Almost as silly as Scientology's aliens

Rating: Null/10 (13 October 2009)

Is this the sequel to "E.T."? The brown monster went back to his home planet, described Spielberg and Drew Barrymore to his brethren, and then they made the only decision that made any sense: destroy all humans.
A remake of a truly idiotic 50s flick. Trust Spielberg not to have made it much more intelligent than the original. I can certainly see the mountains of effort that Spielberg and his jaded special-effects crew put into E.T.'s little blood-sucking pals: they're like a cross between parrots, spiders, and Wall-E. Real scary. Scar-E.
"This is not war. This is extermination," says one of the human buffoons. So why did they call it "War of the Worlds" then? I would have gone for a more edwoodsian, i.e. more suitable title, such as "Attack of the Blood-Sucking Vampires From Space". At least that name would act as a kind of excuse for the movie's considerable silliness.
True to Spielberg's idea of "sci-fi fun", there's the obligatory smart- ass kid(s). A lot of hysterical bitch-screaming by the girl. But considering she's Cruise's kid, no wonder she's so mentally unstable. Daily lashings of breakfast-accompanying sectarian brainwashing will turn any child into a mess. I don't think she was screaming because Earth was being invaded; I believe she screams like this all the time. "I want a different daddy!"
Not only does she scream 2,315 times from start to finish, but her father and brother keep carrying her around as if she were either an invalid, badly wounded, or 5 years old. She's around 12, healthy as a pit-bull. (Alone the incessant screaming attests to that). If anything, she should be in better physical shape than Cruise, who is almost as short as her, and rather old by now. SHE should have been carrying HIM! Sure, that would have elicited a few unwanted(?) laughs, but it's not as if WOTW is "2001: A Space Odyssey"...
Many idiotic/funny scenes, such as when Cruise & co. get mobbed. He fires a shot, and INSTANTANEOSLY everyone stops in their tracks, goes silent, as if a single bullet-shot (amidst all the chaos hardly a note- worthy event) would get a foam-at-the-mouth, rabid mob to suddenly cease all destructive activities. In fact, the entire movie is like this: Spielberg's masses of runaway humans all behave in pretty much the same way in any given situation. Not much variety. Spielberg would have us believe that a dimwit like Tom Cruise turns out to be the most sensible/intelligent individual in the country! If that's true, we're all in trouble...
Cruise eventually ends up on a farm, the residence of a mentally challenged man. I mean Tim Robbins, of course. And then Cruise starts singing and you know that Spielberg had lost his tiny mind, much like Cruise when he bounced up and down Oprah's couch, or like Tim when he thought he understood enough about world politics to start speaking publicly about it.
Michael Madsen had stated that Robbins imitated him in WOTW. And imitated poorly, I might add. Robbins is a rank amateur (even worse than expressionless, baby-faced Cruise): the son a popular country singer, i.e. your run-of-the-mill nepotistic offspring, with the I.Q. of a Scientology manual and the acting/directing talent of Pia Zadora's right toe.
More spielbergian malarkey comes during the alien-stares-at-mirror scene. I've seen cats who figure out sooner that they're staring into their own image. An intergalactic civilization that hadn't invented the mirror yet... That's SS for ya Spielberg's movies are full of extinct lizards with high IQs and "advanced" aliens who act like morons. What an intellectual this Oscar-obsessed Tinseltown nerd is...
Perhaps the funniest scene is Cruise pinning down his son, while observing the kidnapping of his daughter happening nearby. "What shall I do??" he must have thought. "Should I keep sitting on my son's stomach, or should I rush to save my daughter from these annoying do-gooders??" He makes an astonishing decision: he chooses to stay seated on his son a little while longer, and that made me laugh for an entire minute. His son wanted to battle the aliens with his bare fists, while his daughter screamed every 5 seconds: ample proof that Scientology simply doesn't work, at least not in the child-rearing department.
Aliens are playing hide-and-seek with them, yet what are Cruise and Robbins doing? They engage in Silent Shotgun Arm-wrestling. I really don't know what else to call it! Just like a Marxist and a Scientologist to engage in puerile activity at the worst possible time.
"Not my blood, not my blood!" screams Robbins. Relax, Tim! Who the hell would want your blood? That inferior produce The aliens would have skipped that particular "feast". Speaking of which, the WALL-Es employ a rather wasteful blood-sucking method: they impale a human, then suck what little blood there is left after they'd already spilt more than half of it all over the ground. Sort of like wanting to drink milk by smashing the bottle against a wall: really, really wasteful.
The end features the obligatory soppy spielbergian family reunion scene. SS truly is Hollywood's CHEESE KING. And voilà! Cruise's son is miraculously still alive. There wasn't a dry eye in the house; Oprah- loving housewives were sobbing, the rest were laughing.
So Tim Robbins, the Great American Liberal and opponent of military spending, didn't see any irony in appearing in a movie in which humans needed all the weapons they could get to fight a formidable enemy? But I forgot: the aliens were killed by the flu. Mankind needed no weapons at all. Aliens' preparations for the invasion lasted "a million years" and yet this supposedly highly advanced species never even bothered to check Earth's bacteriological/viral landscape
Evidently, these Spielbergian aliens were beginners in matters of invasion. First time - nice try - but better luck with the next planet. AND DON'T FORGET THE VACCINES!