Messy and muddled

Rating: 2/10 (1 July 2005)

I wanted to like War of the Worlds - I really did. I'm convinced that Spielberg still has a few good films left in him, but on this evidence it's hard to see where they are going to come from.
To all extents and purposes, it's just one enormous B-movie that sprawls onto the screen like so many other cumbersome, shallow films have in the past. It's an event movie; the sort of thing you just have to go and watch for fear of being branded a social leper and excluded from most of your friend's conversations for the next six months. Unfortunately, like most other Summer blockbusters in it's genre, it's clunky, emotionless, poorly acted and substitutes style for substance on every level.
The fact that you have a leading man whose name can dwarf the title of the film (both metaphorically and physically) says it all really. Cruise just isn't cut out for this sort of thing any more. Sure, he plays the part of the archetypal arrogant asshole dad pretty well but other than constantly staring, shell-shocked, into the cameras for a good hour there's little else for him to do except be utterly out-acted by his on-screen daughter. Unlike his excellent recent performance in Collateral and his early work as a rouge-ish, likable dick, you just don't have any empathy or sympathy for him here. At times, you're actually hoping the alien tripods cut down the irritating little scientologist in his tracks to allow you to actually try and enjoy the film rather than constantly thinking "oh look, there's Tom Cruise running away from some really expensive CGI". He's got so big that he can't actually play characters any more, and as a result there is no Ray Ferrier in the movie - it's just Tom Cruise.
And then there's the aliens. The reason why the War of the Worlds novel and exquisite Orson Welles-narrated radio play were so good is because they actually instilled some fear into you. Martian invasion was this huge apocalyptic event that brought out the most primitive, animalistic impulses in the people that it affected. Nowadays, of course, we've seen Independence Day. We know that there must be a weakness in the machines and we regard the devastation they cause as unbelievably cool rather than terrifying. In Spielberg's film, the special effects are admittedly top notch but they just lack any emotion. Other than Cruise's (sorry, Ray's) young girl Rachael, you don't really give a monkey's about the thousands - millions, even - of ordinary people who are brutally cut down in an alien wave of terror. Tom and his kids are OK, so it's fine that the rest of the human race has been obliterated. Pah! It may all look very impressive and state-of-the art, but by the last 15 minutes it quickly descends into farce. The aliens' inevitable destruction isn't explained coherently and no-one I spoke to had any idea why the neighbourhood where Tom's ex-wife is visiting had miraculously escaped being destroyed. Did they have their own force filed surrounding their sleepy Boston neighbourhood? Or did the aliens just decide that crushing a white, middle-class suburb would just be too passé for them and their world-domination plans? For two of Hollywood's leading players, this horrible mess of a film is a definite low point of their careers (yes, even more so than Amistad and ET - which still rates as Spielberg's most horribly saccharine alien tale to date, yet it's seen as a masterpiece. Some people have no taste...). If there was any justice in the world, it would have been critically and commercially panned, but of course it won't be.
I'd implore everyone not to watch it, but you know you all will anyway and fill the coffers of a filmmaker and actor who just look like they really can't be bothered trying any more. Just don't complain when you leave the cinema and start to think about asking for your money back.
Oh, and Tim Robbins has really let himself go recently hasn't he? What the hell has Susan Sarandon been feeding him?