An edge of your seat, roller coaster of a movie!

Rating: 10/10 (4 July 2005)

I just came back from seeing a late show of War of the Worlds. What a movie! This film takes what we loved about the "B" sci-fi's of the 50's and brings the genre into the 21st century in a suspenseful and gripping way.
This film does not pretend to have any "big message". It's simply the story of an incredibly powerful alien invasion as seen through the eyes of one family. It's a story of survival. It's a story of how you might expect humans to react under such intense pressures. And the film is visually stunning.
If you're considering seeing this movie, you should. I recommend you ignore the negative reviews. I suspect many of those so called "reviews" were written by people with an agenda. To those IMDb members who gave this film a vote of "1", I find it sad that you would attempt to denigrate a film of such quality and put it into a category that is shared by films like "Manos' the Hands of Fate". Your vote only demonstrates that you truly are not really criticizing the film, but instead are trying to make a statement of your possible dislike for Tom Cruise or Steven Spielberg. Having said that, if all of the "1" votes were removed, this film would probably be at an 8.0 or greater. And that would be more representative of it's true overall rating.
And to those IMDb members who complained about the little girl's screaming, what other kind of reaction should she have had? And to those members who complained that there didn't seem to be sufficient character development or that characters were not as "likeable" as they would have liked them to be, they don't need to be.
On a side note, I think Tom Cruise has publicly acted like a jerk as of late. But it's important to keep things in their proper perspective. He's just an actor. And if he didn't get his big "break" years ago, he'd be someone that you might see coming up to your table in a restaurant and announcing, "hi, I'm Tom and I'll be your server tonight". But simply because I think Tom has gone completely off the deep end in his personal life doesn't mean that I can't look at this film objectively.
This simply, is a roller coaster of a film. If you're up a for a good ride, take your seat and make sure that your fastened in! 10/10