Nonstop Action Good Special Effects Make This A Winner

Rating: 10/10 (29 June 2005)

I want to preface this review by saying that I understand everyone has a right to their own opinion. With that said, I cannot understand why anyone would give this movie a poor review. Certainly, the acting could have been better from Tom Cruise, but Dakota Fanning makes up for it. As with most high budget Action/SciFi movies, special effects take precedent over individual cast performances. And in this version of War of the Worlds, the special effects are exceptional. Few movies I have watched made me feel like I was actually there, witness to the events as they unfold (Saving Private Ryan was one). In this movie, I felt like I was standing next to Tom Cruise and his family almost during the entire movie. It is my opinion that this movie is as close to reality as you can get given the subject matter. I believe that if non-benevolent aliens ever were to visit our world, this is exactly how it would go down. This movie has a feel of realism.
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One popular film critic has picked this movie apart on technical and logical grounds by asking questions such as: Why do the machines have only three legs? How did they go undiscovered for millions of years buried underneath the ground? Why should the aliens annihilate humans if they came here to harvest us? I personally had answers to all of these questions within my one logical framework. 1). Three legs are better than four for negotiating uneven terrain. 2). How do we know how far down the machines were buried? Maybe they were buried thousands of feet into the ground. 3). The humans were only zapped during the initial attack. It is my opinion that this was done by the aliens to invoke fear. Later in the movie, rather than seeing humans disintegrated, we see them plucked up into the machines. All I would have to say to this critic is - For pity sake, this is a science fiction movie, not a study in physics and or alien psyche. Chill Out Man. This movie is true to the original HG Wells vision of how the machines looked. Who cares whether they have three support legs or four? The one aspect of this movie I was somewhat disappointed in was it's depiction of the aliens themselves. I thought they looked cartoonish. Spielberg would have done much better by leaving the aliens in shadow or fleeting glimpses, playing up more on the fantastically weird machine sound effects that are heard only a few times during the movie. Every time I heard that weird alien sound, chills ran up my spine. In closing, I did not give this movie a full ten points due to the lackluster Cruise performance, but mostly for the mistake of showing us a full view of poorly conceived alien beings.