Better than expected

Rating: 8/10 (31 July 2005)

I gave this an 8 because although I generally very much enjoyed the film, it was well acted and nicely directed overall I have a couple of things to moan about. Firstly the beginning was slow. I realise introducing the characters in a film is hard to make interesting but the first 10 minutes were pretty awful. They did set up the characters well but at the expense of being 10 minutes of dull viewing. The other point I can't really explain very well as it would be a spoiler but suffice to say instead of meteors simply coming down in some freak meteor storm they have taken a different approach. This approach to me is completely rubbish. It makes no sense and I found it spoilt the film for me. I don't know who came up with this alternate idea but it really sucks. I can only guess it was Spielberg or Cruise.
Still a very enjoyable film with some good performances. I felt it was overall very true to the book and far superior to the Gene Barry version which was only very loosely based on the book. I also felt Spielbergs directing apart from the slow start was nicely done.