60 Minutes Of This Film Should Have Ended Up On The Cutting Room Floor

Rating: 6/10 (4 August 2014)

I still watch this movie once in a while, but only by skipping past the insipid parts, which are frequent. The annoying over-the-top drama with Cruise & his kids is just plain distracting.
Spielberg's special effects are great! And I find every scene with the alien tripods to be fascinating. But his decision to go Cruise-family-centric with the film left it cluttered with needlessly annoying scenes of conflict thrown in for absolutely no good reason.
Spielberg should have realized in the editing room that he could still save his movie and make it a real classic by trimming the scenes that were distracting from the REAL STARS of the movie, the ALIEN WAR MACHINES! I think Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning are great, they just needed to be incorporated with more subtlety. At least the 1953 version showed more of mankind's attempts to battle the aliens.
The only attempt at a real military combat scene we get in this film is one where Cruise's annoyingly waywardly rebellious son is running up a hill towards some aliens we can't see beyond the rise in the darkness. The way the tanks and Humvees were deployed just looked silly and amateurish, as if a giant invisible child was playing with his toys.
I understand that Spielberg apparently wanted to do War Of The Worlds from the standpoint of a father trying to protect his family during the alien invasion. I'm not against incorporating family drama in a movie. I'm just surprised that an experienced movie-maker like Spielberg did not realize the film just really desperately needed some serious editing out of the many scenes that dragged and pulled. That entire scene when Cruise and his daughter took refuge in the house occupied by Tim Robbins' character was a complete waste of time! I would guesstimate at least 60 minutes of this movie should have ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor.
A much better use of those 60 minutes would have been to incorporate scenes showing the military tactical and strategic response to the invasion. Spielberg should have woven in how the world's governments were responding.....something to give some relief to the claustrophobic movie that came out.