In my humble opinion this was very good.

Rating: 9/10 (8 August 2005)

I have read with interest the first few dozen or so comments on this film and I was amazed that the majority were so negative. It was a brilliant piece of film making. Tom Cruise, never my favorite actor, played the part of the father trying to keep his kids alive and everything together very well.
I read comments about the heat ray, not an efficient method of genocide, and the aliens suddenly becoming vampires, well if anyone had read the story it would have been obvious that the aliens were not out to commit genocide, they had specializes machines to capture humans and they intended from the start to use us as a snack. They only started to use the black smoke in the book after a hidden gun battery wiped out a fighting machine. So I have no problem with the way they behaved. As with the awful 1950's version the aliens had some sort of force field to protect themselves, which I don't like but hey, can't have everything. The end did seem a bit rushed, and as for the untouched street in Boston, well there were plenty of untouched towns/cities in England when London, Coventry, Birmingham and the rest were being flattened in the Blitz, so that's being a little over critical I think.
It would have been nice for Mr Spielberg to have made the film as close to the original story as possible, but I suppose that everything has to be set in the US if they want to attract an American audience, so as I said you can't have everything. All in all a great film and another to add to my collection when the DVD comes out.