A waste of time and money.

Rating: 2/10 (3 January 2006)

I was surprised to find that this film was incredibly ill-made. I would expect much more from a seasoned director like Steven Spielberg and a well-known lead actor like Tom Cruise. The four actors with the most screen time (Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Justin Chatwin and Tim Robbins) all delivered half-hearted displays of acting. The plot was neither solid nor very true to the book. The writing was mediocre. The characters were shallow and poorly imagined. The film was also filled with inconsistencies and plot holes. For example, the 3-legged alien walkers were supposedly buried underground for a million years. Anything, even something made of mysterious "alien metal" would decay to the point of being unusable, if not non-existent, over the course of a million years. It was the many small mistakes and inaccuracies that made this film unbearable. The only thing that made me give this anything better than a 1 were the special effects, which were rather nice to look at. DO NOT BOTHER.