Natasha suggests that the alien invaders in War of the Worlds are pretty stupid:

You’ve had a million years (or even tens of thousands) to plan the invasion of a planet, and not only do you wait as an established civilization grows up, but you neglect to do even minimal epidemiological surveys? In all that time, you don’t send one bloody probe to take air and soil samples, culture the results and maybe experiment with some of the lifeforms on your planet to see if there’s anything to be worried about?
It’s almost as blitheringly stupid as planning to re-invade a middle eastern country for over a decade, ignoring every well-founded opinion on how things will probably go once you get the opportunity, and creating conditions that ensure you can’t call for backup if the things people said would go wrong, go wrong. But not quite. There’s a lot of recent and well-documented history describing the outcome of land wars in Asia, whereas the movie aliens were clearly invading an inhabited planet for the very first time, so there’s an excusable learning curve to go through.

This might be stronger than some of the other 9/11 comparisons I’ve seen over the past week.
Well, the Modulators are on there way to turn off their brains, enjoy the movie and then turn their brains back on to watch some fireworks.
Happy 4th!
Update: Movie Review courtesy of Mrs Modulator: “That Sucked!” I’m not about to argue with her. If you are human you can not turn off enough brain cells or suspend enough disbelief to make War of the Worlds a good movie.
As to the current event analogies: Spielberg stuck some hooks in the movie to try snag folks but it was too obvious to be meaningful.
How about this for another variant, one for the 4th of July: If you infect it with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness the slimy red tendrils of government will wither and die.