Utter Tripe

Rating: 1/10 (20 August 2006)

Stevie Spielberg has inflicted some dross on the movie going public in his time but this insult surely has got to rank among the worst films of all time. He takes the greatest Sci Fi novel ever and turns it into sewage with his cheesy road trip from New York to Boston with the Idiot family.........
Tom Cruise (who is a decent actor...though not in this) plays Ray Ferrier an ordinary Joe with the usual soap opera problems ....your Mission Mr 'Ferrier' (if you choose to accept it) will be to stumble along in the only car left in America in working order via roads that never seem to suffer any major obstructions, even when hit by a Jumbo Jet, with a pair of imbecelic children of whom the oldest is the most childish and annoying, whilst pursued by a group of stupid aliens who bury massive three legged war craft under the ground a million years in our past but don't have the brains to kick the ass of the monkeys who inhabit the planet instead waiting until said monkeys have developed nuclear weapons.
The storyline is so utterly stupid a sperm could pick holes in it.........what did the aliens use to bring the tripods to Earth? Spaceships surely......so why did the aliens not just invade earth with spaceships like their mates in Independence Day instead of using lightning bolts to infiltrate clapped out buried tripods that were a million years old and surely were out of date compared to the weapons the stupid aliens would have brought with them a million years later? They would have looked pretty silly if the bloody things had not started.........also rather convenient that we humans who have been digging holes in the ground since we were those monkeys never noticed rather large million year old alien tripods buried under our cities with great foresight by the stupid aliens it must be said....been a bit of a bummer if they had buried one under Krakatoa...
Just seems a rather convoluted plot by these supposedly intelligent creatures when they probably could have kicked our asses without them?
The Human element of the film is pretty thin.....the only characters who are developed are complete arces who I was wishing would die after 20 minutes.........Stevies worst trait though are his endings which are usually complete rubbish but he outdoes himself with WOTW........ Billions die, cities and civilisation is reduced to ash but Ethan Hunt....oops Ray Ferriers cretinous family all amazingly survive in a slightly singed Boston.......there is no sense of loss or tragedy or catastrophe as we are not meant to care about the thousands we have seen reduced to a few clothes fluttering in the breeze by million year old stupid alien technology. Tom's lot are all right so alls well that ends well.....after a series of 'Peril's Of Pauline' type adventures the family is reunited and all is wonderful. The end in itself is rushed in such a way its rendered a complete farce.....maybe Stevie is a fan of The Forgotten..........one minute the world is at the brink of extinction next 'Oh look that stupid alien death machine has fallen over'.......'is there a Starbuck still standing?'.....'well that was exciting officer can we all go home now?'.............. Instead of wasting half an hour with an utterly pointless cameo from Tim Robbins who seems to have went completely insane within the first few hours of the stupid aliens invasion El Cheesmeister could have at least tried to present some kind of storyline rather than fill us in with a few offhand comments via Mad Tims cellar. Yes the Special Effects were fantastic and the scenes with the stupid aliens fighting machines were awesome but the acting was dire, the plot nonexistent and the story itself an insult to the genius of H G Wells...........stick to having your characters talk to hand shaped glove puppets mate and if your follow up Munich is anything to go by leave the serious subjects to people who know what they are doing.... The worth you accrued through Jaws and Schindlers List has made you the most over rated film maker in movie History and this pile of drivel you have foisted upon the cinematic public ranks as the worst garbage you have ever produced.........can I have my £5.50 back by the way :)