Minor holes, but overall very real and very scary.

Rating: 8/10 (4 July 2005)

OK by real i don't mean that its a good chance that Martians are buried underneath us at this very point in time and will soon come up and destroy us all, but nevertheless Spielberg's War of the Worlds is one of the most harrowing films i've seen come out of Hollywood in a long time. The images of people running away from the tripods (thank god they were tripods and not hover crafts!! Thanks you Mr 'berg) and being instantaneously puffed out is burnt (no pun intended) onto my memory. I'm glad that he decided to focus on a few imperfect human character rather than offering large scale destruction sequences. I can watch Independence Day for that. This time we're given something different in an alien invasion movie - people involved in the destruction to care about! I'm also glad that the demise of the Martians was brought on by bacteria, just as in the book. What i didn't like was the fact that "God in his infinite wisdom" put the bacteria on the Earth. If God put bacteria on Earth, then he created the Martians on Mars. Why would infinite wisdom reside in killing your own creations? Curious. We always need someone to credit and if it couldn't be a gung-ho Yank, then by Joe it was gonna be the next best thing - a Deity which cannot claim sides, because we allocate him them! Yay us. But aside from these little blunders (If the Martians could get here 1 000 000 years ago, why did they wait until there were people to bother them to invade?) this is still a cinematic event, like all Spielberg films (save The Terminal)