No Wonder Tom Cruise Went Crazy...

Rating: 1/10 (22 July 2005)

...After this, how could he not? Cruise's PR tour for "War of the Worlds" has been infamously disastrous. Cruise seemingly went crazier and crazier with each show he appeared on. No movie has had PR this bad since Bill Cosby publicly begged people not to see "Leonard Part Six", his own personal disasterpiece.
Well, there's a reason Cruise is acting the way he is. It's the movie. "War of the Worlds" is so vapid, shallow, redundant, and pointless that it becomes almost palindromic: it starts out dull, and it ends dull. The middle part isn't just dull, it's insipid too. This film is so full of plot holes, enormous leaps of faith, impossibilities, and continuity mistakes that I wonder if Spielberg even hired a script supervisor.
Here's the plot: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, and some other kid I've never heard of (so far as I remember) run away from gigantic alien machines that have been buried under our feet for millions of years. I'm not sure how we never noticed them while laying pipelines and subway tunnels down, but this doesn't matter to Spielberg. Along the way the trio encounter crazed people running for their own lives, a plane crash with no bodies in sight, which is never explained, and other general destruction. This is "Armageddon" without the giant rock.
The movie carries on like this for two hours. I got so bored I was begging for a gun to magically appear in my hand so that I might shoot myself in the face and end the pain by the time Hour One was three-quarters over. You can imagine how desperate I became as the film progressed.
I've seen films with mistakes and plot holes, but "War of the Worlds" seems to be based on them rather than just having them. A plane crashes straight into a house where Cruise and company are hiding out, and yet it doesn't crush the van in the driveway, allowing them to drive away. Mind you, the entire neighborhood was flattened by this crash. The crash has no victims. Dakota Fanning's character remains clueless, despite looking the slimy martian bastards in the face, until the very end of the film. The rest of the time she asks why "the terrorists" are attacking. Does she think that people who had to steal jet planes to attack us only four years ago could possibly have ten-mile tall machines of mass-destruction, and just neglected to use them previously? Does this film have any right to draw comparisons between itself and the worst attack ever led on US soil? Spielberg apparently thinks he has that right, and for this he should be shunned, fired, and banned from all Hollywood studios. It's a disgusting thing to do. He knows it, and he doesn't care. Steven Spielberg is not only a hack director, but a sick freak as well. I will never ever regret saying that. I'll also never regret vowing to never ever see another of his films ever again. I may just throw out my as yet unwatched copy of "Schindler's List" in protest.
The only good thing about this movie is the special effects. Well, at least for a little bit. The first appearance of a martian machine climbing out of the ground is impressive. But once it started killing people just so Spielberg could use sights of genocide to jerk our tears, I became completely disgusted with the movie as a whole. "just so Spielberg can use sights of genocide to jerk our tears". Frankly, this sounds like a possible plot description for "Schindler's List", so maybe I'm not wrong to throw it out. Anyway, it's not like I can recommend the film based purely on the look of it's effects. That would be like giving Jennifer Lopez an Oscar for "Enough" just because she's attractive.
"War of the Worlds" is a shameful, vile film. Not only does it assault our senses, but it also insults our intelligence and uses allusions to a national tragedy to tug our heart strings. Steven Spielberg is a despicable person for making this, and the cast should be ashamed to have appeared in such a movie. The only people who can be proud are the special effects team, who made the creatures come to life beautifully. It's too bad they're used to progress such an evil plot.