Insipid update of the HG Wells classic

Rating: 2/10 (11 January 2014)

"Nazis from space" might have been a better title.
This attempt to update the HG Wells classic is miserable on several fronts.
1. Tom Cruise, who true to form plays Tom Cruise. In this case, it's a blue collar version of Tom Cruise, who punctuates behaviour I'd expect from someone who had been dropped on his head as a baby with moments of observational and deductive powers of Holmesian proportions. Of course those moments are so clearly broadcasted/foreshadowed that no one is actually surprised. Perhaps this was an attempt to make the impossible dichotomy of Cruise's character less evident. A better idea would have been to just burn the film and write it off.
2. Hey, Spielberg! Enough with the Nazi allegories! You won't be able to surpass yourself (viz Schindler's List), so why bother trying? Instead of universally destructive "heat beams" of the novel, Spielberg opted for a beam weapon (I'm guessing microwave-based) that seems to only incinerate humans - just like the Nazis did. All these ashes floating around, covering Cruise and making him ghost-like. Heavy, man. The alien tripod fighting machines were not at all consistent with the earliest renderings by various artists; instead, they look like Nazi soldiers' helmets.
3. Spotty effects. Some of the effects - especially the tripod coming up from under the town square - were very well done. But others, not so much. Spielberg tries to stick to the novel viz the aliens' blood-sucking tendencies, but those effects are no where near as "organic" as, say, those in Aliens, even though Aliens was released 9 years prior.
4. And they're *stupid* aliens too! Back when the novel first came out, one might reasonably expect the aliens to have not bothered to check the atmosphere before mounting their assault. But in 2005? Seriously? Jiminy Cricket! They were checking for "breathable atmosphere" in the original Star Trek! To have the aliens killed by germs - albeit true to the original - is laughable in a modern setting.
5. Dakota Fanning was completely ignored. She was brilliant, as usual, but she only had to play a stupid useless girl whose character is completely undeveloped and seems in the movie only to provide assorted dilemmas for Cruise's idiot-savant character to deal with. This was a complete waste of her talent.
6. Too much dumb luck. The movie is mostly about Cruise and his daughter narrowly evading capture and death - over, and over, and over again. Cruise is always just millimetres away from the person who gets incinerated, or tagged as the aliens' next crunchy snack, or drowned, crushed, or exploded as so many hundreds of other "collateral casualties" in the movie. And then he ends up in a tripod's food basket (to save his now catatonic daughter, natch), with a grenade belt, AND a soldier with sufficient training to act in a soldierly way (while still letting the boorish dad actually be the hero). As Gob Bluth would say, "Come on!"
7. Morgan Freeman's narration. Morgan Freeman has a great voice, but it is unfortunately entirely cliché now. His voice is used in so many commercials, at first I thought I was listening to another damned commercial. "More aliens go, with Visa."
8. Morgan Freeman's narration, redux. The narration at the end of the movie comes pretty much directly from Wells's novel that, being of a different era, is steeped in concepts and traditions that are laughable today. Germs were not put on this earth by God (or by Morgan Freeman playing God); "man" does not have a "right" to exist; etc and so on.
I'd've given Spielberg's War of the Worlds only 1 star, but some of the effects were cool.