Has garnered very unnecessary hate.

Rating: 8/10 (21 April 2008)

As an alien invasion film, it fails. I just couldn't really get on board with the fact that they went into their basement, fell asleep, woke up the next day and it was all over among other things. However, as a character story of a man regaining his faith, it succeeds quite well. I'm not a religious person by any means, but I admired it nonetheless. In some aspects I did really enjoy seeing an epic alien invasion as portrayed through the eyes of a simple family with no huge explosions or battles or anything like that. It made it much more suspenseful and terrifying knowing that if the aliens actually did get to them they wouldn't have a shot of fighting their way out. As Joaquin Phoenix's Merrill says "It's war of the worlds." but instead of epic shots of explosions and alien technology, we see the fear and hopelessness of a single family.
I love how slow-burning it was as well. It takes a while to get into the actual invasion, and all of the chaos on the news channels that we see just makes it a very exciting and suspenseful journey. I thought Shyamalan handled that very well. For instance, when Merrill sees the Brazilian video with the brief shot of one of the aliens, it shocked and intrigued myself just as it did him. However in bringing up the aliens, I have to say that they looked pretty ridiculous and just far too fake. It looked like something out of a playstation one game. I also wasn't too impressed by Shyamalan's attempts at humor in the film, aside from Joaquin Phoenix. It felt too cheesy and out of place. Some of the dialogue didn't go over so well with me, but most of it was good enough. Performance-wise, Phoenix is superb and Gibson falls pretty short for the most part. The kids are fine but nothing to write home about, and Shyamalan's brief appearance is laughable just like it is in all of his films.