A War Drama with UFOs

Rating: 7/10 (5 July 2005)

If this movie will not be as a big blockbuster as e.g. Independence Day then it will be because it is not really a dull audience-serving popcorn. This is a war drama about a father who learns how to protect his daughter; it's a war of worlds not only between aliens and the Earth but the father and others, the father and himself. We can see lots of typical Spielberg moments in this movie (from his war, adventure and also sci-fi movies) which shows it is way more efficient (viscerally) to show explosions and flying cars in their actual speed than the very slow-mo spectacle that Emmerich's movies show. The keyword is "realistic" this case: the sights make us remember all human catastrophes from our memory (from wars and holocaust to 9/11 and tsunami) and righteously so. In the end the movie becomes a bit more popcorn-y as the father becomes a hero and helps in the war against the aliens but still not in an Emmerich-style dumb way. Maybe my only concern is that we could not see anything "revolutionary" or fresh and new - but maybe that's too much to ask from an adaptation of a hundred-year-old book.