A Fascinating Alien Movie Intertwained With Stupid Cliché's and a Happy Ending

Rating: Null/10 (31 July 2005)

This comment contains a spoiler first, there are just too many gaping plot holes to not comment on, first when the jet crashes on the home Tom Cruise and his family are in it just happens not to strike his car. I mean come on we're not that stupid. That is forgivable, but the compact ending is not at all. Out of nowhere the son appears and is unharmed after he went off foolishly by himself to see the alien's attack. Also the house he went to and everyone in it was unharmed, grandparents and all, what a perfect ending, half of the world is destroyed, and that one neighborhood in Boston went unscathed. This movie should not have ended so perfectly. And then after Cruise defeats the aliens the next thing you see is he and his daughter going to Boston, I mean come on, what happened in between there? Let's try to be a little realistic here.
Morgan Freeman's narration added a nice little element of intensity to it, and the idea of organisms in the human body destroying the aliens that was interesting. Tom Cruise for once did a decent acting job, and was a decent leading man. The strength of this movie is it's characterizations, and the visual images, Tim Robbins as the man taken in by the whole invasion, having lost his family, and obviously crazy, a train going by set on fire, but not able to stop, flowing bodies down a river, the countryside north of New York City drenched in blood, all of these images are quite incredible, and do contribute to the all around effect of the movie. The other strength of this movie is seeing the image from a non-corporate standpoint. There are very few superhighways in the movie, no McDonalds, no WalMarts, the movie is told largely in small towns and city neighborhoods, far away from the reaches of suburban America.
The most recent alien invasion movie I can think of was Independence Day. That movies was just the opposite of this one. That movie had the president in it, and had a bunch f different stories put together to make that movie. This movie had one story, the family trying to get together, and revolved around one character, Tom Cruise and his two children. There is no scenes of the American military plotting it's counterattack, the story is simple and it works overall, despite the glaring follies in the plot. I didn't want to see this movie because I thought Cruise would be awful, he was decent, the problem was in the movie itself. Spielberg and the writers took a perfectly good movie and added some silly stuff to it especially at the end, where everything was wrapped up too nicely and made it all so perfect. I hate that the movie ended so pathetically, other than that it was very good. Spielberg has made a movie well worth seeing but it is not of the caliber of his earlier stuff, this is fun to watch though, and is probably best enjoyed by Science Fiction fans.