 movies. We get the awesome display of Alien power, destroying countless cities in seconds and impervious to nuclear weapons. Then we get huge explosion of the mothership, followed by the knowledge that the aliens are now fucked and various scenes of alien ships going down. We even get will smith knocking an alien out then giving us the campy superhero quality line, "now that's what I call a close encounter". Roughly speaking, I believe for every 1,000 generic lives, or single main character life killed in a movie, we need at least 1 major alien ship blown up on screen, or one man-to-alien combat scene. Bigger ships cancel out larger amounts of life, as do combat scenes with cheesy lines (puns add another 1,000 generic lives to the total).

Now my whole investigation into movies of this sort was spawned by watching The War of the Worlds. The War of the Worlds had all the promise of an Independence day. Gigantic unstoppable alien machines vaporizing humans, sucking their blood and spraying it back are the perfect targets for a massive human uprising in the end. I knew this movie was not going to satisfy me when I realized the only guy willing to fight back was crazy ass Tim Robins with his shotgun and axe, and Tom Cruise goes and kills him. At the very least they could've had Tim go up against a "tripod", running balls to the wall with his shotgun in one hand and axe in the other, only to get flicked up and launched 50 feet into the air by one of the tentacle things. (and let's take a moment to to notice the name of the ships, "tripods". come on, that's what a japanese tourist uses to make sure he gets a steady photograph of the break dancers at the times square subway station) We get two ship explosions in the War of the Worlds, thats it, and one of them only after the aliens are enfeebled by the common cold and syphilis. Now, I like the story of the war of the worlds, H.G. wells created a wonderful story, and the message that in the end humanity was stronger than these aliens because we have inhabited the earth for so long (the ultimate home-field advantage) is quite interesting and even moving. BUT, if you're gonna make a blockbuster movie about it, you gotta change it around and blow more shit up this is not new for hollywood (think I, Robot) and I'm disappointed. This movie had an incredible amount of potential, and, like a high school girl on prom night, left me saying "what the hell was that?" (I find it odd that as I wrote that sentence the "girls gone wild" commercial just came on. In totally unrelated news, I have to go now and get my credit card...)

oh, one more thing, why the hell is the whole point of The War of the Worlds to get to Boston? That alone warrants an entire post.