No one would have believed...

Rating: 1/10 (28 June 2005)

just how badly Spielberg was going to screw this up.
A few thoughts:
If a town centre cracked open in broad daylight, revealing a 500ft metal flower of death, you'd know about it a mile away. However, when Cruise and his appallingly unsympathetic kids (including the interminably shrieking girl-woman that is known as Dakota Fanning, who surely slid straight from the birth canal clutching an agent) flee to the 'burbs, it's as if the news hasn't filtered through, with by-standers milling about doing nothing much of anything.
Imagine a lightning storm ripping through Clapham, followed by an immense metal tripod, vaporising everything in its path. (No clothes, mind  just the people inside them. Perhaps these aliens are after our laundry. Actually, there's a Woody Allen routine about that, and it makes a lot more sense.) Imagine the noise. The smell. Were you in Balham, you'd know about it. Worlds would have us believe you wouldn't lift an eyebrow. Simply, when Cruise and co aren't in immediate shot, these tripods don't appear to exist. The only reason we know they do, is because a TV crew has a video  a VHS!  of them eating up some buildings somewhere else. Europe, apparently, has already been mostly decimated. Well, how incredibly lucky that massive landmass called the United States merely suffered a flesh wound in Boston. Although Europe, admittedly, is the subject of the movie's one decent joke.
Worse is to come: a pinch of Cameron here, a steal of Bruckheimer there, this is one of the most derivative movies yet - albeit one with obvious stage sets and pound-shop CGI. It's as if Spielberg has sunk down under the weight of so much shoulder perching, and has been reduced to foraging for ideas in the mud. The aliens, when they finally emerge from their tripods, are duffers: neither scary, not convincing  while their reconnaissance 'tendril' sports a couple of plastic reflectors that wouldn't look out of place on a mountain bike.
On that note, the one effort to bamboozle the uni-eyed tendril is laughable too: they place a mirror in its way. Surely something of this power and capacity isn't going to fooled by a bunch of reconstituted silica? The acting, as you'd expect, is uniformly awful  Cruise (who specialises in playing gormless obnoxious assholes) is especially bad  his two facial expressions wavering from "shock" to "delayed shock" at inopportune moments.
The pacing's terrible  it just suddenly ends, bang. The aliens catch colds and die. Film over. And most surprisingly in a Spielberg flick, there's no emotional clout here  at one point, the elder son begs his dad to let him go and see the front-line military action  not to join them in the fighting, just to have a gawp. "If you love me, you'll let me go" he says. It's supposed to be one of the Big Emotional Highpoints, but just comes across as a surly teenager (who hitherto was not surly) throwing a tantrum because he wants a better view of the fireworks.
The final shot of Ray delivering the kids back to mum and new boyfriend (in a bizarrely peaceful and untouched street) may as well be the culmination of having successfully delivered them home from a particularly lengthy snarl-up round the one-way gyratory system.
There's not one sympathetic character in the entire film, and by the end of the movie Ray's still an a**hole. No redemption, no lessons learned  other than aliens should carry a packet of fisherman's friends with them before they set out.