Diseased Imagery Gallery

Rating: 3/10 (25 May 2009)

Tom Cruise plays an armhole with two kids, Dakota Fanning, who primarily screams, and some kid who hates everything and needs a good beating.
Aliens have been waiting underground for thousands of years to attack us, and apparently, in a gaping oversight, have forgotten their hand sanitizer.
So, for some very obvious reason (that escaped me) they were waiting eons (what is an eon?) until we have nukes, flying machines, infrared weapons capability and the slinky, for this attack.
They generate electrical storms to arm their large metal ships (which are apparently, invisible to satellite imaging) with crew, then pop out of the ground like Jehovas Witnesses and the rest is carnage. In the beginning they shoot people, turning them to dust, but not their clothing. (Except the people who dress at Banana Republic)- Yet cannot seem to hit Tom Cruise, (who once played a high school football player.) Tom gets his kids, the crying one and the obnoxious one, and head off towards Boston with the only working minivan in north jersey (one must suspect that there would have been a plethora of Camarros)and curiously the only moving vehicle is not fired on. (But then again, Tom Cruise once played a NASCAR driver). oh yeah , the aliens throw a tanker on his block and kill Michael Scott's girlfriend Holly, which is a shame since she was such a cool character why did they take her off? But I digress. Along the way we see several scenes of destruction, including a jet void of passengers that lands on his exwife's house but does not fully disintegrate nor burn. Then some TV news people eagerly take the food from the airplane, how bad is their cooking? and Tom lets his unarmed teenage son join a mechanized battle against the invincible aliens before basement crashing with Tim Robbins. Eventually we discover that the aliens are drinking our blood, instead of turning us to ash, (so Biblically we go from Genesis to the Gospels)therefore Tom has to kill Tim (after all Tom once played a samurai) to avenge the people everywhere who are sick of Tim Robbins and his wife and their left-leaning politics.
then Tom gets captured by a death machine, when he is being sucked up its sphincter (50 points for me for using that word in a review) he gets pulled out by some other people, but he left the grenades inside (after all he did fight in Vietnam once) and destroys the machine. then Tom gets to Boston only to learn that the machines are hyper allergic to bird poop, and somehow his son has survived, apparently either the aliens couldn't stand him either or he smelled of bird droppings.Or both.
that was the movie, there were no characters to care about, lots of death and panic, and not a single musical number that you left the theater humming to yourself. A good date movie for the followers of Charles Manson or Demi Moore.