Another average film from the master of average films.

Rating: 6/10 (9 December 2011)

I had just finished reading the book and as usual I decided that I would pick up one of the movies to see how closely it followed the book. While there are actually a number of movies based on this book, this was not only the latest but also the only one that I could find in the video shop. The funny thing was that I remember from a book that I would read as a child about there being flying machines with long antennas that would shoot across the landscape, however in the book there was a hint that the Martians were building flying machines, but died before they could finish them, and there were no Martian flying machines in this film, which I guess is a good thing because it sticks a little closer to the book than otherwise.
Anyway, other than the setting changing from the turn to the 20th Century to the turn of the 21st Century, and the location changing from the United Kingdom to the United States, the movie sort of followed the book. My first impression of this film was that it was a disaster movie, and ran like one. The original HG Wells novel did run similarly, with the protagonists attempting to get through London and trying to find his wife, however I do not believe that HG Wells was intending on writing a disaster story in the vein of the modern Hollywood style. He was writing science-fiction and the way the book goes it is clear.
Anyway, the movie opens with Tom Cruise, who is a divorced dock worker, having his kids dropped off while his ex-wife goes with her husband to visit their parents in Boston. Cruise's children do not particularly like him, but then a huge storm drifts over and lightning bolts repeatedly strike the ground. It turns out that these lightning bolts where teleporting martians into a number of buried war machines, and when they rise from the ground, they begin destroying everything in sight. Thus Cruise takes his kids and the cars, and attempt to get to Boston.
Really this movie is a special effects extravaganza (as can be expected from Speilburg, and I am not surprised that he wanted to create this movie) where our protagonists attempt to get from point A to point B without dying. The red weed is in the movie, which tells me that Speilburg has at least read the book (and I would be very surprised if he hadn't), but the poisonous black cloud is not. Also, the martians all die from the common cold rather than anything that the humans do (and in fact they have great difficulties in fighting back even with modern weaponry, though in the book, they do manage to destroy some with 19th Century artillery). It was also a little odd that the son rushes off to join the army and attempt to fight the invaders, but at the end turns up in Boston alive.
Yeah, this is an okay movie, I did enjoy it, but it is not necessarily something that I would watch over and over again. I do prefer the book, but then Cruise is a dock worker and not a biologist as in the book. Also the movie is obviously for general consumption rather that being targeted to a specific audience, though I must admit that the original book was not only well received, but it has become a classic. If you like disaster movies with aliens and do not mind known how the film is going to end, then I guess this is worth the hour and a half that the film goes.