cruel and angry

Rating: 4/10 (14 December 2005)

Tom Cruise usually lights up the screen for me (Last Samurai, The Firm, Far and Away) and his choice of characters is usually sympathetic. But his character in Spielberg's War of the Worlds was simply unappealing and even repugnant at times. It's too bad because the Spielberg/Cruise machine has the money and the man power to do just about anything they want to on screen. Even thought this made a heck of a lot of money it was far less successful than the original black and white version of the book, or even the 2005 version by David Latt, "HG Wells War of the Worlds". The main character in that had more heart and held more sympathy than Cruise even came close to in the Spielberg epic.