Spielberg's Worst Ever

Rating: 1/10 (6 July 2005)

There is a certain amount of suspension of disbelief that goes hand in hand with watching movies in which gigantic robots take over the planet. However, the rest of the movie should make sense. War of the Worlds is almost completely devoid of a plot and even the most simple things come off awkwardly. The movie starts with an electrical storm that knocks out all electronic devices, even Tom's watch. So far so good. Then a giant robot comes out of the ground and instead of running, people just stand around watching it until they start being vaporized. Then Mr. Spielberg apparently decided to suspend the idea that electronics weren't working so he could do a really nice shot of the robot destroying things through some guy's camcorder. Great shot, too bad it should have been impossible given that everything wasn't working. The rest of the movie follows the same sort of logic, and absolutely nothing is explained. The robots are said to be buried before humans even existed. Why? So they could come out of the ground in the opening scene I guess. Sometimes the robots vaporize the humans, but then they start picking them up so that Cruise can do a little heroic scene near the end without getting turned into ash. I was really trying to love the movie. The special effects are really great and there are some really suspenseful moments, but literally nothing was explained by the end. The ending makes M. Night Shalaman's "hey we just figured out water kills them" ending look like pure cinematic brilliance. There are so many ridiculous mistakes in this film I don't even want to waste my time listing them all. I don't usually even review the films I see, but this one was so awful that I felt compelled to.