Not bad but not great either...

Rating: Null/10 (1 July 2005)

Let me start off by saying I'm not a huge fan of Steven Spielberg. But I like most of his movies and I like the War of the Worlds story, so I was really optimistic going into this, but not expecting too much from Spielberg. It delivered some pretty stunning visuals but a lot of the story was a bit hard to swallow. *possible spoilers to follow* For example there is one scene where all of the electrical equipment stops working, even Tom Cruise's character's watch. But then, later in the same scene, people are tape recording what's going on with digital hand-held camcorders! That was ridiculous and there were other ridiculous plot holes. Like when Tom Cruise at the end of the film finds his family/friends in Boston and they are all completely clean! After this huge invasion of the entire planet where almost everybody is killed we're I guess supposed to believe that these people are all clean enough and dressed nicely enough to go to church? Plot holes galore and the writing on this movie wasn't superb, you can see everything coming, but it's shot pretty well and without giving too much away I can just say that a lot of the scenes look fantastic. If you're into great effects that are done right without necessarily caring too much about plot holes you should probably see this on the big screen. I give it 5.5/10