Stop with the sappy endings, Steven! PLEASE!!!

Rating: 1/10 (1 July 2005)

I can't fault this film for its special effects. But we live now in an age where that sort of contribution to a film is to be taken for granted and put into perspective. The days are long past where FX achievements really *were* achievements that added to the STORY and not the other way around. Spielberg has, with this latest effort, gone way overboard with the FX and lost sight of some things that matter far more like realistic plot-points, for example. We see the son walk over a hill that basically EXPLODES, okay? He should be dead. But no, Steven can't stand to have an unhappy ending to his films, so the son has to return at the end of the movie, having made it to Boston on his own. How do you spell "pathetic"? I spell it S-P-I-E-L-B-E-R-G. The daughter probably should have died several times over during the course of the film, also. But Steven can't *allow* that, so we have to endure her histrionic screams at the *END* of the film when she's safely tucked away in a tunnel, while she was a zombie in other scenes just minutes before-hand coming face to face with a whole HOARDE of tripods. Ridiculous continuity! S-T-U-P-I-D. How about the pregnant mom: Steven, are you seriously going to ask me to believe that she didn't go into labor prematurely during this monumental holocaust??? Puhleeeeze!!! Spielberg misses the ferry by shying away from some very logical plot developments and allowing the characters to react to them. How profound would it be to see both your children die and then possibly find your ex-wife near death's door having prematurely lost her stillborn child? This is the stuff that would have made WAR OF THE WORLDS something to cheer about, if Spielberg could have made himself realize the audience needs to be shocked emotionally, not just with FX, and cloying, sappy endings do not adequately resolve two hours of a tortuous film like this. How dare he show me so obviously that a character like the son wants to sacrifice himself in an inferno and then bring him back at the end of the film unharmed? That's just plain insulting and, in a way, sadistic to put an audience through that and then negate the pay-off (that the son is lost -- we have to "get past that"). UGGGGHHHH!!!! The passage of time is poorly recorded in this film. How is it that in what seemed like the span of two or three days time so many people could have plastered walls upon walls of "Missing" signs as though the onslaught had taken place over a matter of months? Why is it that such a big deal is made out of having to go to the bathroom literally what must have been several days on the run from the tripods? Perhaps the icing on the cake came towards the end when Tom Cruise picks a piece of the alien vegetation off a statue and it crumbles into dust and he has the audacity to conclude, "They're dying." when he is merely a construction worker (NOT A SCIENTIST)! How the hell would he even know enough to GUESS... (yeah, I know, it's the "wrap up" so they're trying to get the show over with...). For all this movie's stunning visual effects I couldn't (and can't) get past the stupidity of the script. Shame on Spielberg for not growing past his own drippy sentimentality into recognizing that a man, alone, faced with this kind of terrifying onslaught, could (should) have been the way this film ended -- family blown away, scorched, bloodied earth extending for miles around him. Utter isolation in desolation -- the BIG human fear -- a reality until (miraculously), the aliens begin to die, due to a common cold virus. I won't even go into Cruise's performance; now that he's shown himself to be a complete nut-case with a huge bank account, ranting on the TODAY show (and elsewhere), I couldn't even engage in caring about his character in this film.