The cheap disappointment of surviving main characters.

Rating: 2/10 (12 November 2017)

I know what he tried to do, he just shouldn't have tried.
Spielberg wanted to flip the script, he wanted to take a classic of the SciFi Horror genre and flip the perspective from what the best and the brightest were doing in the original film to combat the alien menace and try to do a shot for shot remake that involved "common folk". On paper it seems like a good idea, but in practice this was the dogs breakfast.
The best effort, and the best characters, were the antagonists. They were inscrutable, deadly, overwhelming and entirely without mercy ... the perfect embodiment of evil. The towering Tripods with their klaxon and their eerie grace of movement were absolutely captivating. Kudos also have to be extended to Tim Robbins, who managed to be both an element of menace and an element of pity at the same time. Here endeth the praise.
Tom Cruise, for all his ability to play characters that are competent as action figures, but have no real depth. Ray Ferrier is even more one dimensional than his normal characters, so much so that (with an admitted bias towards his personal life) that I don't really think he was acting ... just reading a script. Robbie (Justin Chatwin) seems to serve no real purpose to the story ... except to disappointingly arrive alive at the end of the film. I am all for the portrayal of teen angst, but this vapid, self absorbed, persistent in the face of almost certain death, idiotic nihilism goes beyond what is even plausible in a human being. And finally we have little Rachel (Dakota Fanning) in what I perceive to be the role that screwed her over for any future consideration of a serious role ever again. Every time she emerged from a situation I simply raged ... from the incident with the van, to the basement, to the capture by one of the tripods ... I found myself wrestling with a great sense of disappointment that she didn't end up a wet stain under a tripod's tentacle.
There are moments of brilliance in this film, buy you have to slog through armpit deep puree'd bat guano to appreciate them. I would like to say that Spielberg phoned in his direction of this film, but I think the more apt description would be that he directed if via semaphore ... from about a mile too far to be seen.