The great genius obsessed with his toys

Rating: Null/10 (18 September 2006)

Mr Spielberg probably never read the script in its entirety at one sitting, because if he had, he would have noticed how many rules of scriptwriting it broke. (The three writers involved seem never to have taken so much as a weekend scripting course.) The hero is unlikable from the start, encounters no particular hurdles other than the central plot hurdle faced by all humanity, and there is no sub-plot that takes him off-screen for more than three seconds. Furthermore, in a climactic scene he commits a gratuitous murder of a brave fellow citizen for the most spurious of reasons, without punishment. In other words, the script stinks. Like a spoilt kid obsessing over his toys, Mr Spielberg was evidently chiefly interested in only one aspect of this silly picture: the special effects. The DVD contains a long, boring "special feature" about this side of things, with a lot of nerdy staffers attributing all the non-existent inspiration to their boss (Spielberg) and giving boring glimpses of their artwork, which to my (admittedly inexpert) eye looked unoriginal. Weren't tripods featured in the comic-book version many decades ago? The sad thing is, that without these extravagant inventions, the movie amounted to a cheesy and improbable children's adventure yarn. My suggestion: avoid all movies made by Mr Spielberg, who has a retarded aesthetic sense, and all movies leading with special effects, particularly Industrial Light and Magic. The latter throws no light, is not magical and certainly is industrial.