Spectacular film, horrible acting, unsympathetic characters

Rating: 3/10 (23 August 2006)

I was fully prepared to hate this movie before I even saw it, for three reasons.
1)Tom Cruise. He's an annoying, self-absorbed, posturing jerk of a movie star, with no acting talent, who phones in what little performance he delivers here.
2)Dakota Fanning. Give her some time to mature, and she might be a great actress. But in this, she's a midget clone of Joan Crawford who just gets on my nerves, and that's before she starts screaming.
3)As good as this is, and it's pretty good, it still hasn't been done right. Except for the Jeff Wayne-produced musical version, which was done in the late Seventies, no one has ever tried to do this story as a period piece.
In spite of those gripes, I have to admit that this is pretty good. The visuals will melt your brain. Doug Chiang's design of the not-Martian tripods is creepy. Spielberg makes it very plain that he's not following Wells exactly from the git-go, by starting in New Jersey and making a dockwalloper his protagonist. And that's where my complaint about Cruise takes full voice.
I know Teamsters make good money, but show me a dockworker other than maybe Hoffa who drives a vintage Mustang Shelby Cobra GT350H and wears a $15,000 Omega chronometer. Cruise's character, Ray Ferrier, is a jerk. His kids call him that. And since Cruise is a jerk himself, playing one isn't much of a stretch. He's nasty, unsympathetic, and you really want the man to die, which would kinda leave it to Fanning and Chatwin, and they're not exactly the most sympathetic characters either.
I chalk this up to David Koepp's script. This is the way he writes people; complex, real, not very likable, with problems that get in the way. But real people are not very pleasant to be around. They're cranky, idiosyncratic jerks. I know. I'm one. In fact, there're only a couple of people you feel anything for. Tim Robbins is one. His character, Harlan Ogilvy, is an ambulance jockey who's got the notion that people can burrow into the ground, rebuild a combat infrastructure, and fight back. It takes very little time for him to go snap! and start screaming. The other person you feel something for is Maryann Mayberry, who's got less than two minutes screen time but still makes you feel for her. She's a barmaid who meets Ray at the Hudson Ferry crossing. They get separated during the riot when the Martians show up, and Ray winds up on the ferry while she's stuck on shore.
That brings me back to the visuals. Over the years I've gotten ticky. I want my fx to be invisible. I want them to serve the story and be as seamless as possible, because I hold to the same feeling as Ray Harryhausen, Chuck Jones and Orson Welles; you must respect the medium, all the way down to the single frame, the single page, the single word. You must show as much or more respect to the individual parts as you do to the whole item. And you need to know where you're coming from to understand where you're going. Some people don't get that, and it shows. Dennis Muren and Doug Chiang get it. They pretty much run ILM, and they have the feel of the tripods dead on. They did the one thing that makes this movie really work: these tripods really are three-legged battle machines, just as completely alien and creepy as Wells imagined them over a century ago. No fixed legs, though, because tripedal motion is tricky, even with multijointed limbs. They got around that by making them more tentacular, but still giving them some mass. The three legs are for the purpose of propulsion, but there are other tentacles, as well as some potent weapons. The Heat Ray of the book is given a slight alteration, becoming some sort of disruptor that'll blast you to ashes in less than a second, leaving little more than a cloud of dust and some clothing flying though the air. And lemme tell ya, it gets used a lot. Regrettably, not on Cruise.
I've seen this movie half a dozen times now. For the spectacle. Because it's that, for sure. Crowds of people driven from their homes by vicious aliens bent on wiping humanity out of existence, either killing us outright or eating us, or liquefying us to fertilize the red weed, towering battle machines stalking through the darkness along the banks of the Hudson, vaporizing humans by the thousands, an Amtrak train blasting though an intersection on fire those things are spectacular. Gene Barry and Anne Robinson playing the in-laws, that's a nice touch. Tiny little nods to the original George Pal version from the Fifties. These little things redeem the presence of the most overrated actor of our time.
To give Cruise credit, there are spots where he seems to actually be trying to act. But it still boils down to the fact that he's not an actor, he's a movie star. What was needed here was an actor. An Ed Harris, or Tom Hanks. An Everyman. Not a preening glamor-puss movie star who has no way of identifying with the character he plays. Cruise has all of the range of a stalk of celery. I can think of a hundred actors, all much more talented, who could have played this role a thousand times better. But Cruise has the box office clout to headline this film and make people want to see it. And that's what brings in the big bucks.