A $132,000,000 movie about people arguing

Rating: 2/10 (31 May 2006)

Spielberg has spent obscene amounts of money on a movie about people arguing with each other. The theme I get out of it is that human beings are too stupid and selfish and uncooperative to survive an alien attack. No one ever listens to anyone else in this entire film (despite the fact that there are many more scenes of people arguing than there are scenes of actual alien attacks), and no one ever cooperates on anything. At every point, people make the dumbest decisions possible -- gee, aliens are attacking our major population centers, what should we do? I know, let's head to Boston! Instead of hiding, let's all walk right down the middle of the highway, and get on big boats with all the lights on! The family manages to survive the first attack and get to mom's house, but none of them even attempts to turn on a TV or radio to find out what's going on. Alien ships intent on exterminating 6 billion people spend half an hour combing through the basement of an abandoned house. Half the dialog consists of "Robbie, come back!" and "Rachel, stop screaming." This was a movie about stupid, unpleasant people who deserved to die but just lucked out.