Feel-bad movie of the summer!

Rating: 4/10 (28 June 2005)

Spielberg! Tom Cruise!! A tried-and-true sci-fi classic by H. G. Wells!!! Together they should add up to a great summer popcorn movie, but here's how to squander a golden opportunity by making all the wrong choices: Make sure there isn't a single sympathetic human character in the entire film, so that we'll be sure to root for the Martians (or whatever they are). Make your central family so quarrelsome, incurious, irrational, and just plain annoying that we long to escape from their company -- and then force us to spend the entire movie seeing all the events through their eyes. Let Tom Cruise bicker with his teenage son in a tedious sitcom way while civilization is crumbling around them and hundreds of people are being vaporized. Encourage Dakota Fanning to scream, scream, scream throughout the entire film so that we can savor the joy of having a little kid screaming shrilly in our ears. Take a heart-meltingly beautiful actress like Miranda Otto and make her pregnant so that she looks pudgy and matronly -- and since she's the Mother Figure, don't give her anything interesting to do. Have human beings -- who might be expected to scatter and flee at giant killer tripods -- crowd together and gaze up at these lethal 200-foot-tall machines with a dumb awestruck wonder approaching zombiehood (even a herd of sheep would display more survival skills). In particular, at the first sight of the first alien war machine thrusting up from the pavement somewhere in Queens, NY, have your multiethnic crowds assemble around the widening hole just inches from the edge and peer inside, even as the sidewalk begins to crack and buildings around them fall to pieces. Give the hero a Quest, a Goal, that's really dumb and just this side of pointless -- in this case, somehow getting himself and his two kids from NYC to Boston, where his ex-wife is -- but don't reveal how he manages, improbably, to get there, and don't let us know why he assumes she (or anyone in Boston, for that matter) would still be alive. Don't give any other human beings any direction or motivation at all, but instead just show them shuffling like refugees down roads, bound God knows where, or fleeing together in a panic -- for no logical reason -- onto a ferry boat which has no chance of getting away and no particular safe place to go. Wherever humans are, have them congregate in groups so that the lethal tripods can pick them off and slaughter them more easily. Have the motivation and intentions of the aliens themselves remain thoroughly obscure: At first, when they presumably want to rid the earth of mankind, don't have them use poison gas (as I seem to recall Wells did), but instead let them content themselves with firing death rays, like target practice, at individual fleeing humans -- the most inefficient method of extermination imaginable. Then, midway through, suggest that -- for no particular reason -- the aliens are vampires who seek human blood. When all of metropolitan New York, or perhaps the whole East Coast, is plunged in a blackout, have the hero and his family reach an unnamed suburb at nighttime where, miraculously, the one house they're seeking is flooded with light: the only house on the street, standing empty but with every light inexplicably burning (and no other humans around to investigate). Have the hero be a derrick operator and presumably something of a technical expert, but don't use any of his expertise during the course of the story. While the eponymous War is raging, don't use the benefits of modern computer graphics to show us what's interesting (such as a battle between the Air Force and the aliens); keep the action for what seems a quarter of the film confined to a couple of basements, so that, claustrophobically, we feel as if we're watching a low-budget three-person stage play with all the action going on -- unseen -- outside the windows. Whenever possible show humans screaming, despairing, panicking, and fighting among themselves -- never cooperating or displaying any ingenuity. Take the one potentially interesting, sympathetic character (Tim Robbins), the one character who has a dream, however crackbrained, of resistance to the invaders, and quickly turn him into a loony that will engage Cruise in a fight to the death. When, in the time-tested Spielberg manner, you have the Family Reunited At The End, stage the scene in such a hokey, amateurish, improbable way that the audience around me laughed derisively.