Tom Cruise doesn't save the world, but in this flick, he saves the producers' butts

Rating: 5/10 (30 June 2005)

There were 9 people at the 4:10 pm screening on Thursday (opening day 2), on a overcast blustery day in Minneapolis. Two of the people got on their cell phones in the middle of the second act, and they weren't telling their friends how great the show was. I yelled at one and he left. If it weren't for Tom Cruise doing the best acting he's done in years, I would have left, too.
It seems almost a sacrilege to pan a Steven Spielberg movie, produced by Kathleen Kennedy, and co-written by David Koepp, but here it is:
Cruise plays an immature, smart-ass, working-class father who, against impossible alien odds, saves his kids (and himself) and delivers them back to his estranged and pregnant wife married to another man, who by the way also survives with elderly in-laws in a devastated Boston brownstone.
In the process, Cruise' love for his incredibly stupid and unpleasant children grows him uncommonly good sense and makes him a man even his kids and ex-wife can admire.
One has to hand it to Cruise. He hits every emotional beat and gets it out there for the camera and makes it believable. He's the best thing about the movie. He's as good as he's ever been. Possibly better because it is his talent alone that gives the film any emotional validity. Dakota screams and looks scared a lot but surely her acting range is better than that. And the dialogue they give her is unworthy.
As for the rest of the film, it is one ludicrous scene after another, of overly familiar alien machines, and unbelievably stupid and, thank goodness, quite unrealistic crowds of humans.
Take for example the neighborhood of people gawking at SOMETHING IN THE SKY -- something ominous and like nothing they've ever seen before. Most people I know would have been running to their TVs, or at least their radios, to find out if anyone else knew what this was. Only when electrical zaps start hitting the ground all around them, do they start to run.
But not the folks around the corner, gathered around a big cold hole in the center of a street, that rumbles and cracks all the way up the sides of buildings. They back up a little, but continue to stare at the hole, even as the crater enlarges toward them. They don't get the heck out of there until this gigantic, obviously alien, machine is already halfway out of the ground. Now where in the world would you find a non-extinct population so devoid of a sense of self preservation?
Later, Army gunners and tanks head up a hill toward a sky bright with distant fires and destruction. And who are the idiot throngs following our brave young men in uniform up that hill? Well, Cruise' son. But by this time in the film we already think he's a jerk. However, when a big alien machine chews up our troops and tanks and rises in all its glory over the top of the hill, only then do the throngs of dummies turn tale and head the other direction.
Here Cruise does the best he can trying to save his idiot son by leaving his little girl standing alone by a totally denuded stick of a tree. Even as he sees his young daughter being dragged way by well meaning strangers, he hesitates, reluctant to leave his dopey son who says something inane like, "I have to see this for myself. You have to let me go." In your dreams so stupid.
It goes on and on, right down to the unexplained reason for bloody roots, up to the very end when these wimpy, apparently vulnerable aliens inside the tripod machines succumb to our microbes and RPGs. Why the heck didn't they use bombs and RPGs to get these guys in the first place? Clearly they were just little soft aliens inside metallic shells. Surely our American military -- nay, the World's military -- could have beaten these puny creatures. I'm sure the reasons were more obvious on radio.
After seeing this film, it's clear why Cruise is jumping on Oprah's couch and driving his fans nuts with Katie-mania. It's not because he's lost his mind. His scheme is actually brilliant. What better way to divert attention from, and lower expectations for a movie in which he alone is the only thing that truly shines?