dull

Rating: 5/10 (1 December 2014)

I'm very surprised that Steven Spielberg put his name on this thing. Also, why does he use Tom Cruise so much? I won't go through the story. Aliens invade earth, using machines they have hidden below ground for I don't know how long. Everybody goes on the run, and the focus is on one particular family, headed up by Tom Cruise, a divorced man taking care of his young, constantly screaming, hysterical daughter (Dakota Fanning) and his older son who apparently pays no attention to anything his father tells him.
The beginning of this adaptation of the H.G. Wells story was quite good, if you overlooked certain things. I mean, an entity that can evaporate people must be also able to evaporate their clothes. I'm in no way a special effects expert, so I was pretty impressed with the effects in the beginning.
My problem with this movie is that within thirty minutes, I lost interest.
If you move fast and keep an audience entertained with a strong script, good acting, good direction, and good pace, no one will care about the fact that some cars work and others don't, that a videocamera works when everything else doesn't, that a few miles out of town, no one knows about this catastrophe and there is no alien activity - etc. But when you give an audience time to think, they consciously or subconsciously start picking up inconsistencies which gives them a perfect excuse to criticize it.
And what a cop out - to have Morgan Freeman's voice explain the ending.
My real problem is that a great artist like Steven Spielberg should know better. This movie could have grossed more than however many millions it did by having a little more attention paid to it, rather than saying, okay, we've got Cruise, we've got Spielberg, let's throw this thing on the screen, sit back, and let the idiots pay for it.