unimaginative junk

Rating: 1/10 (30 June 2005)

The film is directed as an Action-Adventure rather than as a Horror-thriller. If only it had been directed by the Steven Spielberg who directed Jaws, or by the Ridley Scott who directed Alien. Instead, Spielberg has made forgettable junk, cobbled together too quickly, with far too little imagination. Apart from a decent enough alien fighting machine, this was an artless pastiche of many superior versions of this overused story. If you are not going to re-imagine a story, why bother telling it? This screenplay was barely written at all, it feels like it was jammed together over a couple of conference call story meetings.
The people were either uninteresting (Tom Cruise) or poorly played (Tim Robbins). Dramatic set pieces such as the alien probe searching for humans in the basement have been done better in other movies. In this case, the basement scene had no real dramatic tension and it played interminably. Tom Cruise's character's decision on how to deal with Tim Robbin's character might have been believable if it had been sudden and impulsive but instead the lead up to it was needlessly drawn out and ridiculously sentimentalized at the same time.
The burning train praised by so many critics was to me a wasted sequence - it appeared almost like a bunch of people on screen stopped to watch a short film of a burning train racing past. How much better if they had been waiting to be rescued by that train and then saw it coming and had to run to escape before it crashed burning into the train station. Yes, that is stolen from Day of the Triffids but so much else about this patched together script was stolen, they might as well have stolen that, too. Then, in panicked desperation, people doing something as irrational as getting on board a slow-moving ferry would have been almost believable.
I give this a 1/10 because Steven Spielberg has said that he has the power to make any movie he wishes. In that case, there is no excuse for this one not being a classic.