Worth the money!

Rating: 8/10 (29 June 2005)

Possible spoilers ahead Feels good when you go to the movies and you come out feeling like you got your money's worth. I enjoyed this movie and like others pointed out, really liked the cinematography and styling that Spielberg used for the effects / action scenes. I vaguely remembered the original 50's version and recall some similarities but this movie seemed quite different too. While I recall the 50's flick aliens ships had shields too, they were flying saucers with sparklers for the main gun rather than the tripods in this movie. Also I don't remember them abducting anyone and were bent solely on destruction. Never read the book, so I don't know which is a closer adaptation. Obviously the reason for their destruction remains the same, which is why it surprised me that other posters said that it ends abruptly, which is how I remembered the original one ending too. So I was not surprised at all by this, little confused as to why others were though.
I have to say the entry sound the Tripods made was pretty damn scary, and is an important part of the fear factor for this movie, that being said, see it in a movie theater with good sound, otherwise this important and scary aspect is lost. I thought the acting was good and both cruise and his daughter put on good performances and made it believable. The son kind of bugged me, but not to the point of affecting my opinion of the movie itself.
While I vaguely remembered the basement scene in the original movie where they chopped off the head of the robot camera and studied it, I didn't remember Tim Robins character and him needing to be killed as it happened in this movie. It was the only scene that kind of bugged me a little bit, well that and why that guys video camera worked. Speaking of which I couldn't tell what part that guy had fixed on the car to make it run again, but I'm guessing that only the transportation lightning affected the power of things and not the actual robots roasting everyone.
I guess the one other concept that bugged me was the theory that the robots were always there and the aliens simply beamed down there and then broke through the surface to start attacking everyone. It raises some interesting questions like why didn't we ever discover any of these tripods before the aliens beamed down in them? And if they had been down there for thousands of years and all, why didn't the aliens take over the planet back then? Why bury thousands of robot machines all over the world only to take it over hundreds of years later? Doesn't make sense to me unless I just missed something.
On a larger scale, I didn't make sense to me why you would have these walking Tripods reeking havoc all over when you could more effectively and efficiently kill off people with some sort of harmful ray gun like in Independence Day or some sort of biological weapon or something. Granted the movie was much more entertaining and action packed the way it was done. I guess while watching it it just occurred to me that these things are grounded with there 3 long legs, don't appear to move that fast (meaning you could out drive / out run them) and were killing people individually with the lighting guns that tuned people into popcorn dust. It would take quite a long time to exterminate city's that way. Kind of like trying to kill every bug in the house by spraying each one when you could bug bomb the whole place. I do realize that the book was written back in the 30's and all, but still just doesn't seem very realistic I guess.
Anyways getting little off topic. I did think the movie kept you glued to your seat throughout and kept me entertained the whole time