“This is no more a war than a war between men and maggots is. This is an extermination.”

Rich’s rating: UUUULLLLAAAA!

Rich’s review: Occasionally I find it difficult to know where to begin with my reviews. In the case of War of the Worlds, I have so many starting points I don’t know which one to use. Should I begin by telling you about my illicit love affair with the Jeff Wayne musical version of War of the Worlds, which accomplishes the incredible feat of combining ’80s music with global catastrophe to produce excellent results? Or do I tell you about the recurring nightmares the 1950s version of the film gave me, which my dear old aunt tried to help me dispel by telling me I would be at least 24 by the time the world ended (true story, by the way)? Or do I simply mention that at least 30 minutes after coming out of the cinema the muscles in my shoulders and chest still haven’t un-knotted from the marathon of tension and fear I just put myself through? Yeah, I think that might do it.

Because, if you wanted to find a way to really give me a heart attack, protracted watchings of War of the Worlds might be the final thing that does me in. My scarred and shattered psyche has many faults, and my weird phobia about alien destruction of humanity wasn’t helped by watching essentially a vividly accurate re-creation of the end of the world in Dolby Surround Sound.

Visually, and unsurprisingly, War of the Worlds is absolutely stunning. To a generation of filmgoers who have grown accustomed to big budget special effects extravaganzas, this manages to stand out from the crowd. Maybe it’s just because everyone seems to be spending their special effects budgets on mass historical battles nowadays, but there is something refreshing about seeing a whole bunch of stuff really, really impressively blown up.

Now, for those of you who have somehow managed to miss the book, film, and various other adaptations, the plot of War of the Worlds is simple. Innocent bystander stands witness to the end of the world as brought about by militant men from Mars (gotta love that alliteration). In this case, divorcee dock-worker Ray (Tom Cruise) who finds that his weekend with his estranged kids, delinquent 16-year-old Robby and intensely annoying and psychologically damaged 10-year-old Rachael, is somewhat ruined by the systematic extermination of the human race by alien invaders. Not exactly word-for-word from the HG Wells original, but I’m willing to forgive a multitude of sins in the case of this film. While I would loved to have seen a proper historical adaptation of the book, watching alien tripod fighting machines blowing up New Jersey and the like does give it a certain immediacy.

So when aliens start messing up his weekend plans, Ray makes a beeline for any kind of safety he can find, which is scant. With terrifying, unstoppable alien death machines everywhere intent on turning your species to fertiliser, it’s hard to catch a break. He’s not aided by the fact that his kids are as dysfunctional as any five Jerry Springer guests, and the rest of the people he meets along the way are also more than a few death rays short of a global extermination plan (how’s that for a beautifully extended metaphor? Don’t like it? Everyone’s a critic…).

Exactly as it should be, War of the Worlds is almost the antithesis of films like Independence Day. Instead of being caught in the centre of humanities fight to drive back the aliens, we are instead drawn along with someone as powerless as we the audience are. It’s hard to be emotionally invested in the safety of a jet fighter flying US president — not many of us happen to be one of those. It’s pretty easy to relate to the normal man (or woman) on the street though, doing exactly what we would do in the same circumstances — hiding, running, and trying not to die.

Not everything with this film is perfect, however. Spielberg’s tendency to over-schmaltzify everything is still prevelent, including a scene which if you are anything like me you will be praying for Tom Cruise not to sing. There’s also a scene which I felt was out of place (but I don’t want to spoil here), but which I thought pretty much subverted a lot of the films integrity for the sake of adding an ‘action’ scene.

However, there are lots of nice nods to both the book and the 1950s original film — the addition of the Red Weed, the extended sequence in the cellar, the stuff with the ferry and the addition of several sequences that seem deliberately identical to the same scenes in the ’50s version show that the film knows its roots, even though it’s perfectly willing to leave them behind.

What else is there to say? Steven Spielberg knows how to make a blockbuster, and War of the Worlds is no exception. In a summer which has continued to produce quality films, War of the Worlds simply adds to that pedigree, as well as having the distinction of being the first film to cause my girlfriend to unconsciously injure me. Here’s a tip guys – if your other half has sharp nails and a strong grip, you might want to not hold hands.

Lissa’s rating: I agree with Rich that Tom Cruise should not have sung.

Lissa’s review: We all know how I feel about scary movies. I don’t like horror, overall. I don’t like to be scared much. I don’t like gore. I really don’t see the entertainment factor in watching a bunch of idiots run from zombies or serial killers or whatever the horror du jour is. So it may not be a surprise that I didn’t like War of the Worlds, but keep reading anyway, at least long enough to see this important fact: War of the Worlds wasn’t scary.

