I disliked the movie because of the lack of any type of depth to it.

Rating: 3/10 (2 July 2005)

1. The ending was corny. How could his son have survived the napalmed field and end up in Boston? Why was his family still in Boston when the rest of the city was abandoned? It was nice, however, to have Gene Barry and Anne Robinson there! 2. There's no scathing political or philosophical commentary that the book or even the first movie had. The most damning commentary is Robbins' line that "Occupation doesn't work." Spielberg, you're so tough! One line does not make biting controversy. The book slants toward Marxism and attacks the Imperialism of the late nineteen/early twentieth centuries and religion. The original movie has a tribute to religion, which Spielberg annihilates in the opening invasion sequence. All this film has is... 3. A dummying down of society. We've taken intelligent characters as our protagonist to a crane operator! He has limited intelligence and limited character. I guess most people can relate to an "everyman" instead of an intellectual these days. This character is driven more on feeling than anything. However, the original book's narrator feels for his lost wife just as much as he uses his brains. Can't we have a juxtaposition of thought with emotion?
I did like the borrowing of some of the images from the movie while this movie remained closest to the book. Spielberg is a master of using emotions to evoke a response from the crowd. I cry worse than a baby at E.T. still!
I felt obligated to share this response after reading some comments saying this is the best Sci-Fi film ever and it's better than Batman Begins. Yes, it's visually pretty, but there's more than just being able to use computers to evoke some kind of feeling. This really isn't any more than a typical summer blockbuster with explosions, though it doesn't come at you in rapid succession as some other bloated visual effects films have. Sci-Fi should teach us something about society and ourselves. It should ameliorate ourselves. Signs, for example, gets us to question our existence and ask about higher powers. A Morgan Freeman tacked on explanation at the end doesn't cut it.
Batman Begins is the best film of the year because it shows that we need to do something for the less fortunate in society. Don't just give money, but get out there and help out in some way. There's a deeper, more important issue going on in Batman that WOTW doesn't even come close to scratching.