Singularly awful!

Rating: 1/10 (8 July 2005)

Have you ever seen a remake of a good movie that makes you say "what the hell went wrong?!" Well, this is one of those movies, y'know? I loved the original, and I loved the book. And, hell, I liked this movie, too, but I'm inclined to give it such a low score (a one) because of its overwhelming amounts of mind-crushing badness and nonsensical errors, not to mention all the differences between the book and this movie. And the kids (which weren't in the book at all). I hated them. The daughter screamed way, WAY too much to be a convincing character, and the son was an idiot. "Ooh. The Aliens are killing everybody. I better go fight! Despite the overwhelming evidence that human weapons do no damage whatsoever, it's extremely important that I explode!" What the hell? We get it. The kid's angry, but hell, why have him go "fight" and apparently get blasted to tiny pieces. I suppose it was to make him look dead. And I genuinely thought he was. But somehow, he survived his giant hellfire explosion and walked to Boston. And, of course, the Aliens start out vaporizing poor idiots and then they're using some kind of hellfire cannon and then they're somehow killing them (in the river scene) and then they're drinking them. And the aliens themselves. They manage to know before we do that there will be edible human life on this planet, and thus bury their huge killmachines. But, despite their obvious scientific superiority, they walk around on the planet without protective armor. And, why didn't humans ever notice GIANT METALLIC MONSTROSITIES buried under their freakin' feet? And the whole... "Civilization must collapse in order to make this poor schmuck into a good father" thing bothered me, too. One star. This movie made my eyes melt.