Good!

Rating: 9/10 (22 September 2006)

Yes, very good.
SPOILERGASM
Some folk have complained about the fact that the some electronic devices stopped working and some didn't. This is exactly what would happen if the cause of the electronic failures was that well-understood scientific phenomenon (and often pondered candidate as a basis for weaponry), *a massive electromagnetic pulse*, which looks reasonable from all that lightning. EMPs only affect devices that are *already switched on* (This would include the entire power grid). Anything switched off would work fine *after* the pulse.
Also there have been mutterings about the aliens planning it for millions of years. Well, who's to suppose the aliens were planning an *invasion*? A colonisation is certainly at least one of their goals, but it's quite possible that they had no idea that humans were on Earth at all! This dovetails nicely with the alien bods looking in Tim Robbin's basement scritching their heads over all his basement stuff.
For all we know, cows blood would have been just as good...
There's also been annoyance that certain characters turn out not to have perished, well, I think Spielberg's allowed ONE of these given how much hell he's been giving everybody throughout the entire movie.
POST SPOILER CIGARETTE...
Anyway, all that stuff aside, it's all very affecting. The effects are excellent and thankfully the CGI doesn't try any of those impossible POVs that have been plaguing Hollywood. It's all done from ground level, only one annoyingly disorientating swooping sequence. This brings about a very tight atmosphere, very tense. The war machines are well-designed, clearly alien without being hokey, but they still look and sound like machines. The harvesting / fertilising sequences are *bloody scary*.
The plot's a bit unidirectional. It reminds of Grant Morrison's writing in places, when Morrison's at his most unidirectional he tends to up the scale of whatever's going on when he needs a change, in this movie Spielberg's direction is similarly one-track but when he needs something to change he just drops the protagonists in it even deeper. I'm a sucker for this trick.
Not *ten* stars, because he didn't go the whole hog. He could very easily have done even worse things to those protagonists, or even some of the extras, that would be more like a proper war laid bare, and he held back. He should have gone the whole hog.
Having said that, the feeling of the mad-eyed hopelessness faced by an utterly overwhelmed invaded country he projected onto that screen was shockingly clear and, perhaps, almost, sobering.
A feat of the imagination...