Spielberg disappointed me. After giving some awesome movies like Schindler’s list, Jurassic Park, Independance Day and E.T – what went wrong with this one?
War of the Worlds is a bad movie. Spielberg, Tom Cruise, not even the smart and precocious looking Fanning girl could make this one watchable even once.
I have to wait for the movies to become a DVD for me to watch it – can’t coz of kids, time crunch, and the rest of the fancy stuff that binds us moms down to homes! neways, saw this title at the local Blockbuster and thought this would make a good Friday evening entertainment along with some Baja food. The kids wanted to watch Lord of the Rings and so I scooted upstairs on the pretext of putting the baby down, and settled in comfortably.
..and am waiting, and waiting – for emotion, for some nerve-racking action, suspense, and even some humor, or how about soem drama. Drama there was but the movies lacked a decent plot. Ok, so the aliens have been hatching a plot to exterminate us human beings by laying groundwork. They apparently have been sitting under our feet, buried in the soil, for hundreds of years even before men arrived, before men made roads , and built cutesy towns and cafes. Ok, that’s a wild one, but ok, let’s push our imagination far enough and continue. So what do these tripods do? Star firing and vaporising all humans, so much that they show you enough times sets of pants and shirts and willowy wisps of fabric floating in the air.
They keep attacking, guess they don’t have motion sensors, but can see through these tentacle-like thingies that scurry into every available basement ratting humans out. What crap is that?
Ok, let’s humor them – didn’t get why they suddenly got all erratic and stopped fighting. The voice-over at the end claims they couldn’t handle our air and atmosphere – huh?
Also, there’s this huge melodrama of Cruise to let go of his son – dad I have to do this – do what? watch armies fight the tripods up close, so you can smell the gumpowder, suddenly the responsible big bro is consumed with a passion to serve on the front-lines. Despite showing dialogs such as ” what are you doing eh? if you go away who is going to look after me?’ says the sister to the bro, with the poor dad on the side.
Spieleberg could have done better and am sure he knows it. He’s a genius and I admire his work, but this time it just didn’t come together.
Cruise is cute, and Dakota Fanning is quite mature for her age. Here’s a review in case anyone’s interested. There is a fair amount of nit-picking towards the end of the review. You can ignore them, coz those are just teeny compared to the higher level of details that the movie didn’t put forth.
