Nothing more than an over the top use of special effects

Rating: 5/10 (5 July 2005)

Unfortunately, Spielberg makes an over the top blockbuster movie without caring about the mistakes in the plot. I'd like to first start out by saying the although Tom Cruise is a wonderful actor, one of the best in Hollywood, he is not believable as the character in the movie. Perhaps it is because he looks to young to play a father or perhaps it's because we've never seen him in a father figure role. So, in the movie, these aliens have been planning this attack for millions of years. They placed these machines deep under the Earth and for some reason, after all of the digging and construction we've done to the Earth , we never found them. Then during this lighting storm, the aliens magically come down through the lightning, through the ground, and into the machines. The first machine comes out of the ground with Tom Cruise watching. It then begins to laser people disintegrating them and causing the sky to be field with raining pants and shirts. Amazingly, although you see the laser hit Tom Cruise several times he does not disintegrate. He then shoves his kids into the only working car and travels days without having to stop and get gas. I'll spare you the boring details of the middle. Towards the end of the movie, we see the alien-machine now using live human bodies to suck their blood and spray all over the environment causing this type of vine to grow. What the purpose of all that was we will never know. Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning are captured by one of the alien tripods, and again amazingly enough there seems to be some grenades and poof their all saved again. The spoiler....at the end everyone realizes the aliens are dying because although they planned the attack for millions of years they failed to realize that they can't survive on our planet because of our organisms that us humans are immune to. The big finally....Tom Cruise makes it all the way to Boston to take Dakota to her mom (Tom's ex-wife in the movie) and they haven't a scratch on them. And boom....there's his son in the doorway. He had lost his son along the way because he wanted to be a man and fight the aliens. Tip....just because it makes money at the theater and is number one at the box office doesn't mean it's a good movie. This movie contains too many unbelievable things.