Where was the war? Where were the worlds?

Rating: 4/10 (14 July 2005)

Forget about the wasted opportunity. This movie opens with a big 'screw you' shot. Did we need an expensive panning shot to establish that Tom Cruise was a hard-working average Joe? No. He could have been a bartender but that would not have involved wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on a single shot. And what average Joe other than an average Joe played by a movie star drives a classic Mustang? One review I've seen on IMDb says the movie's opening avoids clichés. That might be true but they've avoided clichés by the numbers. There are no surprises in the first half of the movie - right down to Tom Cruise not carrying his young daughter's suitcase up to her bedroom and leaving his pregnant ex-wife to do it. There wasn't any need for this kind of lazy shorthand character exposition as we got the idea he was a useless father later on in the movie. There was no sense of any worlds being involved in a war. Even their drive out of town on the crowded freeway did not convey any excitement or danger, quite possibly because the sequence was obviously shot in a studio. The entire world was just background - extras in Tom Cruise's life - and as such one could not care less whether they were vaporised, had the blood sucked from their body or turned up at convenient moments to give Tom Cruise and the audience information they needed to know about what was happening. The only surprising part of this movie is the murder of the Tim Robbins character by Tom Cruise. Throughout the movie we see nothing but selfishness from Tom and pretty much everyone else and if Spielberg's intention was to punctuate this with the ultimate act of selfishness, he succeeded. However, he stretched my credulity in doing so. Tim Robbins had a sharpened shovel and a number of knives and tools attached to his tool belt. He towers over Tom and yet somehow Tom was able to murder him without getting more than a little scratch. And why murder him anyway? In the old days, a sock in the jaw would either knock a person out or bring them to their senses. And then the whining son turns up at the end. I knew he would the moment the flaming jeep rolled back over the hill. Why did Spielberg have to be so sentimental? Frankly, I didn't shed a tear when I thought he was dead, but I did when he showed up outside the pristine house in the Boston suburb. Predictable (apart from the premeditated murder), lame and with CGI effects that did nothing for me. If Hollywood really wanted to give us great entertainment they would dazzle us with the unexpected. A real Hitchcokian moment would have been to kill off Tom Cruise in the first fifteen minutes and up the stakes for everyone involved, including the audience. Instead, Spielberg gave us a bizarre combination of the sickly sentimental and the sickly harsh.