Spectacular, riveting, gut-churning ... but ultimately leaves a bad taste

Rating: 7/10 (12 May 2006)

I paid to see this movie twice at the theater, so it must have something going for it. And it does--first-rate special effects, thrills and chills galore, some scenes that will likely haunt me for years, a mood of hopelessness so powerfully projected it's a miracle I didn't deliberately asphyxiate myself with my popcorn bag.
In spite of all this the movie leaves me disappointed and vaguely hostile. The source of my discontent is not only Stephen Spielberg but all those Hollywood moguls who think it acceptable to pass off a second-or third-rate story (at first-rate admission prices) so long as the story *looks* good. Who think, in other words, that their only demographic is adolescent males, that these possess the collective IQ of a bin full of cabbages, and that any hole in story or script is readily plugged by patching in another explosion or knocking over another building.
More than anything I am saddened and frustrated by the obvious contempt in which movie-makers today seem to hold the viewing public--contempt not only for our intelligence but also our wallets. I suppose when you're a billionaire it's easy to forget that the price of admission plus refreshments is a significant outlay for a whole lot of people. When I pay good bread to see a movie I want a story that makes sense, plus characters I can care deeply about. Good special effects are a wonderful add-on, but they can't compensate for underlying deficiencies in a script that should never have made it to the shooting stage--which, I am sorry to say, is the case (in spades) with *War of the Worlds*.
I won't try to present an exhaustive list of all the problems with plot, character and logic in this movie. It would be a very long list indeed, and many commenters have already raised most of the pertinent points. Here, however, are a few of the things that aggrieved me the most:
1) the constant bickering and quarreling among the Cruise character and his two kids. This discord commences and continues even at the most dire moments, when cooperation for their very survival would have been uppermost in the minds of all but the psychotically self-destructive. The incessant shrieking of the Dakota Fanning character is in addition so jarring and obnoxious that on several occasions I nearly leaped up in the theater and yelled at her to shut her f**king mouth.
2) the off-screen apparent summary dispatch of the Tim Robbins character. We clearly see in an earlier scene that Robbins is not only bigger but stronger than Ray. Plus he is armed with a shovel. Are we to believe that Ray is temporarily transformed by the need to fight for his daughter--by some kind of spiritual spinach, if you will--into a murdering superman? Yet Ray's readiness to kill the only person who has offered him shelter severely impugns his morality, and renders him even less sympathetic than he has already appeared.
3) the incredible incompetence and stupidity of the aliens. Man, those guys are dumber than a bag full of hammers. How dumb are they again? Dumb enough to dive into a barrel full of breasts and come up holding their own butt cheeks. Dumb enough that if their brains were made of C4 they couldn't blow their own noses. So dumb that ... well, you get the idea. There's no point in belaboring the many ways in which their incompetence is displayed throughout the movie--that's already been done here, many, many times.
4) the hypercompetence of the aliens' technology. I do not like--and have *never* liked, not in the '53 version of *War of the Worlds*, and not in ID4--the idea of impenetrable "screens" of an unspecified nature that render human weapons useless and the aliens behind them invulnerable. H. G. Wells plainly intended the title of his book as irony. One of his characters states that there is no more a war between mankind and the Martians than there is between mankind and a colony of ants. Even so, Wells's Martians are vulnerable to human weapons including artillery and ironclads. The use of impenetrable screens severely limits conflict and poses the screen writer a dilemma: how to defeat the undefeatable. The viewer expects a resolution to this problem that is an order of magnitude more clever than the problem itself, and that is difficult to provide. All too often (as is the case here or in *Lord of the Rings*) evil holds all the cards--but loses simply because it is evil.
If you're an aspiring screenwriter then do yourself (and the viewing public) a favor and watch this movie--just so you'll know how *not* to write your own. If you're not an aspiring screenwriter then watch this movie with the sound turned off. You'll like it a whole lot better.