2/3 awesome, 1/3.... wait... whaaaat??

Rating: 7/10 (7 July 2005)

When I sat down in the theater to watch War of the Worlds, I was expecting some crazy action scenes, mindblowing special effects, and total meltdown of human society.
And I got it.
Am I going to complain about Steven's work? Not the main stuff, sorry guys, but that was utterly brilliant. Not having seen the original movie but being familiar with scifi films, I was not expecting the aliens to arise from the earth so quick, how they attacked with death rays, the enormity of one tripod destroying whole areas, the electrical storms and killing "everything" electronic, the strange creepy plants, the spraying, the horrifying Hudson Ferry scene, the shots of the corpses in the river, the ash in the hair.... c'mon. That. Was. So. Cool.
Mention the horrible bizarre stab-me-in-the-face-please ending, the audience's total and complete hatred of the little girl and her endless screaming, the total uselessness of Cruise getting concerned over his son running over the ridge (didn't you know he was going to show up later?), the scavenging of the plane (was it really necessary to climb through dead bodies to get to little Dasani bottles?), the constant repetition of "they must have been buried here for a long time", the randomness of fighting Tim Robbins, how much you just wanted to have -someone- come running down the stairs screaming and bloody when they had that perpetual basement scene.... and you will see why some people just couldn't handle Steven's movie.
But I went for special effects, a need for fear of alien invasion, and numbing doomsday scenario. I got what I wanted, I just had to avoid all the rest of the crap that came with it.