War of the Worlds doesn't live up to the hype

Rating: 4/10 (27 June 2005)

Just saw a sneak of War of the Worlds. It surprises me how a collection of so much talent can make a product so, I'm sorry to say, bland. Yes, it has good points. The war machines are impressive, the destruction sequences (what there are of them) are awesome, and the special effects in general are incredible. But this is what we've come to expect in a Spielberg film. A movie needs more than cool special effects... we learned that way back with Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
The first part of the film takes great care with the character development of the Tom Cruse character and his children. But they don't really grow at all throughout the rest of the film! There is an old question to ask... do we care about these characters? I, for one, didn't. The story plods along, spending a lot of time showing people running, people hiding, people running, hiding, and occasionally shows an alien war machine (no mention at all of Mars in the entire film)doing something. Many of us fans were excited that the film would make use of the Martian "Red Weed" which the aliens plant on Earth to make it more like their home. Well, the weed is there, but that's about it. It's there for a few scenes. And the aliens... personally I think it would have been far better to leave them out of the film entirely. In the original film we only caught fleeting glimpses of the creatures. In this one, we see them walking around, looking at photographs, playing with a bicycle, in all their CGI glory. Unfortunately, they look too much like a cross between their machines and the aliens from Independence Day for my taste. By the end of the movie, I was surprised to see that it ran less than two hours. It seemed like three!
A real problem is that the film tries to play the story of the invasion a lot like "Signs" did so well a few years ago. Tell the story from the POV of the average Joe. Trouble is that this average Joe is so average that even when he runs from the aliens and sees them doing horrible things, it comes across almost dull.
There are several tips-of-the-hat to the original George Pal film from 1953, including cameo's by Gene Barry and Ann Robinson. But it just doesn't grab me. Someone asked me, on the way out of the theater, if I'd go see it again, or buy it on DVD. I answered no to both.
I hate to say just how disappointed I am in this film. I really, REALLY wanted to like it. The afore mentioned Independence Day, itself a remake of War of the Worlds, was a film that I also disliked, for many of the same reasons. Yet I found myself liking that film a little more than this one. Give me the old George Pal film, or even a few episodes of the television series, over this film any day.