suspense but no action

Rating: 5/10 (10 July 2005)

War of the Worlds
I have previously said that Bewitched was the most disappointing movie of the summer. Unfortunately, I was clearly mistaken, because War of the Worlds blew it out of the water. Maybe that's not a fair statement because it's a completely different genre, so let's go at this another way. For a Steven Spielberg action flick, there wasn't a whole lot of action. There was a lot of suspense that wasn't particularly suspenseful, and there was a lot of running around and a lot of Dakota Fanning screaming. There was also a lot of crazy robot aliens that spewed blood or red.. something. What there wasn't a lot of was acting or dialogue, or any real plot. Now, to be fair to Spielberg, it was rated PG-13, so he wasn't really allowed to show anything too graphic, but.. he didn't show anything besides some mildly impressive CGI. Maybe it's me, but if a 100-foot metal machine stomps it's tri-pod looking foot a mere five or six feet away from me, I'd probably jump, or at least appear startled. I would assume a good 99% of the population would do the same, but Spielberg got lucky and found the two people (Dakota and Tom) who don't even flinch in the presence of doom. Good for them and all, but if Tom was seriously trying to play the "dead beat every man dad," he didn't pull it off. So.. as the flimsy storyline progresses, we see Tom's son (a nobody in Hollywood who will likely stay that way) supposedly killed and see Tom and Dakota get swept up inside one of the alien robots. Tom, miraculously, had found some abandoned grenades in a military hum-vee (whatever) and stuffed them up inside the robot alien. Shortly thereafter, all the robots and aliens collapsed and died. I thought they might say Tom set off some kind of chain reaction and was responsible for stopping the aliens. However, it turns out it wasn't Tom, but the atmosphere that killed the aliens. They buried these tri- pod robots a billion or so years ago, and then came down in 2005 to "extreminate" (if i can borrow the word from Tim Robbins, who played crazy quite well in this film) the human race - but apparently they weren't immune to the dirty nasty atmosphere and germs that we have on Earth, and they died. I was under the impression that Tom was going to save the day, and he didn't. He was just an innocent bystander who survived and escaped death over and over again because, well, he's Tom Cruise, afterall. Who wouldn't want to save him? War of the Worlds is not an action movie. It's a CGI filled suspense film for 13-year-olds, because I can't imagine anyone who actually read the novel would like this remake. To further my research, I checked IMDb.com too see what the ratings were for the 1953 version and the 2005 version. 2005 got a 7.0 out of 10, while the original scored a 7.2 out of 10. I'm not sure what that says about either movie, but I can tell you this: For Tom and Katie's sake, I hope Batman Begins is awesome because they're 0 for 1 as far as I'm concerned.
Rating: C