"War of the Worlds" Loses the Battle of the Plot

Rating: 4/10 (4 February 2007)

"War of the Worlds," revisited by none other than Steven Spielberg, may have been updated to enter the new millennium, but, it still suffers the same fate of its predecessors. Visually stunning as the special effects are in this installment of Alien Invaders' Flick, "WOTW" didn't learn much from its distant cousins, like "Independence Day" and "Signs." How many times are we to endure films that center around seemingly invincible space aliens coming to Earth, kicking our collective derrières pretty handily, coming oh-so-close to wiping us out completely, only to be defeated by simple, everyday obstacles? We're to believe that these aliens have the technology and capability to accomplish something that we as earthlings can't--intergalactic travel--but, can't prepare for the unexpected simplicities in life? In "Independence Day," the aliens didn't think to install Norton into their computer systems and were taken down by a simple virus. In "Signs," tap water proved to be their downfall. Here, in "WOTW," the aliens, who apparently need our blood to either operate their tripods or sustain their everyday diets, meet their nemesis in the form of bacteria...or microbes...or viruses...or...well, you get the picture. I'm not sure exactly why they needed our blood, but, they sure needed a lot of it, since it created some root system that encompassed the land far and wide. I don't know what that was about, it wasn't fully explained, but, it's pretty nasty all the same.
At the end of the day, an everyman--in this case Tom Cruise's character, Ray Ferrier--steps up to the plate and saves the day when military intelligence and scientific minds fail. Ferrier is a divorced father with two of the most ungrateful kids (Dakota Fanning, as Rachel, and Justin Chatwin, as Robbie) I can recall in cinematic history. The threat of alien annihilation can't even seem to endear them to their old man--so much so that Robbie would sooner take his chances fighting the aliens along side the military, with absolutely no training whatsoever. Man--if you'd rather die a horrible death than put up with your father, that's pretty harsh.
Of course, at the end of the day, score one for planet Earth. The tripods get some sort of dementia as a result of something in our blood that didn't set well with them, and their force fields--up until now, impenetrable--become nonexistent, so they can be blown up with no fuss or muss. Still, there are plot holes galore to ponder...
1. When the plane falls from the sky at Ray's ex-wife's house, there are no bodies lying around it. Hell, as others on this board have stated, the family van they acquire was spared. 2. There is a train on fire still moving very steadily along a track without exploding or running off course. And, even though power is spotty depending on where you go on your quest to get from New Jersey to Boston, the train signals at the intersection work without fail. 3. When they reach the ferry, there are a whole bunch of working vehicles on it--so, why did Ray, Rachel, and Robbie almost get torn limb from limb a few blocks from the terminal by a hostile crowd that looked like they hadn't seen a moving car in eons? 4. As nutty as Tim Robbin's character is, wouldn't it stand to reason that as desperate as everyone in this film has been up until the point we meet him, Ray and Rachel wouldn't be the only ones he's managed to coax into his basement? And furthermore, with all the destruction going on all around him, even the craziest of lunatics probably would have had the good sense to run like hell. And what was that house made out of that left it standing, still in tact, anyways? 5. Probably the most inconceivable, how on god's green earth did Robbie manage to make it to Boston on his own when we saw him run over a hill that two seconds later was engulfed in an explosion that NOBODY could have survived--let alone escaped without so much as a scratch? And miraculously, the whole family was reunited at the in-law house in tact. When they came to the door it was almost as if they were expecting to see the Fuller Brush salesman. Did it not dawn on them that, oh yeah, it could be aliens coming to eat you alive?
There are more plot holes, to be sure, but, not enough space to address them. Sufficive to say, with the length of this critique as further proof, for all the smarts it took to create CGI, the plot got the shaft for its Einstein moments.