Could have reach the level of the classic mid-20th century's sci-fi movies'

Rating: 7/10 (19 December 2016)

First of all, it's clear that director Steven Spielberg enjoyed the direction very much. War of the Worlds has all the characteristics of a great Spielberg film, such as the opening additive dissolves like in Bridge of Spies (2015), the steady and hand-held shots of chaos and obliteration (as in the famous opening sequence in Saving Private Ryan) and perhaps the ever-moving camera. So we can state that the direction is fascinating, but is that enough for a great sci-fi movie?
Well, it's definitely not. Let's start with the good points. The visuals are stunning. Janusz Kaminski did an awesome job as always, we can literally feel that the aliens are around us. The visual effects are astonishing. Spielberg and his crew nearly managed to revolutionize the CGI techniques again after their achievements in the massive sci-fi movies of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. The Extra-terrestial (1982) and Jurassic Park (1993). For the good features, I should also mention the movie's extremely dark and obscure tone, because I personally liked it. But this is pretty awkward cause due to this you cannot decide whether Spielberg dedicated this film to children, to teenagers or to adults. The winner out of these three categories is probably teenagers, because War of the Worlds is too dark for younger audiences, and the adults and elderly generations have seen this usual American story a thousand times, and they probably can't ignore the continuity and factual errors. But the teenager category can't be the target age flawlessly, because War of the Worlds has so deep moral and social problems that even young adults can hardly handle.
Now take a look in the cons. The acting is awful as hell. Tom Cruise is probably hired due to financial purposes, and he's acting is worse than usually. We saw Tim Robbins also acting far better then in this feature, but the main problem is with the little girl's character. Dakota Fanning's performance just simply s*cks. I don't know what tiny little spark of talent Spielberg or the casting director saw in her, but she's so ******* annoying that she caused me some sort of ultimate rage, though I consider myself as a calm and patient individual.
The other big problem with this film is the script. The story has huge continuity and factual errors. The largest is that the aliens arriving causes fails in the operation of every sort of electronical gadgets. This is a pretty clever and smart choice as fore-shadowing, but then how the hell some patriot U.S. citizens use their cameras and camcorders during the invasion of the aliens to record some imagery?
Overall, War of the World is an enjoyable popcorn movie, way better than others in this category, such as Michael Bay's Transformers franchise. The sad fact that this could be far-far better, with a proper story and acting it could even become a classic as other Spielberg sci-fis.
7/10
P.S: If you're a parent, I do not recommend you to watch this with anyone under 14, because this movie has an extremely dark tone, the body count is massive and there are huge moral and social issues, especially in the scenes revolving around Tim Robbins's character.