Honestly, I was bored through half of it, and I’m not normally a person who gets bored during movies like this. I usually watch through my fingers. My hands didn’t hit my face once, and that’s a bad sign for a movie that’s trying to scare the [insert PG-13 appropriate word here] out of you.

War of the Worlds is kind of a simple premise; I agree with Rich on that subject. Bad guys come to take over Earth. We don’t have a reason, but frankly, I don’t need one. I somehow doubt we’d get one anyway if such a scenario ever happened. But instead of big flying saucers in the sky, the alien ships have been buried under the Earth for millions of years and are just now being activated. Don’t ask why a race of super-intelligent beings with technology up the whazoo would wait years (much less millions of them) to take over our planet when they had the technology for that long. You won’t ever get anything approaching an answer. But anyway, aliens come to take over the Earth. Fine. So instead of watching someone we might actually care about, we trace Tom Cruise as a deadbeat dad and his two annoying kids as they try to stay alive.

A hint to movie makers: If you’re not going to bother with character development, then give us a character we might like. I honestly didn’t care if Tom Cruise and his family lived or died, because they all annoyed the heck out of me. I’m all for the anti-hero and flaws and all that, but make the guy at least be funny or charismatic in some bizarre way or something. Although to give Spielberg some credit, at least the character didn’t have a cute love interest. There. I said something nice.

I don’t have much else nice to say, though. The dialogue was lacking, the acting was all right but nothing jaw dropping, and the ending really relied on you actually knowing the story and extrapolating from the original. But what bothered me more than anything were the special effects. Excuse me while I pull out my soapbox.

Like most people, I remember the morning of September 11, 2001 very, very clearly. I remember standing in my dinky little apartment, wearing a blue t-shirt and white pajama pants with little flowers on them, watching the Towers fall on my 13-inch television. And somewhere in my mind amid the shock and horror, a little voice was saying this isn’t really happening. I’ve seen this before. This isn’t happening — it’s all some big special effect and it’s a movie and it’s not really happening and oh God, it IS happening! I remember seeing Deep Impact and Armageddon playing over in my head, when you saw the landmarks of New York fall. And I remember hearing in radio interviews and people talking about it that I wasn’t the only one with that reaction. There was talk about less violence in movies, and maybe that we shouldn’t film major landmarks falling anymore.

Well, no major landmarks are destroyed in War of the Worlds, but the focus of the movie is entirely on the destruction of humanity and our way of life. Maybe I’m making too much of it (and arguably, it is a summer blockbuster), but maybe I’m not, too. I don’t think that September 11th should govern our every move and influence our every decision, but it really has put a sour taste in my mouth when it comes to movies like this. I just don’t see what the entertainment value is in mass destruction.

The problem with War of the Worlds is that that’s all the movie is — mass destruction. Rich mentioned that utter feeling of powerless that someone would feel in such a situation. Now, I’m all for that. But if you want that, and want it done well, go rent Signs. Something I noticed is that Signs and War of the Worlds basically have the same plot: Aliens come to take over Earth but get defeated by something monstrously simple. The difference is the focus. War of the Worlds has Tom Cruise running from Steven Spielberg’s CGI cinema, and Signs explores how one family responds to the same threat in a more psychological fashion. I loved Signs. Signs was everything War of the Worlds should have been… and for that one I was on the edge of my seat.

I don’t even so much mind disaster flicks. There were some concepts that were really interesting in Deep Impact, like the idea of a lottery to determine who would be saved and who would be left to die. I haven’t seen The Day After yet, but it’s a person coping with destruction brought about by mans’ own carelessness. But what War of the Worlds lacked was any compassion, caring, message, or thought about the characters. It was simply “Tom Cruise runs from the world ending”, with nothing else behind it. Take away the special effects and there was nothing there for me, and that was what left me frustrated and not liking the movie.

Okay, I’ll get off my soapbox now.

Anyway, this isn’t to say War of the Worlds is a terrible movie, or that Tom Cruise should be burned in effigy. I mean, granted, the media hype around him right now kind of puts a bad taste in my mouth as well, but that even annoys me because it’s really not my business what celebrities do outside their movies, and I refuse to care because that lends them far more importance than I think they deserve. (I mean, it’s not like they listen to the gossip about MY life or anything.) But overall, I just didn’t think this movie was worth the money put into it — either by the producers to make it, or by me to see it.

