I liked the ending....but not too much more

Rating: 4/10 (20 June 2011)

What I learned from this movie: 1. If you're the wife/mother major male characters you're doomed to an early, messy death, but it will happen off-screen the day before the story starts. 2. The state of Ohio will hire someone with a dishonorable discharge from the Air Force for a teaching job in a nice little town. 3. A man can drive his truck down the railroad track and deliberately have a head-on collision with a train and survive, and be conscious and able to talk afterward. 4. I'm concerned about the safety of my town as a train carrying a monster will be coming through. Therefore, I'll go downtown to the train station and derail the train right there instead of letting it be derailed somewhere nobody cares about (New Jersey?). 5. Children and important characters cannot die. Death is only for peripheral or unsympathetic characters who do not see the error of their ways. 6. A town can, after a cataclysmic explosion, be isolated from the outside world. In return, the outside world will take no notice of this as none of these people have friends or relatives outside of this one tiny town in Ohio. 7. A character played by Noah Emmerich (a very good actor who deserves better) will appear, at first, to be kind and helpful. That will not last forever. 8. The American military is evil. Uh, no, they're all very stupid. Oh, they're really nice people after all. 9. Monsters from space are only nasty on the surface. Once you get to know them they're really nice (as long as they don't eat you). Well, yes, they do eat people, but only older character actors or women who wind up in caves with curlers in their hair. 10. A spaceship can be built around a water tower if magnetism attracts the contents of what seems to be a junkyard to it. It cannot achieve critical mass and accomplish its transformation, though, without one piece of mass-produced costume jewelry. Pixie dust seems to be optional. 11. Cars will fly toward said magnet like paper airplanes. Tanks are immune to this. 12. Theater stereo systems (and this is from someone drove two hours to see THE DOORS in a theater with really great sound when it was playing locally in mono) are really distracting when vehicles drive across the screen. Stereo should be reserved for explosions of various kinds and music, and (like jalapenos) using sparingly.