War of the Worlds?

Just watched "War of the Worlds" (to be referred to as WTF from here on in), and all I've got to say is: WTF?!


OK, WTF is a good movie.

I like Senor Spielbergo and really the enjoy the point-of-view (POV) approach. By POV I mean that WTF had relatively few wide shots from some imaginary camera floating hundreds of feet in the air. Most of the shots where from just by Tom Cruise's head and we saw just what people would see: destruction and awkward shots of the big bad things (walking webcams).

I also enjoyed the realistic character (really, there was just one character, Tom, everyone else was window dressing). Tom played the lost-but-trying father, and I really felt it.

The situations were a bit cliché'd and opportunistic: from the frying pan of the walking webcams into the fire of the mental-patient Tim Robbins (who had an unexpected but a welcome and interesting cameo). The plot seemed old and predictable and very unrealistic. Hey, shut up, I know that saying "unrealistic" about walking webcams popping out of the ground to vaporize people is strange, but here's some examples: Tom goes through adventure after adventure, narrowly escaping death more than three times, killing a webcam in the process and helping destroy another one, all without taking a bathroom break. Oh, and lets not forget the plane that falls on his ex-wife's house and somehow manages to miss the garage. I guess a 747 is big, but not that big.

And now, the ending. WTF had, by far, the worst ending I have ever seen, and that includes "Fellowship of the Ring" (to be referred to as "That Hobbit Movie"). OK, yes, I know, I should have read the book, as my dad pointed out, but no. That is no excuse for the poor execution. Yes, the book has the same lame ending. I guess in those days people didn't read the books to the end, so the author could really go hog-wild. Or not. But the point is that Spielbergo finished up the movie in one minute, explaining, IN WORDS spoken by someone sounding exactly like Morgan Freeman, how and why we won. I mean, spare an extra minute or two and show the global effect, but no, we stay with Top Gun throughout the whole thing and, imaginatively, the finishing shot is the same as the starting one.

Aside from the ending, the movie has quite a few errors. First, the camcorder. WTF? Everything electrical dies (lets not even get started on that one), but some guy's camcorder is working perfectly fine to show us a picture that's actually wrong?! Next, the plane. I mentioned it, but really! The basement is burned to a crisp, but the first floor of the house is untouched in parts. It might seem silly to nitpick the exact logistics behind the aliens' attack, but choose what you're going to be doing: either vaporize the hell out of the world or use us as fertilizer. Can't have it both ways and make sense. And what the hell was the point of the fertilizer option. They never bothered to explain the plants or the reason that the aliens are attacking us. Is it the same BS reason as ID4? You like our planet because of its resources? If you buried your webcams here millions of years ago, why not plunder then, not now when there's the resistance and the deus ex machina that results in your final demise? And, since Morgan Freeman explained that you studied it us "under a microscope" for years, how the hell do you not see that one coming a mile away?

Then there's the 9/11 influence. Practically everywhere you look there's references to that day: from Dakota's questions "is it the terrorists" to Tom being covered in ash to hand-held shots mimicking footage from 9/11, the movie is oozing with it. Nothing against film-makers acknowledging a national tragedy, but you gotta stop with it at some point.

Finally, and this is just skinning a dead horse, why the hell is this thing called "War of the Worlds"? Like the too-tall mental patient (Robbins) said, it's like men fighting maggots. I actually think that's a pretty accurate description of the plot, but you can't just call it "They's Killing Us Maggots, Move Your Ass!"


WTF is done well, has some seriously good elements but is in need of a better story. Maybe retelling the same old story verbatim isn't such a good idea. Look at the Bourne trilogy: they didn't follow the books but still made great movies and turned Good Will Hunting into a bad-ass mofo to match Bond.