Nice effects, ruined by bad decisions

Rating: 4/10 (12 October 2010)

First, let me get the awesome things about the movie into the review: The Fighting Machines are amazing. They mostly fit the book's description concerning tentacle appendages, the baskets on their back (although they're technically below them now) and the barely-visible heat ray are well done and just feel right. Also, in the scene where the aliens enter a human shed, they seem fascinated by a bike wheel, which fits the book's description of martian technology, which does not have any wheel-like components.
But this is not enough to overshadow the huge weaknesses of the full movie.
It starts right at the beginning: For some reason, digital cameras and camcorders are completely immune to EMP blasts, as opposed to car engines and radios. The whole city shuts down because of the Martians' arrival on earth, yet still people are filming the first machine with clearly electronic devices.
Apparently for some reason, the machines were underground for billions of years (not arriving in pods like the book said). Seems like the martians didn't expect to make any technological advances during the time mankind developed from single cells to city-dwelling humans of today, and obviously human cities have no underground components that required digging more than a few metres, since the machine did not emerge from a huge pile of debris.
Another really bad adaptation change, that pretty much every War Of The Worlds movie made, was shifting the plot from 19th-century England to present-day America. Doing so made other changes necessary that made the whole premise of the movie completely ridiculous. In the book, the greatest weapon of mankind was horse-drawn artillery. Since these guns are really difficult to arm, and it's nearly impossible to hit a target that's not on ground level (since there you can hope for the blast to do some damage). Now, there are pretty devastating and easily-aimed weapons, so the machines need an impermeable energy shield to remain a threat. Now, the previous Vernes-Wells-era aliens got a jump to a technological level comparable to Star Trek, which makes it completely unbelievable that none of them thought about the possibility that a completely foreign ecosystem might contain bacteria which they are not naturally immune to and thought of some kind of countermeasures (air filters are standard equipment in hospitals now, and we don't even have developed energy shield technology).
Speaking of the aliens: It's a Steven Spielberg movie, so, while the martians in the book were completely different from humans, and genuinely frightening, in the movie they are inappropriately cute. They look like three-legged versions of ET, and absolutely not like leathery balls with lipless, beak-like mouths and lots of tentacles. While the machines are quite threatening and their awesomeness excuse any artistic freedom in their appearance, the aliens themselves are just too familiar to be adequately scary. The Pendragon aliens looked a lot better despite the inferior rendering.
Also, the harvesting of humans, which was a big story point in the book, was horribly executed (OK, it's supposed to be horrible, but this is the bad kind of it). In this movie, the martians catch humans, grind them down and spray them all across the land, probably to fertilize the red weed (which, in the book, was mostly scary because it grew fast from spores brought in the pods, and conquered the land WITHOUT any fertilizer, just because it had lots more nutrients available than on Mars), instead of feed on their blood (which, also in the book, was a major carrier of the bacteria that brought them down later).
Multiple characters in the book (the artilleryman, the parson and for some reason also Ogilvy) were fused into one single deranged redneck with an impressively shallow characterisation, reducing the actual cast of the movie to one air raid siren (the little girl who seemed incapable of coherent speech), a stereotypical slacker-turned-hero (the son) and Tom Cruise, who apparently was supposed to be the protagonist. Not counting thousands of Red Shirts.
Add to this a lot of cliché panic stampede scenes, and you pretty much got the whole movie.
Some suspense still gets built up nicely towards the end, until you can almost hear someone shout "Hey guys, the movie is already longer than we planned, wrap it up!", and within what felt like twenty seconds the perceived climax of the movie stops and we see a stumbling fighting machine, a flash of a malfunctioning energy shield, a heroic missile (after all, we can't just let the aliens die from their own stupidity, their technology needs to be broken too, so no one can try to analyse it later, because that would be too close to the book) and a family reunion.
The End.
It's not a really bad movie, it's just so riddled with bad decisions and mistakes that even the Pendragon Pictures version is a lot better (at least for people who care for story more than for effects and want to get a book adaptation when they are promised one)