10 Heroic Movie Characters Who Actually Didn't Affect The Plot

3. Tom Cruise/The Army €“ War Of The Worlds

No matter how the events of War Of The Worlds played out, the finale would have been exactly the same.

No amount of human resistance, or insurrection lead by Tom Cruise's unwillingness to be eaten and turned into fertilizer would have changed the fact that the aliens who invade Earth are horribly unsuited to the planet they have chosen to take over for some reason. Surely that sort of mass-scale military operation would have demanded a considerable planning stage in which the terrain, natives and atmosphere were rigorously examined without any short-cuts to determine that a presumably multi-million alien dollar costing operation wasn't a complete waste.

Well, apparently not.

At the end of the film, the aliens died thanks to their remarkably short-sighted pre-invasion planning, sneezing themselves to spectacular death. Apparently movie aliens really aren't as smart as they seem to think they are.

Despite the fact that he is presented as the hero, Tom Cruise manages to do nothing that affects the overall outcome of the doomed invasion. Had he been killed in the first seconds, the world would still have been saved from long-term harm, and all of the people who died, would still have died.