War of the boring...

Rating: 2/10 (23 July 2005)

The only reason that I give this film any stars at all is that the special effects are great. The action, the aliens, the tripods, all look real. Nothing was cartoonish or fakish. However, a movie can't be saved by its looks. Tom Cruise plays, for once, not Tom Cruise. Instead he plays a boorish and unintelligent Tom Cruise. No panache, no style. Not enough attention is payed to Miranda Otto, who was so riveting in "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King". The kids are irritation personified. It's as if Spielberg wanted to show the world how an invasion affected a stereotype of the common family. If this is the common family, we're in trouble. A father who doesn't deliver the necessary skills to his children, or give them expectations to achieve; kids who don't pay attention to authority figures; a crazy Tim Robbins whose character's actions, and final outcome, are pointless to moving us through the story. There wasn't enough horror in this flick. Here we have a filmmaker who has redefined what can be done with film, i.e "Jaws" and "Schindler's List", who has a chance to do it yet again with a classic story of alien invasion, to truly scare us and make us think, and instead, we get tripe. No spoiling here unless I'm not opaque enough, but there is such a cop out, a deus ex machina, in the end of the movie that my impression was that Spielberg mistakenly assumed that the movie was horrific enough for the viewer to that point. I thought "The War of the Worlds" was too long and focused on people we can't really care about because their characters were developed in the wrong directions.