Shock and awe

Rating: 3/10 (8 July 2005)

Dakota is as charming as ET ever was. However, her humanism does not settle the major hangups I had watching this, the most expensive movie ever made. I haven't written many of these, but I feel that instead of telling people I didn't like the movie, I will write here why and lie and tell everyone I loved it. Cause I know everyone else will.
It's Dakotas movie. I truly hope she can retire on royalties from this one. Being that this is the most expensive movie ever made, it's strange that the most price worthy asset is a little kid with a strange name. I absolutely can not avoid smiling when she does and this lifts the movie from a 2 to a 3.
This brings me to my problem with the movie: It's playing on my feelings, or lack thereof, of fear of war and the chaos around it. However, as a movie, it just draws lines to the real world (as I understand both the book, the radio"show" and the previous movie all did, 1st, 2nd and cold war... at least I have been told), but it does not do anything else than terrify. Much like a cheap Koraen horror movie, where it horrifies just to horrify, I sit there, with my War Of The World popcorn and feel nothing. If anything I look slightly disconcerted up at the sky and wonder what the point of the latter two hours was. Was it so that you could impress me with special effects, was it to let us watch Tom jog with tight pants, was it to make some kind of weak political protest (casting Tim Robbins as a depraved redneck/lonely man certainly did the trick of that) or was it just to entertain? Well, for me, and who else can I speak for, it did neither of the above. It was the porn of the alien movies, the soapopera of the big budget movies. It had no purpose or answer, just some cop-outs to justify the idea of having big, bad aliens and let everyone leave with a sigh of relief.
Give me the open ending of Cube or Dawn of the Dead. Give me the humanity of Randy... er..Dennis Quaid from The Day After Tomorrow. Give me a breather. Don't try to R-Kelly impress me with your blingbling-special effects. Don't be a war benefactor.
Just make something that makes me feel something. You have to work for my 6 euros.
And the only one who did that, was Dakota.
And from now on, I will tell anyone who wants to know; "I liked it. It was cool"