My Two Cents on War Of the Worlds...

Rating: 3/10 (17 July 2005)

...ended up costing me $8! Ugh -- despair! A monumental failure masquerading as a top grossing film, W-O-W is far from WOW-ing anybody. Talk about begging the word "contrived". A true fall-de-grace, if there ever was a word -- Seriously, did Tom Cruise really have to LIVE? For the love of Christ, if a movie ever had to create every opportunity for a dead-beat character to survive every possible life-threatening situation without having to really DO anything to merit his survival, the script writers of this film have demonstrated just that. Does the weird basket of captured people, including Tom and Dakota, really have to fall into a conveniently placed tree softening the blow of perhaps a fractured arm or leg? Surely the writers couldn't afford to excite me with a broken neck. I would do anything for Tom Cruise's foot to be vaporized and have him limp across the streets, scurrying away from a bunch of overgrown tripodal metal eyeballs. Ahh... a LAMAO moment.
True, we can all agree that a story originally written for a Victorian audience cannot incite the same reaction of surprise and awe from a more scientifically advance generation of viewers. Perhaps it would have done me some good to don a bonnet and corset and throw comments at the screen with my refined, but fake nonetheless, British accent. Would that have helped? Probably not. For the sake of keeping true to form, I will give the movie a C-.
I will not say I did not find a few moments that excited me. To watch a mass herd of humans running like wildebeast, getting zapped left and right, disintegrating into poofs of dried carbon did bring some good old fashioned comedy to the screen. Oops! Was I supposed to be scared? Sorry. OK, lets say the sheer magnanimity of the damage did concern me. Where do we put all the dead people now? Oh I forgot, they were poofed.
Obviously, I will not spend a penny on renting the DVD. Neither will I exhaust a single brain cell in containing this movie in my memory banks. It will be a another thing I conveniently forget -- Which is why I documented this online, just to prove to myself that it did suck.
Alfred Hitchcock (love of my life) where are you when we need you???