Aliens are Stupid; Humans are Stupider

Rating: 5/10 (9 July 2005)

I wasn't dead set on seeing WotW, but I found myself with time on my hands, and the reviews have been pretty good. Now that I've seen it, I have to wonder why.
Some reviews I've read make the point that this wasn't overly reliant on special effects. If it wasn't absolutely reliant on special effects, I don't know what movie ever has been. Certainly the acting can't be said to carry the movie. Tom Cruise turns in the most wooden performance since Pinocchio wished he could be a real boy. Reviews have heaped praise on the performance of Dakota Fanning as Cruise's daughter. but I thought she laid it on awfully thick, to the point that I kept thinking of Jon Lovitz' old SNL character, Master Thespian ("I'm acting!"). She was most convincing when she was screaming. Justin Chatwin, who played Cruise's son, was nondescript. The strongest performance in the film comes from Tim Robbins, who has a short and unnecessary role that wasn't in the original story. He seems to have been added by the writers to inject some tension into what would otherwise have been a long stretch of characters trying to hide quietly in a basement.
The acting wasn't enrapturing. How was the storyline? Ridiculous. Wells would surely have refused to attach his name to it. His classic has been subverted by Spielberg, Friedman, and Koepp. Under their heavy thumbs, the story of man's struggle for survival and the power of nature has turned into yet another hackneyed "father goes through travails to win the affections of his estranged kids" story. Instead of being truly alien invaders, the villains of this film have been here all along, more or less. At least their battle machines have been, buried by the thousands beneath the ground since before there were people at all. This was one of several attempts to adapt Wells' story to a world beset by terrorism; the enemy is among us, be paranoid, blah blah blah. Such a theme gets good box office, but it doesn't necessarily make for a good story. It didn't work in this case.
The rewrite, in fact, necessarily pokes Wells' story full of holes, and these show up as ridiculously illogical plot points throughout. The worst one of all goes right to the heart of the story as it is. The aliens are killed off by exposure to earthly microbes. If their machines have been lurking underground for millennia, how could they not have known about disease? The point is made at the beginning of the film that the aliens have been watching us throughout our evolution, waiting for the opportunity to strike. How did they miss the plague, chicken pox, the flu? How did such stupid aliens manage to build spaceships? In one scene, they are shown reacting to a bicycle wheel as if they've never seen a wheel before. When the aliens are shown, they seem to have nothing more than animal intelligence. Their ships are intelligent, but the aliens themselves aren't all that bright. Was it smart to bury the spaceships and wait around while mankind started investigating the earth? What are the odds that nobody ever noticed the presence of millions of alien spacecraft just a couple of thousand feet under the ground? You'd think somebody would have picked up on them. I suppose Spielberg could have been making the point that aliens are stupid and humans even stupider. Those of us who paid to see this film may be the stupidest humans of all.
Perhaps the most ludicrous example of bad writing comes toward the end of the movie. We see a sizable group of humans held in a cage Every so often, a tube comes down and takes one away to be processed for the aliens nefarious purposes (I won't give away what that is, but think "Turf Builder"). Inevitably, Tom Cruise is sucked into the tube... and at this moment, someone thinks of holding onto him. The cage is filled with people, the attack has been going on for a week at this point, but only at this point does someone think of doing this. Only when Tom Cruise is sucked into the tube do they hit upon the most basic plan thinkable to save a victim.
All this being said, the special effects and action sequences were excellent. They carry the day here, to the point that there is barely any dialog in the last half hour. That may not have been unintentional. Cruise is at his best when we can't hear what he's saying, and we are largely spared his voice for a large part of the film.
War of the Worlds is run of the mill at best, and downright bad at its worst, and anyone who can say with a straight face that it isn't completely dependent on CGI effects and explosions to distract us from what is nothing more than another bland action blockbuster must have seen a different film than I did. The 1953 Byron Haskin production is much better than this latest flaccid attempt from Spielberg. The new version is a movie very much in the vein of predecessors such as Independence Day and Men in Black II. If it weren't for the blinding flashes, there'd be nothing to watch.