Disappointing

Rating: 6/10 (2 July 2005)

What went wrong? From a purely technical standpoint War of the Worlds is fine--the special effects are first rate and this is the type of material Steven Spielberg can direct in his sleep. His film-making is taut and he stages some of the finest action/suspense sequences that audiences are likely to see this summer. War of the Worlds could have been a classic--so why did it leave me feeling indifferent and cold and why does everyone I talk to seem to leave the movie kind of underwhelmed? I think the problem is the script. Spielberg and writer David Koepp decided to focus entirely on three characters--Tom Cruise's deadbeat dad Ray and his two children. The whole movie follows them from one calamitous event after another as they try not to get zapped by the aliens. There aren't even really any other actors that are on screen long enough to really qualify as characters.
There are a couple of problems with this. First, it makes the story unnecessarily narrow. This is a movie about the destruction of the planet and we spend all of our time following 3 characters. The other problem is that we're pretty sure Spielberg isn't going to kill Tom Cruise or his kids. That creates basically a feature length version of the raptor chasing the kids scene from Jurassic Park--how do you generate suspense when you know the characters who are being threatened with death are never going to get killed? After a while watching the same 2 or 3 characters narrowly escape from the aliens gets to be monotonous and that's pretty much all that War of the Worlds has to offer--one special effects oriented action scene after another after another. There's no plot, too few characters and no soul, just a lot of action and special effects.
There's also a really lame happy ending, which seems to be Spielberg's Achilles heel these days, that unfortunate need to please. He doesn't completely betray the material like he did with Minority Report, but only because there isn't nearly as much to betray. The ending here is ludicrous and stupid but I didn't mind because at least the movie was over.