Would've been great on Mystery Science Theater!

Rating: 3/10 (7 July 2005)

Too bad MST 3K is no longer around. I'd love to see Tom Servo, Crow and Mike Nelson tear this turkey apart. One can only hope that Spielberg's WOTW will inspire them to come out of retirement. It's somewhat discomforting that one of our generations finest filmmakers has produced something deserving the same treatment as the Gamera series, Lost Continent and the Crawling Eye (OK, I rather liked that one when I was a kid), but that's what happens when you combine a completely illogical premise with irritating characters and a story so full of holes and absurd occurrences that one wonders if the crew ever watched the final product before releasing it.
Let's see if I've got this right. You're an alien civilization with technology that allows not only interplanetary travel (at least this since in this edition of the story the aliens are not explicitly said to be from Mars) but transport of heavy equipment over such distances on a scale required to overcome the defenses of a populated world. You either 1) undertake this gigantic enterprise without first ascertaining what would be required to overcome the natives or 2) for some unfathomable reason, decide to transport an army of immense military machines complete with radiation beams that are presumably capable of destroying anything known to your civilization and defensive shields that can presumably withstand any weapon known to your civilization to a world whose most advanced species is a bunch of hominid wannabes that are just discovering the joy of bipedalism. Why not just take over then?
I don't buy the argument that they couldn't do the "being" transport until the 21st century (on Earth). Why would they even consider sending the machines until they were sure they could send the operators? If such a long period elapsed between the delivery of the machines and the onset of the invasion would there still be knowledge that the machines were sent and where they were located (I mean what planet, let alone what coordinates on the planet!)? The machines must have been delivered before any recorded history on Earth otherwise their arrival would've been, you know, NOTICED!!!. And if the machines were left where they were originally buried, the incessant probing, imaging and digging of the Earth by modern industrial civilization would've uncovered at least one of the gadgets located say, RIGHT ACROSS THE BLEEPING HUDSON RIVER FROM NYC!!!. Even a crew of incompetent malcontents from the local cable monopoly might've accidentally stumbled on one.
I wouldn't condemn a movie merely for having plot holes (Casablanca, one of my all-time favorites, has some real howlers). The problems with War of the Worlds 2005 are not just plot holes they are major, debilitating flaws in the premise of the story that lower the plausibility below the level to which one's disbelief can reasonably be suspended. I'm not familiar with the novel but the original film avoids these problems by having the machines arrive at the time the invasion is to begin. The original film is also immeasurably better for being told from the point of view of a scientist who is in contact with the higher echelons of the government and military that are providing the defensive reaction. This gives the big picture view that gets short shrift in the 2005 edition.
Spielberg's choice to tell the story from the point of view of a random citizen caught up in the maelstrom has possibilities, but suffers from the injection of the superfluous subplot involving Ray's (Cruise's character) parenting issues. It's not that parenting issues are unimportant or make an uninteresting film subject it's that they might be a bit less imperative than say, oh, I don't know ... AN ALIEN INVASION OF THE EARTH!!!! Not only that but Ray and his bratty kids are all completely insufferable as characters and give us little reason to be interested in their plight above any other person's. Making them the focus of this movie detracts from the central theme. To go back to my Casablanca example, the characters are so compelling that one can look past the obvious flaws in the story. Here, the insufferable characters accentuate the bad story.
There are some great moments in this film: the burning train, Tim Robbins' scenes, the overturning of the ferry, the mob scene. However, in this case, the whole is much less than the sum of the parts. The original film is somewhat hokey early fifties sci-fi fare. But, it's a lot better than Spielberg's edition, which comes off more as a vehicle to sell lunch boxes and action figures than it does as an example of good film-making. I'm not sure why Spielberg felt another edition of War of the Worlds was necessary but whatever point he was trying to make was lost on me.