Nice visuals, interesting direction, deeply implausible story!

Rating: 6/10 (17 August 2005)

I found this an intense cinematic experience. Not least for its soundtrack. The music was old-school sci-fi, and it kept the tension at a constant high. Dakota Fanning's interminable screaming was pretty exhausting, but thankfully I was sufficiently distracted by the things evoking the screams to be properly annoyed. And that wonderful honking noise made by the tripods! It was somehow frightening and absurd at the same time, especially once one realises it's a kind of alien 'time to work!' signal. It makes the extermination seem all the more disturbing, when you realise it's all in a day's work for these dastardly creatures.
On the other hand, any way you look at it, the plot is deeply implausible. From the failure of the alien EMP to knock out everyone's video cameras, to the bizarre fact of the aliens having missed - despite thousands of years of observing us, so we are told - that humans get sick sometimes, the story was altogether a lacklustre affair.
I also missed the lighter side of previous Spielberg outings. There is only one good line in the film, as everyone has observed, and rightly so, for it makes the film all the more exhausting for having so little genuinely human content. Yes, scenes like the fight over the car evoke some strong thoughts and emotions about the some of the appalling ways human beings can behave in a crisis. The scenes of mass hysteria are generally a strong point I think. But Spielberg's focus is throughout on Tom Cruise and his family, and here there is just insufficient material to make an involving story. Yes, he's a poor excuse for a Dad, and he slowly comes to accept this, and that's perhaps a little sad. But there is no resolution to this process. The film just stops. The aliens are dead, Boston is in ruins (except for the one street where his ex-wife is... what were the chances?), now what? What did we learn? Where is the moral, the beating heart of the film? (And I absolutely DO NOT mean, where's the sloppy sentimental bit at the end, there was quite enough of that). And more importantly, why did I just pay money to listen to Dakota Fanning screaming for two hours?