Go rent Signs. Better flick, more suspense, better acting, better writing, better plot, and just a better movie overall.

Justin’s rating: Deep-fried alien sounds MIGHTY good right now, yessum!

Justin’s review: Answer me this: Why do people rave and lavish adoring praise on movies that do nothing more or less than make them extremely tense? Because in the aftermath of War of the Worlds, I kept hearing this same line of reasoning — “I loved it!” “Um, why?” “I was gripping my seat the whole time and I thought my heart was going to explode under the tense strain of it all!” “Usually that‘s a good reason to see a doctor, not praise a movie, pal.”

People tend to get worked up over movies that strike them with a powerful emotional reaction, whether it be sappiness, excitement, or deep constipation. If the emotion is high enough, then they don’t really get critical of the film they just saw, asking themselves if it was genuinely good or not — it doesn’t matter! It made them tense! My first girlfriend got a major adrenaline rush after seeing Timecop (yes, THAT Timecop) that she forever pronounced the film a classic even though it was the cinematic equivalent of bubblegum stuck to the bottom of your shoe.

I knew about from the time of the trailers that War of the Worlds would not be on my favorites list this year. I did give it a fair shot, but I had a gut feeling (which was later proved correct) that this was nothing more than a full-fledged Disaster Movie with scifi trappings. There’s no “winning”, there’s no clear antagonist, there’s no bigger rhyme or reason to it all. It’s just a lot of things that go “Boom” and the people who run from them. That, to me, is what dull is all about.

War of the Worlds introduces us to aliens who make a mess on the rug of humanity and how Tom Cruise and his two “please for the love of PETE shut the heck UP” kids trotting away from the scenes of carnage without a greater purpose in mind. Similar to both Signs and many zombie flicks, War of the Worlds takes an extremely limited view of the large-scale events, offering us only little slivers of the larger picture here and there. That is frustrating. That is restricting your storytelling from what is interesting and planting it squarely on what is boring. If it wasn’t for all of the Random Exposition Characters that Cruise kept bumping into, offering him exclusive information given to few other people in the world, I think this film would’ve been entirely focused on a handful of people hiking across New England.

Yes, the special effects are nifty. So what? There’s no real fun to it. The humans don’t offer up any serious challenge to the aliens, so the whole affair has the excitement of watching a kid go stomping around on earthworms after a spring rain. Messy and only momentarily interesting.

Plus, did anyone actually read the script with a semi-intelligent eye and see all of the nonsense when it came to the aliens’ intentions and actions? I have to imagine that the Alien Overlord’s orders to the invading fleet had to be something like this, in order to fit in with the events of the film:

• ORDER #1: We’re going to create gigantic war machines fit to obliterate an entire planet! And then we’re going to bury them like dogs burying bones… for no good reason. Hey, what’s the fun in blasting dinosaurs? Let’s wait until an intelligent civilization spreads over the place.
• ORDER #2: Let’s stealthily invade the planet under the cover of gigantic lightning storms.
• ORDER #3: Even though we have immensely powerful death rays and huge machines, let’s be completely unsporting and use Invincibility Shields so that it’s not even close to a fair fight.
• ORDER #4: Oh, and just so no ocean-going vessels collide with us, let’s equip each Tripod with a fog horn.
• ORDER #5: Kill all humans.
• ORDER #6: Capture live humans and use for fertilizer. What, we don’t have any humans left? How come?
• ORDER #7: Let’s not actually do any scans of the planet we’re invading to see if there’s anything potentially life-threatening to our species. It looks like a nice place, let’s just go ahead!
• ORDER #8: Stan, make SURE you put a vulnerable Death Star exhaust port on each tripod. You forgot that last time, and we almost won.

Intermission!

• Ray’s basement-dwelling buddy’s surname is Ogilby, which is the name of the Astronomer who first comments on the Green Flares from Mars in the original book?
• The scene with both the telescoping eye and the martians in the basement hark back to identical scenes in the 1950’s version?
• If the lightning storm blew the solenoids on everyones cars in New Jersy, how come Ray’s car works still after the second EMP blast brings down a whole plane?
• Do all little girls in peril from alien menaces need to be so annoying? The prosecution calls Newt from Aliens to the stand…
• One of the streets was named Van Buren. One of the main characters from the 1953 War of the Worlds was Silvia Van Buren. [thanks Robert H!]
• The grandmother and grandfather at the end of the movie were played by Ann Robinson and Gene Barry. And they played the lead characters Silvia Van Buren and Doctor Clayton Forester in the 1953 War of the Worlds. [thanks Robert H!]