Nice emotions but bad handiwork and lots of mistakes

Rating: 4/10 (26 February 2008)

One thing sticks out a lot of this movie: It is incredible low volume. When watching it on television I had to push up volume to the max to hear people whisper and still had problems understanding them. And then some action kicked in and the max volume made my whole house shake, so I had to pull down the volume nearly completely - only to be unable to understand the next dialog at all. This is an exemplary failure at delivering the message of the movie and simply makes me angry.
I'll just ignore lots of logical mistakes because Hollywood never expects a thinking audience but let me mention the major blunders: A bunch of aliens has planned to wipe out the human species many millions (billions?) years before ever a human (or at least some ape) wandered on earth? By using giant, highly specialized machines designed to resist 21st century weapons buried million years ago? Thats like digging in some thousand Abraham-M1 tanks on mars so we can annihilate any live-form (which surely will look like some 18. century Indians) we encounter in ten million years on mars? Just building an army and waiting until something worth killing shows up? Nothing wrong with "ebil aliens ate human species" though as it is merely a vehicle to show some techno-holocaust-family drama. On the other hand, would you be running to see Freddy Krueger in a family drama? And thats exactly the job of the aliens and the tripods: Making people run and weep and whisper. Freddy could have done that too, with a lot less special effects.
Some other stuff to hate: The stereotypical characters (the crykid, the teen on steroids)
Some stuff to like: the last 30 seconds of the end monologue.