Should have been called, "Saving Dakota Fanning"

Rating: 3/10 (9 July 2005)

Summer blockbuster? More like Summer lackluster. Pairing the genius of Spielberg and the draw of Tom Cruise should have been a no-brainer for another big box office hit. Instead, WOTW turned out to be a no-brainer of a film, as in "What were they thinking?" The year is 2005, not 1965, meaning that today's audience is a very savvy group, having cut their teeth on fantasy tour-de-forces like "Lord of the Rings," "Star Wars," and the "Matrix" trilogy. It is not enough just to throw a lot of CG-effects at an audience and hope that they would allow a weak story line to accompany the "Wow" factor of the movie. To be successful, Summer popcorn movies must have characters to which people relate, a clear start and finish with consistent plot lines, a message to tell, and at least some plausible plot elements to accompany the FX. Sadly, WOTW has none of these.
The movie was a mishmash of overdone, derivative elements from very familiar Hollywood movies. DO NOT DARE to compare it to "Independence Day!" That masterpiece was intentionally derivative in order to pay homage to Sci-Fi movies of the 50's and 60's. WOTW was merely a rip-off of previous genre clichés.
WOTW is a remake of a very good, 1954 film directed by the master of Sci-Fi, George Pal. Normally, I do not make references to source material, but it is definitely warranted here. Unlike its 50-year old predecessor, the 2005 WOTW has more plot holes than Swiss cheese.
Here's a sampling (**WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD**): Supposedly, the Martian war machines had been buried under the Earth's soil for a million years before man walked over it, and the aliens had been planning this invasion all this time. These machines are massive, 100ft tall tripods that somehow evaded decades of underground sonar, seismic scans, and numerous excavations occurring over the millennia. Yeah, right! Okay, so these machines have been sitting undetected under the ground at a depth of about 50 feet. How do the Martians hop in them and bust through the Earth's crust like they were exotic dancers popping out of a cardboard cake? Ready? Are you sitting down? They travel a distance of 350 million miles in capsules down to the Earth's stratosphere -- (no one knows how) -- and then, suddenly hitch a ride inside bolts of lightning that penetrate the ground where these Leviathans are just waiting to be cranked up after a million years. Meantime, are there any scientists - or at least someone with more sense than our two protagonists who together have the IQ of a wet mop? No way.
In Spielberg's WOTW, there is a 5-second scene where a bystander offers his scientific take on what the invaders have in mind. Yet, there are so-o-o many things that desperately need some explanation, but none are anywhere to be found. What is the deal with the red roots? Why do Martians need to drain humans of all their blood? Why does the war machine's death ray only vaporize humans and leave their clothes unscortched?
Another big flaw in the movie is the machines themselves. They are supposed to be big, scary things, but they are anything but that. Listen, we've seen equally large, mechanical war machines with legs in "Star Wars -- Attack of the Clones" as well as seeing tall, massive, elephant-like creatures in "Lord of the Rings." Throw in the giant, Jurassic Park residents with whom we come to know and love (or loathe), and we've seen it all too often before. In the case of these "terrible tripods," bigger is just not better -- especially when they are just, too darned big to be believed. They were not at all scary -- mainly annoying with their loud, fog-horn blasts to signal other tripods (or maybe to scare us poor humans)?? In the original WOTW, the war machines were the most elegant-looking, flying machines ever seen in a sci-fi flick. These green, swan-shaped, triangular flying saucers had two primary weapons: a heat ray attached to a long, goose-neck arm that emanated from the top and fired white lightning-like bursts, and two plasma-generating devices on each corner that spewed green plasma -- very reminiscent of the "Green S***" (as Will Smith described it) in "Independence Day." Unlike the articulated tripods in WOTW 2005, WOTW 1954 glided along on virtual legs created by force fields. There is a little bit of trivia as to why this came about.
The original saucers were models mounted on metal tripods that rolled along the sound set. During the shooting of the scene where the saucers came out in droves, the tripods got entangled in the wires along the floor and caused a fire that destroyed the models and most of the set. Ever since then, George Pal decided to ditch the metal legs in favor of force fields.
It was a brilliant move born out of disaster, with the result being the most memorable-looking flying/gliding alien spacecraft in movie history.
Another bothersome aspect of the machines is that their movements were MORE articulate than the creatures that built and drove them! In fact, when we finally get to see the aliens in full view and full form, they look like a cross between the aliens in ID4 and chimpanzees.
All in all, the movie had a few interesting scenes, but in total, it was a big bore and a waste of my precious time and money. So much of the movie was concerned with Cruise's efforts to protect his banshee of a daughter from the big. bad aliens, that the film should have been called "Saving Dakota Fanning!" Please -- go rent the 1954 version instead!!!