Are you joking?

Rating: 3/10 (28 June 2005)

I saw war of the worlds last night @ the midnight session. I disliked it immensely. firstly let me just say that the 3/10 was wholly for the visual effects, which were very good and there is no doubting it. yet from the minute the handy-cam kept working after everything else that had electricity broke i was ready for a script with plot-holes as big as the ones created by the tripods...and thats what i found. The writing was sub-par, especially for Dakota Fanning's character, who was a super-calm child-genius one minute and a blubbering kid the next (granted that this was done probably on purpose to represent the effect this kind of attack can have on ones mind, but i just thought it went abit overboard.)secondly, whilst yes the film did pose the question of "what would you do if this happened to you", i didn't buy cruise's son's response and i would have rather expected a stronger sense of family to come through, in that it took an attack to make him realise he needs his family, not to go an fight instead. What made me most upset was the ending, it is definitely up in the air. I still didn't understand what exactly killed the aliens. i went with two other people and we all had different opinions. I thought the film was very unsatisfactory, and am astounded to see all the positive commentary on IMDb.