Annoying Mind Freak with Awesome Special Effects

Rating: 6/10 (28 March 2014)

Yet another movie like Jurassic Park 2 the Lost World where Spielberg uses annoying characters and unlikely plots to mess with people's minds. Maybe he said: hey, we spent too much on special effects, let's not bother with plot, editing, or high caliber supporting actors. The daughter in that movie is the main reason the movie is messed up, despite the dinosaurs. Here Robby (car-thieving, Europe- hating Robby) all of a sudden is the hero when he helps strangers onto the ferry, yet in the next scene he abandons his own sister and father, not to join the army as an untrained teenage civilian, as suggested in a previous scene, (like they would say: we are in the middle of an attack, you have no training, please join us) but because Robby "needs to see this", all this while a strange woman attempts to kidnap/rescue the sister, who clearly and repeatedly states she is waiting for her dad. I wonder how many fathers would knock their son and the kidnapper out in order to protect their kids.
The kids' characters are made to be as annoying and disrespectful as possible. Nice touch with Rachel's high-pitched, hysterical screaming in the confined space of the minivan, fueled by Tom not explaining what is happening to his kids, yet ordering an immediate evacuation while looking like a stunned, speechless 9/11 survivor. We are supposed to believe that Tom lives only of condiments, peanut butter and Tabasco, and that his ex wife and boyfriend eat only sliced bread. The sandwich preparing scene is embarrassing to watch, as is the lullaby singing scene.
Even tough it's the end of the world and that is the only food they will have, (save the plane that is about to crash on their heads), nobody is hungry and the peanut butter sandwich still ends up on the window. That's right poor Rachel is allergic. Robbins is an EMT in real life, yet he knows how long the aliens have been here, what their agenda is, how many attack waves there will be, and that the Aliens are here to drink and spray us like fertilizer. Despite admitting that we are the maggots being exterminated, he becomes "the resistance", and decides to carry out a one-man offensive against these technologically advanced aliens and their 500 ft, force-field-protected, incinerating tripods. He will take them on with a hooded sweatshirts and a shotgun!
The snake probe scene: lifted from The Abyss, with a snake head that looks like a dentist's light and has a problem with mirrors. That's right: the aliens are at least 1 million years more advanced than us, but need flashlights and headlights to find us, incinerate 95% of us, and drink the remainder. Somehow they gather enough human blood to spray entire regions, God knows why. Their death ray, which sounds like a microwave oven with foil in it, for some reason spares our clothes and our video cameras, but not our buildings.
The alien heads and the tripod heads look the same, and the aliens look like some of our insects. They are from another atmosphere but don't feel compelled to wear any type of space suit or respirator. Didn't they have a million years to analyze our bacteria? They are taking the whole planet, they could walk in the Pentagon or access our uranium deposits, yet they choose this dark, flooded basement .What were they looking for? Do they only travel by lightning on special occasions?
The tripods are supposed to be advanced machinery, yet they are top heavy, unstable contraptions with three segmented legs, despite millions of years of evolution have shown that four legs give greater speed and stability. The tripods take a long time to come out of the ground and power up, sounding like a very human jet engine, they can be spotted 20 miles away, and if that wasn't enough to warn us, they even sound a horn. This is not characteristic of any military technology designed to hunt and kill ( sound suppression, low profile, stability, stealth, etc). Why don't the aliens, who like Zeus can control lighting, use it to wipe out entire cities? Why do they pick us off one by one? If they are really here to drink us, why incinerate us first? Do they add water to our ashes? Are we to believe that these machines were buried for a million years, some under bodies of water, and yet spring to life flawlessly? They must have really good batteries. Obviously this wouldn't work for many reasons: (power source, plate tectonics,magma, earthquakes, water infiltration, rust, man-made earth movements etc). Besides, it would be technology that is 1 million year old and extremely obsolete to the aliens. It would be like us attacking Martians with stone arrowheads.
Birds usually fly away from danger, warning humans by doing so. Here they fly and chirp joyfully towards the tripods, horn or no horn, death ray or not, and land on them. Yeah, that would really happen. Not! And off course it takes Tom Cruise the heroic working man to figure out the shield is down. Oh by the way, the shield technology is down for bacterial reasons! The trained army professionals , who do this for a living, and are in the process of firing missiles at them, must be either blind or clueless.
The family is fleeing a war zone, they have just lost their van at gun point, Robby has been beaten up bloody and Rachel almost carjacked, yet they are strolling peacefully towards the ferry while elevator music is playing, looking like they don't have a care in the world . The soldiers see the Tripods coming and remain there calmly, (instead of running for their lives) telling people there's no more room in the boat, yet one second later there is a side entrance and plenty of room on the boat.