Watered down for a young audience, and lacked punch.

Rating: 3/10 (9 July 2005)

**** SPOILERS! ******
Sometimes, as in this film's case, you can't just throw money at the problems and hope that it would all go away or go unnoticed. They did spend an awful lot of money - but they did not spend the money wisely and still decided to run with it.
A lot of people would say that the "conventions" for films like this are different to the conventions in a novel from which the film is made, and that is why the film is allowed to take more liberties and add or subtract to the plots - but we all know that's just a nice convenient excuse. This reasoning would also indicate then that the book and the film cannot be compared with each other in the first place, and that the film is actually not an homage because it's not the same as the book! Logic!
I think that one of the messages this film is trying to convey is that we are all so desensitized to the actual horrors that happen all around us, and even when we watch a genuinely horrific thing like an alien vapourizing a human with its laser, we don't really feel that concerned about it. Spielberg started the first zapping through the eyes of the camcorder specifically to convey this message, that we are desensitized to such images or so we think, because most us in the modern world now at the beginning of the 21st Century are seeing events through the TV, or movies, or photos, and not seeing these sorts of horrors first hand as we may have once done, only a couple hundred years ago, when such nastiness as hanging, lynching, beheading, torture and humiliation were presented and shown in public spaces, at the village square for example.
Personally I would like to have seen more people running around without a leg (bad pun, sorry) or an arm, and more people running around burned or disfigured would have also helped in making us feel more disgusted. Seeing the field of red tentacle-roots and red liquid flowing just doesn't cut if for most of us to make us feel frightened. The one man who we are allowed to see as his blood is sucked out of him was rather too deliberately hidden from our view. Censored, in a sense, to make this movie PG-13 was to bring in a bigger audience to pay for its hefty production budget which ended up making the filmmaker ease up on the violence factor.
In fact, we were supposed to be terrified as we went on the run with the 3 of them, but somehow the tunnel-vision effect worked so well to encase the viewer into Ray's perspective that we became just as detached and emotionally exhausted as Ray is, in his life - his methods of trying to control his own children are put to test here, even though the trying circumstances end up actually showing us how pathetic and meaningless he is as a father. Even when he attempts to protect his daughter from the horror he is about to bring upon Ogilvy, he is somewhat reckless - even though he put blindfolds around his daughter's eyes and she sings to tune-out any supposedly horrific noises, the scene indicates that the young ones in our modern society are pretty savvy to what's going on around them, as she knows the exact moment that the deed had been done; and I think Dakota Fanning was picked especially and precisely for her "awareness" which is, in fact, the prelude to her character's (and possibly the actress') future as a desensitized human being. And she ends up simply being annoying. And Robbie: He is just one generally confused kid, isn't he? I didn't quite understand what brought on his sudden madness to want to SEE it all happening, besides the fact that he wanted to get away from his dumb father who actually happened to have saved him up to this point, no matter whether his father had been a wastoid until the aliens arrived. We never really got to know Robbie much except for the fact that he was going to turn out to be a fool in life like his father is, his disrespect for authority shown in his behavior at the beginning of the film where he "borrowed" the car. OK he seems to get along mightily with his mother and sister and his mother's new husband, but his desire to see the battle was not motivated enough because his character was never fully fleshed out. So when he came out of his mother's apartment to let us know he survived, we actually felt that it would have been better if he had been dead - the message for the audience then, could have been that there is a lesson to be learned here not to be a wastoid father!
At first glance, it's an OK movie at the higher levels of Hollywood mega-budget film-making. The effects are about what we would expect, the production design is on par with that, and so is the cinematography. And those things are all pretty, alright. The acting could have been better to keep us suspended in disbelief, but once again, Star Power did get in the way and more often than not we were taken out of the film's reality. All that is glossed over with the story moving along as fast as the plots would let it, but unfortunately, there are far too many questions left unanswered and though it was a valiant effort to make something of an homage to the book, they could have done a lot better about controlling the plot lines and certain fake-out edits that made some audience members groan because they knew the filmmakers did some things in this film in haste and the intentions did not pay off in the end.