decent SFX, lame story, bad acting

Rating: 4/10 (1 December 2005)

"War of the Worlds" 2005 follows same blueprint of as other countless Hollywood action movies - pack your best special FXs in first 20 mins and then add rest of the movie that feels like afterthought. So if you are in a hurry just watch 20 mins of the WotW and turn it off - since you have seen the rest of the movie hundred times already - "father fights against bad monsters and (mostly) against bad people to keep kids alive and he succeeds due to his fist/gun prowess". But that is minor flaw - you do not rent WotW and expect masterpiece like "Oldboy".
What bothered me the most was LAZY writing.
C'mon people - aliens coming from other side of Galaxy to Earth to EAT PEOPLE? It might have been shocking in Well's times but it was ridiculous in this movie. No alien race with enough know-how to build giant walking robots then bury them inside Earth crust millions and millions of years ago (only to have them ready for action once tasty plumpy humans have evolved - interesting corollary on Intelligent Design, eh?) would be stupid enough not to know HOW to make their own SPAM!
You can sortta believe in Martians coming to Earth from their dusty cold planet and going bananas for human flesh but in case of the Spielberg's remake I would expect much smarter morbid premise. Same goes for ending when aliens are wiped out by microbes - you would expect that race such smart and evolved would at one point discover anti-bacterial soap.
To summarize: Special FX are good.
Acting is bad - especially two kids (both spoiled brats with girl being a cliché "tiny old neurotic" with horrible piercing shrieking scream).
Story is dumb.
In fact: If aliens feasting on humans is main reason you want to watch it then you will not even see that much of it. Way BETTER movie in that genre was Peter Jackson's "Bad Taste" - about alien fast food company scouts landing in New Zealand in search of fresh humans brains. Shot for probably 0.001% of the cost WotW it is much more fun to watch.