Worth seeing

Rating: 7/10 (24 July 2005)

I went to see this film without having read the book (unusual for me) or seeing previous films or hearing the radio broadcast. From the beginning, Tom Cruise is a intriguing character, with his attempts to engage his children's attention. His children are a young ten year old girl and a teenage boy with a serious attitude problem. The boy is a reasonable character, but ignore the girl, she is just plain annoying.
Then we have the requisite destruction scene, which was, as destruction scenes go, rather good. Cruise packs up, and hurries his two children out of town, having discovered how to make cars work.
The next hour or so explains that the aliens were actually here before humans, buried under the ground! Yes, these stupid aliens came here, buried the tripods (which are AWESOME little critters) and LEFT, waiting a million years until the planet is populated with a dominant race before coming back to claim the planet. Surely if this were the case, they would have known of the bacteria, and not attempted to return. But, no, that is beyond them...even if cool heat ray technology isn't.
Cruise is NOT a hero. He does not fight back (except at the end to get his kid back from this chopping, blood-spraying Tripod) but that improves the movie. Cruise's character is not a stereotypical, Will Smith fighter, but a scared as hell dysfunctional (doncha just love that word?) dad. The hero (in my opinion) is his son, who has a relatively minor role in the film. He saves people, he goes to fight back. Stupid? Yes. But he did the right thing.
So...ignore the plot holes and sit back and watch a reasonably frightening movie, is my advice.