The Third Tom Cruise Thread - "War of the Worlds" reviews (spoilers in boxes!)

[Lonestar]

Spoiler:

I'm really, really pissed they did the whole "OMFG TEHR GONNA XTERMINATE US!!!!" spiel. I had to explain to my family that the aliens (besides sucking our blood and using us a fertilizer) probably inteneded to enslave us, as from a extermination perspective, it would make more sense to park the spaceship in orbit and lob rocks at the urban centers.

I'm glad they more or less stuck to the Original WotW plot, right down to the narrative at the begining and the common cold killing the aliens.

Also, I got really, really tired of the "I'm a bad dad and my son is an angsty teenager" number.

Dakota Fanning is going to be an acadamy award winner when she grows up.

The Tripods were damned impressive.

Lonestar OUT!

[floppy_lobster]

I was damned impressed by those tripods.

There was a moment were they were all waiting at the ferry. And that tripod came over the horizon. Man I could relate to the way those people acted.

I thought the Horns the Tri-pods had kicked ass too. Well theres also


And the water seen was insane.


But answer me this?

Spoiler:

what the hell was the deal with the human blood the martians collected. I was utterly repulsed on how those scenes made it to a pg13 movie. The only conclusion i thought of yet was that they were trying to make earth more 'Red' or martian like? Even tho they were never admittly martians?

The battle scenes left somewhat to be desired, In regards to the hill thing. That was a dissapointment. But the movie kicked my ass for sure, overall.

[JohnT]

Pretty good movie - visually impressive, but I saw it on a small screen which didn't help. When I get out of New York I'll see it in a proper theater.

I would've enjoyed more scenes of tripods laying waste and less of Tom Cruise, Father. Knowing that that was Tom Cruise, you were always reassured whenever he was in a scene - you knew that nothing could happen to him.

I didn't like the explanation about the lightning storms: I thought they were the tripods draining our civilization of its power in order to power up the war machines.

They make great noises though. When this comes out on DVD, I'll have to hunt out the one scream he's used in all his movies, whenever applicable. In Duel, as the truck falls off the cliff, it makes a groaning noise. This noise has become a Speilberg signature and he uses it in any movie in which it can be used (Jurassic Park, SPR, this one (most likely.))

[floppy_lobster]

One thing that kind of kicked me in the ass tho.


There was no Thunder-child moments....


You know. When the BEST WEAPON man has to deploy is, indeed, deployed. And for a second. You regain some faith in humanity and its machines of wars in there ability to deal with the invaders....there was nothing of the sort in this movie.

In ID it was the A-bomb. In 1953 it was an A-bomb
In the Original it was the Ship.

But again. A must see movie.

[Nostromo]

I'm ambivalent about the movie. It was ok, but somewhat boring imo. The sound and the special effects were great, but that was expected. Some great scenes: the rise of the tripods, the train... I would like to have seen a larger scale battle between the aliens and the humans. And Tom Cruise's kids were extremely irritating, the little girl especially. I wished she just shut the **** up. I was glad when the teenager left. I'm not sure I like the story, either. I'm even more ambivalent about the ending. I'd give it a 7/10. Its definitely not a must see movie. Go see it if there's nothing else.

[Nostromo]

This is the official War of the Worlds review thread, so I'll post what I have to say here. Here's an interesting interpretation of the book I found on Wikipedia:

The book has been viewed as an indictment of European colonial actions in Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas. Justification of the conquest of non-European peoples was usually along the lines of might-makes-right; i.e., the Europeans had vastly superior technology and so must be naturally superior people and so are perfectly justified in taking the lands for themselves. This argument gets flipped on its head with the arrival of comparatively technologically superior Martians who, according to the colonizers' own arguments, must therefore have every right to subjugate Europeans.

I wonder if it was Wells intention?

I've been doing some thinking, I changed my opinion about the movie. Now I would give it a 8/10. I still think the kids were a major pain in the ass. The first part of the movie is great, then it slows down too much IMO.

About the ending:

Spoiler:

When I was watching the movie, I was expecting Tom Cruise, or somebody else, to poison the Alien's bloodstreams or roots, whatever they were. I guess I was expecting that the hero would save the day like in any other Blockbuster. But no, Tom didn't save us from the evil Aliens. That's probably why almost every viewer has an incredulous "say what?" reaction at the end of the movie. Now I think the ending was decent. At least, its a lot better than Independance day's ending.

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by nostromo
This is the official War of the Worlds review thread, so I'll post what I have to say here. Here's an interesting interpretation of the book I found on Wikipedia:

The book has been viewed as an indictment of European colonial actions in Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas. Justification of the conquest of non-European peoples was usually along the lines of might-makes-right; i.e., the Europeans had vastly superior technology and so must be naturally superior people and so are perfectly justified in taking the lands for themselves. This argument gets flipped on its head with the arrival of comparatively technologically superior Martians who, according to the colonizers' own arguments, must therefore have every right to subjugate Europeans.

I wonder if it was Wells intention?

In the first chapter of the book it says as much:

"And before we judge them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only on animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?"

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Saw it yesterday. Didn't really like it. I think I can say why without spoilers.

