A contender for 'Worst of all Time'

Rating: 1/10 (28 December 2005)

Tom Cruise seems to have taken on the role of 'worst articulating actor of our times' after the pathetic ham Brando finally checked out.
Cruise plays the part of a semi-retarded dock worker with a screaming brat of a daughter and a glum moron of a son. Mumbling and shouting seem to be the limits of Cruise's performance, where the screenplay writers seem to have read the version of Wells' book which was translated to Korean, Welsh, Basque and Hungarian before being rendered in English by monoglot illiterate Siberians armed only with dictionaries. I'm sure they did their best, but the didn't really understand the book at all.
Within minutes of the staggeringly unconvincing start I was on the side of the Martians. The screaming brat of a daughter - she must be a cert for the Razzies for a shallow, irrelevant, pointless, but somehow infuriating performance - burbles some drivel about 'her own space' or some such garbage whenever there is a life-threatening event. The son runs up a hill to where the entire US army (which seems to have a acquired a collective IQ of about 12 and the dimmest officers in history) is wiped out with him in the middle. His entire justification for this totally obvious suicide is: "I've got to see what happens!" It is, I think the pathetic excuse for setting up a silly reunion at the end.
Several hilarious points of irrelevance stand out:
1) Why is Cruise heading for a major populations centre (Boston) knowing that the Martians are engaged in a war of annihilation? 2) OK, it's to find the wife who sensibly has left this retard in a dump in New Jersey for someone who looks a bit sinister but at least doesn't say 'Gwarlf gworg, hbif, mmmunghf, gurdtle' for most of the soundtrack. So still, why is Cruise dragging his children to see his ex-wife? 3) The best of all, how come Cruise is the ONLY person in a large crowd in New Jersey with a gun??? If this were Woking or Chobham (i.e. where the intelligent version was set) then this would be reasonable, but do we really believe that in the slums of New Jersey there is only one gun? 4) Why does the ferry have ALL of its lights on? Is this just in case a couple of Martians are particularly dim and haven't noticed? 5) Having wiped out all electrical equipment with an electromagnetic pulse (which if I remember involves a low yield nuclear explosion in the lower atmosphere - and only affects hardware with small scale electrical contacts) why did all of the electrical equipment recover?
Essentially this is an exceptionally bad film, badly acted, cretinously adapted from a book which 100 years earlier had a sounder scientific foundation.