A film betrayed by Context?

Rating: 5/10 (6 July 2005)

I think the main problem with this version of "War of the Worlds" is context.
To explain a little further - Taken on its own, "War of the Worlds" is a fairly decent piece of cinema: The actors (even the usually stilted Cruise), play their parts relatively well and with a fair degree of realism, the story is well-paced and the action sequences are well-directed in portraying the Martian purge of Earth from the (exceptional) everyman/every-family perspective. The CGI and visual effects aren't over done either, even in the more visually-intensive scenes...
HOWEVER it's when you place the film into context, that things start to go wrong...
For a start, "War of the Worlds" is part of an alarming trend amongst Hollywood film-makers to apparently negate claims of plagiarism, by using phrases such as "Based on the novel by" or "Suggested in the novel by" - Attempting to hide the fact that they are simply plundering older works for film ideas and using the names to provide marketable Kudos. "War of the Worlds" is not an adaptation by anyone's standard, its association with the work from which it steals its name is there to justify the use of the original's structure, characters and overall story-telling concepts.
Unfortunately, this intentional plagiarism is rife in Spielburg's effort, which at best could be described as a synthesis of several works and at worst, outright and systematic laziness. Having dealt with the obvious origins that provide the film with the majority of its material, you'll also find elements taken directly from the 1953 film version, such as the use of shields, the design elements of the Martian Tripods/Scanners/etc, and the remaking of several iconic scenes (The basement and final defeat sequences) - Even the homage in the opening 30 minutes, that sees a war machine rising from out of a church (reminscent of the end scene of the 1953 movie, where one crashes into a church) do not make this any the more forgivable.
There are other niggles that might be a little more tenuous but nonetheless give pause for thought - The wail of the Warmachines and Cruise's destruction of one, both seem to echo similar sounds and scenes from the British 1980's TV series "The Tripods" based on books by John Christopher - One of the Warmachines in that work is also destroyed by grenades thrown into the cockpit. This is without mentioning the facts that scenes of the Warmachines in the current movie spreading the Red Weed and feeding, instantly remind the watcher of the Machines farming humans in the Matrix Trilogy, and the aliens themselves bear a shocking resemblance to the Greys in "Independence Day" from 1996! When you thrown in some glaring continuity errors (Working Camcorders after an EMP blast?), some gaping plot-holes (The link to Mars is never made explicit, nor is a reason given why the aliens buried war machines under the surface instead of taking over at that point, or how said vehicles escaped detection with the construction of modern civilisation above them), and Spielburg's propensity to provide needlessly happy endings (I'll concede that in the original, the Narrator finds his wife & cousin unharmed, but in this 'adaptation' the survival of the son at the end beggars belief and belittles the audience) and the film is cast in a completely different and none to favourable light...
Whilst others might say the box office figures speak for themselves, this of course is sophistry - You don't know what you're getting with a movie until you sit down and see it, so by then it's too late to show your disdain by not viewing - Besides, even forewarned, people would still go just to see what the fuss was about! All in all? A disappointment, and a sizable one at that - Not so much on technical merits, but more on philosophical points...