Some goods, some bads

Rating: 5/10 (27 August 2013)

You know, when i hear covers of my favourite songs, i expect them to be as accurate as it can be. You can play them in a different style, different keys, take some liberties, change the solos, but don't change the lyrics or the melodies because that's the core of the songs. Same thing with movie remakes.
I liked the crescendo of the beginning but it didn't took long before i started to frown.
Yes of course all visual aspects are very neat, the cinematography is interesting and the sound design is very cool but the whole wrecked family thing is boring as hell and does not help the story, it seems like they tried to put an unnecessary depth to this and the movie suffers in my opinion.
The acting is down to earth enough, i don't like Tom Cruise but i can recognize he's a good actor. Tim Robbins is amazing as always, i didn't expected him to be in this movie at all, great surprise. There's some epic scenes but sometime too much action for nothing and yes, that little girl with the strident voice screaming all the time was really annoying.
A lot of clichés in this movie like the single dad with a garage in his messy kitchen having trouble managing his anger and arguing all the time with his rebel and introverted son; it gets old very quickly. At some point Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) tells his daughter to «stay right here i'll be right back» (wow, really? How lame!) then another family took the girl with them by force because they didn't believe the girl's story, i saw that coming from miles away, so unoriginal.
There's a lot of incongruities too, like when Ray is looking in the fridge: no light, the next shot: he turn on the light switch to check if there's electricity. The crowd just staying there, staring at the first tripod emerging from the street instead of running like deers, etc...
They could have removed only 4 or 5 key scenes and nobody would have notice that this was "war of the world". The way they ended the film was so predictable it's embarrassing.
In one word: watchable.