A re-imagining of a re-imagining.

Rating: 6/10 (3 July 2005)

Wells wrote a good story about a technologically superior enemy colonising our planet and displacing the locals. The goal was to try and teach people who advocated the colonisation of Africa, what it was like to be on the receiving end.
Unfortunately the world has moved on since then. A modern tank (120mm sniper rifle + 60 ton metal heat sink) would be a good match for the original tripods. Gerald O'Neil showed us in the 1980s how then technology could easily be used to create space-colonies which in many ways are better than planets. More to the point, we don't colonise any more.
So how do you update WotW? Well the Iraq War from the PoV of Iraqis wouldn't have been far wrong. Nor would Mars Attacks; that at least addressed the issue of why the Martians would want to attack. Or you don't, and you tell the original story.
Spielberg has done none of these things though. He has taken a classical piece of literature and turned it into a cheap disaster/horror film. Worse than that, he has castrated it by giving it such a low age-rating. The true horror of what such an invasion would mean (and the horror of American soldiers are doing in other countries right now) is therefore safely locked away from anyone who might be shocked by it.
He's taken the 1950s film and warped it still further by revelling in evil and inhumanity of the invaders. Where as the whole point of the original story was that the invaders were doing nothing that the so called 'innocent' country had already done to countless others.