Terrible... Unforgivably Terrible...

Rating: 1/10 (1 July 2005)

A Director's job is to engage the audience and in that respect War of the Worlds failed miserably. This film fails on virtually all counts for me as it was distinctly Americanized. The script was simply awful and although the actors did their best with the woeful material they were given, it wasn't enough to revive this mess. This has got to be a modern-day portrait of the typical U.S. family with a teenage son who is seethingly angry at father and a head-case daughter suffering from claustrophobia and panic attacks. The whole lot of them seem ready for the loony bin. Absolutely no reason is given for the son's behaviour and he seems angry at nothing. He later develops into a living embodiment of 9/11 revenge mentality and his behaviour is made even more irrational as he hopes to go up against apparently unbeatable enemy and consequently exhausts the audiences patience through behaving like a Rambo wannabe. Cruise although working within a clunky script, was miscast in this role as he is simply not a powerful enough actor to carry this sort of character off. In many respects Cruise appears to be acting as though he were wearing a blindfold, but all of these faults would have been forgiven had I actually been able to empathise with him and actually care about his struggles. Robbins provided a good performance but could anyone please explain to me what the point of his entire sequence was? Was the violence the sequence ended with really necessary? I realise that people panic in horrible situations but in some scenes this panic went beyond any kind of rational explanation. I must say the special effects were great and the film managed to create a feeling of imminent extermination. While there was a good performance from Fanning, there was nothing in the film that made you care about the characters in the slightest. It didn't really matter whether or not the characters lived because the film just simply failed to engage. This film if nothing else is a demonstration of always making sure that you must have an up-to-scratch script put together before you start shooting, otherwise you can end up with an apathetic, self-indulgent post-911 revenge mode tripe such as this.