Bore of the Worlds

Rating: Null/10 (30 June 2005)

Mister Teeth Tom Cruise plays a divorced father of a precocious daughter Dakota Fanning and angry teenage son Robbie. His ex-wife drops the kids off for the weekend. Before you can say "What's for dinner?" the aliens arrive. After that it's pretty much Cruise and the kids running from the swath of death and destruction wrought by the aliens.
There is nothing wrong with the performances of Cruise and Fanning. Before the aliens invade, Fanning is cute and Cruise is a guy you'd have a beer with after work and talk about baseball. But when the aliens arrive the screenwriters give Fanning a lot of crying, whimpering and screaming and Cruise is relegated to a papa bear trying to save his cubs. The problem is not with the actors but with the script. Their characters aren't allowed to develop since they spend all their time running, hiding, and trying to stay alive.
Tim Robbins plays Ogilvy a rather lunatic guy hiding in the cellar of a farmhouse. He does an adequate job with the little part he is given. He is totally unnecessary to the film and in fact make the film grind to a halt.
The aliens are nothing new and we've seen the likes of them in Independence Day and Signs.
It's fair to compare this movie to other Spielberg films. WOTW is about the same quality as Minority Report and A.I. It is not in the same league as Close Encounters, ET, Jaws or Raiders of the Lost Ark. It really lacks any Spielberg touches and could just as well have been directed by someone else.
The FX are mostly spectacular but sometimes cheesy. Some scenes look absolutely real, as if they were filmed with a documentary camera. Others look like flat blue screen. Roger Ebert liked the scene with the flaming train and this could have been special but it's lost with the larger FX. The scene in the farmhouse cellar has been compared to the raptors-in-the-kitchen scene in Jurassic Park and had a similar tension.
There are huge plot holes and unfortunately you notice them during the movie, not later as you talk about it over dinner. There's no reason to rehash them because they've been documented in other reviews. But you wouldn't expect them in a movie of this nature and they are annoying.
This is simply a remake. The 1953 original had its charm even when you could see the wires holding up the alien ships. There are no wires holding up the alien tripods in this film; but there is no charm either.