Take a huge amount of money, an Oscar winning director, famous actors and churn out CRAP

Rating: 1/10 (27 August 2005)

Words can't describe how awful this movie is. Its only saving grace was the sound effects. I suggest this film goes straight to DVD bundled with Artificial Intelligence AI and Hook as a package entitled 'Spielberg - The Ultimate Crap Collection'. What ever drove Spielberg to release such a badly conceived and poorly assembled movie? The plot was full of holes, the ending was ludicrous and at best the characters were hollow and unsympathetic. Especially annoying was Dakota Fanning's character. With so much screaming I started to wish she would be vapourised by the aliens early in the movie. It is reported that filming started as late as last November and the the movie was rushed through for a summer 2005 release. Judging on the final result I would suggest that at most, a week would have been more than enough time to churn out this appalling excuse for what should have been a great movie. How many more other authors 'classic' works can Spielberg maul to death with his lame re-workings of truly great stories? First J.M Barrie's Peter Pan (Hook) and now H.G.Wells' War of The Worlds. Who is his next victim going to be? I see he is currently working on an Abraham Lincoln Project, perhaps in Spielbergs' reworking of this factual story Lincoln only gets slightly wounded instead of assassinated, and goes on to become Emperor of America with John Wilkes Booth as his life long friend for another happy ending.