Anything but brilliant

Rating: 5/10 (28 July 2005)

Spielberg's strong point is definitively the visual part,the plot development is just pathetic, as it was in Saving Private Ryan. This is the typical movie to be watched and enjoyed while your pop corn lasts, afterward it can become really monotonous. It is hard to explain how a trashy van can stay untouched and with not even a flat tire or a shattered glass while a passenger's plane wreckage lies burning just next to it, what necessarily means that such plane crashed during the night before near the vehicle (not even a tank would have resisted, but a dodge caravan yes....what the deuce!). And this is supposed to be science-fiction, what for most people means "fantasy", but even in a sci-fi story some minimal connection with the things and facts experienced in ordinary life shall exist. In a word, the sci-fi stories must have sort of a "believable" factor, something that makes the story, though unreal, at least "possible to imagine". This movie constantly lack of this factor. I've failed to understand, even in sci-fi, how a "superior" race of beings, capable of building mass-annihilation machines with advanced and sophisticated technology before the human race even appeared on earth (a million years before), whom defeated and smashed the most developed country in the world in a couple of days, can just die of an "indigestion" with bacteria or single-cell beings (ooops..this wasn't in our plans!).The main character's son went fighting the tripods (whose killing average was 0,45 seconds for each human) and suddenly appeared in "Boston", safe and clean, in his mother's house (seem the "tripods" felt pity for him!).A bunch of grenades blew within one of the tripods, and its "human" prey, all gathered into a sort of basket, fell onto a tree harmless (not even a scar!) I think they have to apply themselves to produce something more serious. Bad adaptation of the H.G. Wells book...photography and art direction were really good, though.