Interesting Special Effects, No Story

Rating: 1/10 (17 January 2006)

War of the Worlds is not only Spielberg's worst movie, but the worst movie I have seen in some time. It is right up there in the running for the worst movie I have seen in the last ten years.
Wells' story has never translated well into a visual medium. The story, inherently, lacks any of the elements necessary for a movie. There is no real conflict resolution, the story just ends. While that might work with a book, where pages and pages can be spent developing the back story, it doesn't work in a movie. In this particular treatment of the story, about ten minutes is spent on character development, resulting in characters that I didn't understand and could have cared less about. After that, the movie set out to try to "wow" the audience with special effects. Unfortunately, not even those where very good.
The appearance of the "tentacles" of the alien tripods were a poor imitation of the effect first developed for the water tentacle of the alien in James Cameron's 1989 thriller, "The Abyss." The same effect was resurrected, with somewhat less success, for Luis Llosa's 1997 stinker "Anaconda." Aside from the tentacles, the alien craft - and the aliens themselves - looked more than a little like the aliens from Roland Emmerich's 1996 classic, "Independence Day."
The story is,basically, the same story as was told in "Independence Day" and Tim Burton's 1996 tongue-in-cheek "Mars Attacks." In those movies, though, the story consisted of more than just a series of almost totally unrelated and entirely contrived scenes of the heroes, (in this case, Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning, who, hopefully, will recover from this film and go on to make more movies with actual plots, characters and stories), running from the monsters. There was, essentially, nothing that connected any of the scenes in "War" to each other. Most of the scenes didn't even make sense - If the monsters are attacking cities, why would you run towards New York City? The monsters are flattening everything in their wake, why hide in a basement? - and seemed to be contrived to show off some novel special effect.
There were more plot holes than I care to count - If the electromagnetic pulse destroyed the electrical circuits, it is unlikely any car could ever be made operative, yet they find one car that they can drive off in. If the aliens were smart enough to plant the tripods millions of years ago, how come they weren't smart enough to figure out how to protect themselves from earth bound viruses? How come, at the end, when the ex-wife and the parents walk out of their charred house in Boston, they look like they just stepped out of a GQ spread when the rest of the world around them is in ruins? For that matter, how did the Cruise and Fanning characters even make it to Boston, not to mention the Chatwin character? And, finally, why is the reason the aliens died only explained by the narrator after the end of the movie?
I was not particularly impressed with the special effects, as a whole. There were some good ones, like the bridge exploding at the beginning of the film. However, because their was no story, no plot and no characters that anyone could care about, the special effects were left to carry the film. Given the film, it is hard to imagine that any special effects could have carried it. If I had been Industrial Light and Magic or Stan Winston, I would have been embarrassed to have my name associated this movie. Both ILM and Stan Winston have done much better and, in nearly all cases, their effects could have been used in movies that were much better.
For Spielberg's sake, I hope "Munich" is much better. But, then, it would be hard for it to be worse.