Special effects were cool, no doubt about it. But I realized about halfway through that I didn't give a rats ass whether the protagonists lived or died, or whether or not the aliens conquered earth. I actually was more emotionally engaged by Independence Day, a film I consider to be an utter piece of crap. Maybe I'm an alien, but still: special effects don't make up for an uninvolving narrative.

This also confirmed two thoughts I've had about Spielberg for a long time:

1) He's really a sadistic misanthrope. Aside from his protagonists, he actually hates people, and delights in their suffering. This runs through all of his films.

2) He's never learned that not showing something -- and letting the audience imagine it -- is better than showing it. Jaws remains his best film because he couldn't get the mechanical shark to work, and had to imply the shark's presence. Since then, though, he's always had the budget he wanted, and has shown everything he could. This served him well exactly once: in the opening of Saving Private Ryan. But more often its managed to either destroy the sense of wonder he was trying to build up (e.g., showing us the inside of the spaceship in the recut Close Encounters) or just fall so far short of what he was trying to achieve as to be laughable (e.g., the "wrath of God" in Raiders).

Finally, a small thing: this film had one of the dopiest bits of product placement I've ever seen. At one point we get a close-up of Tom Cruise's watch; it's narratively motivated, but it's also big enough and lasts long enough to allow us to see the brand (i.e., it's definitely product placement): Omega. Anyone here ever met a working class joe, just scraping by, who wears a $1,200+ watch to manual-labor job? Spielberg couldn't whore out to Timex? Sheesh.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Actually, one other point, this one for spoiler tags: Spielberg doesn't have the courage to follow his own movies to where they're obviously leading.

Spoiler:

I'm thinking here about the ending, which sucked in two huge ways:

1) The son never should have showed up in Boston. But in Spielberg's world, the movie isn't over until everybody (or everybody with a name, anyway), lives happily ever after. This tendency to redeem everyone, always, is at its most ridiculous in The Color Purple, in the scene where Sug reconciles with her father -- the exact opposite of what happens in the book, and something that effectively undermines the whole theme of the novel. But Robby living here comes in a close second. It's especially ridiculous because...

2) Spielberg's actually stolen the ending, visually, from one of the most famous endings in all of American cinema: the ending of The Searchers, a film that is a touchstone for Spielberg's whole generation of filmmakers (especially Scorsese). But John Ford understood the awesome emotional power of having Ethan save Debbie but still remain outside the family circle, literally being shut out in one of cinema's most famous shots (lovingly cribbed by Coppola for the last shot of The Godfather, because Coppola understood The Searchers). Here, Spielberg sets us up for The Searchers, only to undercut the whole thing by having Robby show up, hug him, and call him Dad. It's not just bad filmmaking, it's a betrayal of the American film canon.

[Drake Tungsten]

It was alright. Special effects were great, but the story needed an update and the ending was bad.

Spoiler:

Having the aliens die because of Earth diseases was a bad choice, even if it is how War of the Worlds has always ended. I was looking forward to finding out how they were going to kill the tripods, only to be disappointed that they were defeated the same damn way they always were. And am I supposed to believe that a highly intelligent alien race that had been studying Earth and preparing an attack for countless years didn't do any research into how Earth's microorganisms might affect them?

Also, Robbie needed to die. It was totally lame when he showed up at the end.

[Drake Tungsten]

Spoiler:

On a side note, the Species 3 trailer that preceded War of the Worlds here in Japan had pretty much every kind of nudity you could hope for in it. Awesome.

[OzzyKP]

Spoiler:

I'm thinking here about the ending, which sucked in two huge ways:

1) The son never should have showed up in Boston. But in Spielberg's world, the movie isn't over until everybody (or everybody with a name, anyway), lives happily ever after. This tendency to redeem everyone, always, is at its most ridiculous in The Color Purple, in the scene where Sug reconciles with her father -- the exact opposite of what happens in the book, and something that effectively undermines the whole theme of the novel. But Robby living here comes in a close second. It's especially ridiculous because...

Spoiler:

That was my initial reaction, then i thought about it some more. I think it was good that Robby survived. Throughout the whole movie he was the only one with any heroism in him. Tom Cruise was just about running and hiding, and if that meant killing people along the way, so be it. As long as he and his kids were safe, then who cares.

Robby though saw the issue as bigger, recognized his dad really had no idea what he was doing, and wanted to do whatever he could to help. He was the hero, NOT Tom Cruise. When they were on the hill at the battle he wanted to off and help. Help humanity. If he just died immediately it would send the message of "don't stick your neck out, just take care of yourself, don't be a hero", which I thought would have been terrible.

In a way his character kinda referenced the firefighters on September 11. Their goal may have been just as helpless, ultimately, as fighting back against those tripods, but they are still heros because they put themselves at risk for the good of others. Like Robby. His surviving is a vindication at the end.

So yea, Robby

I wanted to follow his story, not Tom Cruise's. Cruise was an annoying character.

[OzzyKP]

Also, my full review: http://www.oneandfour.org/archives/2..._the_worl.html

[Drake Tungsten]

Screw spoiler tags. Its in the title of the thread.

The title of the thread says "spoilers in boxes"...

[OzzyKP]

oops