One of Spielberg's worst

Rating: 4/10 (4 July 2005)

War of The Worlds is full of fantastic special effects, but where it lacks is in story and poor direction. Let me explain.
The movie starts out very well. We learn about the characters, nothing surprising because they are the usual stereotypes. An uncaring father, and his two children who are angry with him for being that way. We soon see a lightning storm which causes everything to shut down, cars, electricity, watches, you name it. Soon after a large tripod comes exploding up out of the earth and quickly proceeds to disintegrate everybody. I liked these scenes and was finding myself getting into the film. I even ignored some of the implausibilities, like someone using a camcorder to film even though everything is supposed to be dead. But after this scene the film starts to slowly get worse and finally disintegrates into and ending so unbelievable that I found myself staring at the screen and going what the ****. However, I'm not finished with my summary yet.
Well the Tom Cruise character, and his two annoying kids, take a van that seems to be the only automobile still running and race away from the scene. Later they stop in another house and manage to survive a plane wreck and also find a convenient path around the plane wreckage to make there way towards Boston where the mother and step father have gone. Yeah right.
They soon take a ferry, which is attacked by the tripods, and manage to get safely away from its capsizing, only to swim onto the opposite shore where they see the US army fighting against the tripods and losing. The son decides he has to see what's going on and tells his father "If you love me you'll let me go." I'm not sure I quoted that completely right but you have the idea.
Well Cruise's character lets the son go and together him and the daughter go into the basement of some crazy guy, played by Tim Robbins. This is where the movie really goes downhill as more time is spent in that basement then on anything going on outside. The Tim Robbins character is totally useless to this film and so is an annoying scene when the snakelike eye comes searching in the basement looking to see if anybody's in there. This was done much better in the original and was not so drawn out. We even have the aliens come down into the basement where the characters are hiding to do nothing but play with a bicycle? Come on. And even they are not that impressive. I think it would've been much better if we had only gotten glimpses of them, like in the original and more superior film.
And now onto this movie's biggest problem, the pacing and the overall storyline. The pacing is extremely choppy and the story itself gives us little to understand. Like why did they come and don't you think they would've learned if the germs on our planet would kill them? When the aliens do attack it is superb, yeah I'll grant it this, but then we have the interaction with the characters. Let me tell you, the scenes involving the characters only succeeded in making me yawn. And since most of the movie was about the Cruise character and his family, well you have my answer to that already.
After all this, we get the inexplicable ending. It was and ending that was so horribly done and so utterly unbelievable, that I almost threw something at the screen before realizing that I was in a movie theater and would probably get in trouble if I did that. I will go no farther with explaining it.
Let me say that this is probably the worse movie that I've seen all summer. The special effects though are very good, but the movie itself has no real heart. Jaws, Duel, and the Indiana Jones movies were all much better as was Minority Report, Spielberg and Cruise's last collaboration.