No lessons learned from War of The Worlds.

Rating: 4/10 (29 November 2005)

No lessons learned from War of The Worlds.-

A million years ago, a far-more-intelligent & superior alien race buried thousands of death machines (huge Tripods) underground, which have remained undiscovered because they were apparently cleverly hidden "in-between" where all municipalities on Earth would ever lay water and sewer lines. Anyway, in 2005, members of this non-specific alien race return in the form of lightning-bolts to pilot the Tripods out of the ground. First, the Tripod monsters announce their presence with an unimaginative, steamboat-like "HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK!" Then, they proceed to terrorize curious onlookers who must all be thinking, "Wow, a 900-foot gigantic, scary-thing just erupted out of the ground. I think I will get much closer and see if I can read the Industrial-Light-&-Magic copyright on its leg."
There are attempts to parallel the attacks from these gigantic-force-field-protected-alien-machines to terrorism, providing our first indication that Steven Spielberg REALLY needs a vacation.
The alien machines spend a good part of the movie disintegrating people, and conversely, another part of the movie harvesting people (to use as fuel?). I guess the aliens had no more idea of their purpose than then we, other than one obvious objective, which was to prevent Tom Cruise from getting his loudmouth daughter to Boston to reunite with her Mommy. Luckily, Mommy happens to be vacationing in the only neighborhood in the entire movie that remains protected from the alien's widespread destruction. Maybe it is an Historic district.
Of course, the movie looks and sounds great (except for the steamboat honk). The DVD's optional DTS (Digital Theater Systems) encoded soundtrack was crisp and powerful, providing deep, tight bass, clear voices, and provides a more accurate surround-sound experience than the standard Dolby Surround encoding. But, the impressive DTS surround-sound experience could not cure the film.
Do they make it to Mommy? Do they escape a thousand alien machines? Well, at a point seemingly chosen to help provide a profitable running time, the alien machines suddenly begin to die for no explained reason, but it is implied that the "far-more-intelligent, superior alien race" caught a cold. This allows Cruise to get his daughter to Mommy's. It also allows him to reunite with his angst-ridden teenage son, who somehow arrives there first, even though we saw him intentionally walk directly into a cataclysmic explosion an hour earlier.
So, the aliens die from a cold...like in the film "Independence Day." Oh, but wait, those were different aliens, and that was a "computer" virus. But why didn't THESE aliens learn any lessons from when they were here back in 1953? More importantly, why didn't Hollywood?
PK