Movie stickler digs in

Rating: 4/10 (8 July 2005)

I watched this film in the theatres, and it's a good thing that I did. The visuals were fantastic, but I felt that it carried the movie. The alien crafts and the aliens themselves looked very real. In most scenes, you would be hard pressed to find out if they were electronic puppets or computer animated... As far as the aliens of this film go in a writing and story sense, I thought the individual scenes were written well, but some of the plot concepts regarding the aliens were terrible. Let's start with their technology: Death rays that vaporize people and leave their clothes behind, but no infra-red or heat tracking systems. Shields to block bullets and missiles, but no water-purification (or at least not implemented). While watching this movie, I thought the aliens weren't given enough credit. For a species that had been monitoring our planet for thousands of years, they seemed to have forgotten to test the water (which is ultimately their undoing). I did, though, have some problems with this film. First of all, there were several continuity errors that I won't actually specify so as not to give the movie away. But I will say that Cam-corders require electricity, Mr. Spielberg. Along the same lines as continuity problems; there were several convenient story devices in this film. For instance: when the characters come out from hiding in the basement, they discover the street in utter shambles... except the house they were in... which seems to be in tact for the most part. This kind of thing happens more than once. The character development felt like a good attempt, but I found myself not caring whether most the characters live or die. As much as I like Miranada Otto and Dakota Fanning in this film, I didn't care if they died. As for the ending... I thought it was abrupt and slightly silly. But those endings never really bothered me, and so I'll just say that I smiled and nodded when the movie was over.