A waste of some nice special effects

Rating: 4/10 (16 August 2005)

A somewhat promising start quickly degenerates into a disjointed mess. I won't even mention how difficult it is to accept the perfectly built Cruise (he takes his shirt off in the film) as a blue-collar slob, because this movie has plenty of other problems. What should be an epic film about, well, a War of the Worlds, instead becomes a terribly melodramatic soap opera about Cruise and his misfit kids. And some really annoying kids they are, constantly doing the stupidest thing possible at the moment. I like Dakota Fanning, but I quickly started wishing that the kids would just get killed so we could see more of the aliens. Instead, the film rapidly abandons its one interesting and emotionally impacting scene (the one where Cruise and family deal with the crowd of people) and we spend practically the entire second half stuck in a dingy basement with a histrionic Fanning, a muttering Tim Robbins, and a panic-stricken Cruise, punctuated by a woefully tedious 'hide from the alien tentacle' scene that felt about 30 minutes long.
The movie also badly fails to get across any sense of global danger or devastation. There are only a few very brief scenes of the military trying to fight the tripods, and except for rumors and conjecture from a few random characters, we never have any idea of what is happening in the rest of the world. The film ends with the cryptic narrated statement that "No one lives or dies in vain," but what in the world that has to do with the rest of the film escapes me. Perhaps there was a deep message here that I was too bored to notice, but I seriously doubt it.
The plot holes are also innumerable and blatantly obvious. I won't be specific as to avoid spoilers, but no one noticed huge spaceships buried under the ground for millions of years? Where in the world is the aliens' 'special lightning' COMING from? How does Cruise's car constantly survive unscratched when everything around it is being destroyed? How could the aliens have studied the planet for millions of years and yet apparently know almost nothing about it? This film started out merely average and flawed, but when Cruise and Fanning get to the basement, it becomes downright dull. As cheesy and overacted as it was, I seriously believe that Independence Day was still a far better alien invasion film than this one.