War of the Worlds

[spman 0]

We screened this one at work tonight, and I was surprised at how great it was. I think Steven Spielberg can be highly over rated at times, so I went into this not expecting much, but overall it was a very excellent film, probobly the best so far this year. If you can cast aside Tom Cruise's bizarre personal image, then he has a really great on screen presence. Dakota Fanning is a great actress for her age, although her character in this film gets really grating at times, there are moments in this film where you will simply wish you reach your hand into the screen and slap her. I really don't see anything else on the horizen this summer that's gonna top this, as I'm expecting Fantastic Four to dissapoint. Overall this is definitly worth your time and money to go and see, 8.5/10

[Downhome 0]

I just got back from seeing this one, and it was way better than I thought it would be. It was far more disturbing, dark, and seriously freaky...almost to the point of actually being "scary", than I ever could have imagined. This movie hit me harder than most movies that are billed as true horror.

 

As much as Tom Cruise pisses me off lately, I just can't fucking hate the guy on screen, I can't. I admit, I went into this WANTING to hate him in this movie, but about a second into it I was already so involved with the story, that I forgot about my hate for him, and realized that I love almost, if not all, of his flicks.

 

Dakota Fanning was great, but yes she did piss me off a couple of times. The entire plot point of her

 

being claustrophobic, that method used to calm her, etc...

 

seemed pointless to me, and could have been elminated completely, which would have helped keep her from being so annoying. I didn't really see the point in it, since it didn't pay off or build to anything. I'll tell you what though, this girl continues to impress the hell out of me. Put her in more and more films Hollywood! Stretch her talents just a bit more, and nothing will be able to hold her back. A few more roles that really push her, and she'll be set in stone for sure, and it's going to happen.

 

My favorite line in the movie came from Fanning herself:

 

Is it the terrorists!?

 

by itself, it's not a great line or anything. However, coming from a child, in that situation, and just her fantastic intense delivery of the line...it really hit me hard, very hard.

 

I had no idea that

Morgan Freeman

and

Tim Robbins

were in this film, so it was a nice surprise to see them both show up in one way or another. I'm glad I purposely didn't read anything at all about this film before I saw it.

 

I even thought Justin Chatwin did a great job as Robbie, I believed that he could actually be Cruise's son. However:

 

I hated that SS made it so that Robbie showed up at the end, that really pissed me off and almost ruined that final scene for me. A huge fireball, or whatever that was, destroyed an entire military unint (and tons of other people), but this moron lived through it...without any injury, AND made it home before his father and sister (yes, I know they were sorta held up there for a while). His showing up there at the end took away from the bitter-sweet ending, and I hated it.

 

I'm at least glad that SS didn't have it where Cruise's ex's husband was killed, leading to Cruise getting back with her at the end.

 

Ugh, but why bring the son back!?

 

I really enjoyed it, the two hours just flew by, and most of the film had me in a ball of nerves, just like the characters. Like I said before, this one got to me than most horror movies, and that's exactly what I was hoping for.

 

I am glad they didn't go into detail about why the invasion was happening. It left us, the viewers, in the same situation as all of the people in the movie. That "wtf" feeling, wondering just what in the hell this is happening for, what is going on, why is it going on...and just what in the world their reasons for attacking are. I liked that feeling, I felt like we could connect to the confusion of the characters more that way.

 

This film, unlike most films I've ever seen, really made me feel like I was in the movie myself. The sounds, the confusion, the tension, it was all great.

[Guest BrokenWings]

I haven't seen it yet, hopefully this weekend, but I just thought I'd mention that I sincerely hope that Dakota Fanning doesn't get into any drugs or any of the other Hollywood bullshit as she grows. She's an amazing actress, and it would be a real shame to see her become addicted to cocaine or something when her fame begins to go to her head, or something such as that.

 

I'm really excited for this film, have been since I heard about it, so I'm glad you guys liked it.

[The Mandarin 0]

This movie was the shit. Tom Cruise continues to impress, and Dakota Fanning still REFUSES to turn in a bad performance.

 

Dakota Fanning was great, but yes she did piss me off a couple of times. The entire plot point of her

 

being claustrophobic, that method used to calm her, etc...

 

seemed pointless to me, and could have been elminated completely, which would have helped keep her from being so annoying.

 

I assume they wanted her panicked reaction to go deeper than "Ahh! Ahh! Ahh!" and crying. Besides, she needed more character development anyways.

 

How the hell did that faggot kid make it to Boston before Tom Cruise? He could have explained.

 

I was disappointed a bit, because I was expecting Tim Robbins to die after acting out Agent of Oblivion's dream by pointing a shotgun at a natural disaster (massive alien tripod, close enough).

 

Other than those two MASSIVE LETDOWNS, I must say, the movie was awesome. I'm going to go see it again.

[LJSexay 0]

it was fantastic. Throughout most of it I was gripping the seat arm, because it was all so INTENSE! I loved it all! And I'm so glad so little was explained.. it really made you feel like a part of it. Gonna take the siblings to see this one

[pochorenella 0]

The movie's getting pretty mixed reviews from what I've read. Roger Ebert gave it ** and that accounts for a Thumbs Down (not that most people here care what he says anymore) and that movie critic guy on NBC said he preferred Mars Attacks to this thing. Check rottentomatoes.com where it's getting a 72% rating, still fresh, but not the be-all end-all blockbuster most expected. Personally, I like Cruise's work and couldn't care less about his love life and scientology-preaching. He's been in some great movies, and of course, Spielberg is one of my faves. Minority Report I think is truly underappreciated because of its ending, and from all accounts this one has a hard-to-swallow endind, too. I'll try and check it out this weekend.

[WrestlingFan4Ever 0]

Just got back from seeing it. Great fucking movie. Really intense. Spielberg proves again why he is one of the best directors working today. And Cruise never disappoints me with his movie choices.

[Edwin MacPhisto 0]

Ebert's main gripes come down to the tripods not working for him. And I'm not really sure why, especially considering that

Spielberg makes it quite obvious why the ships have that design, entirely wordlessly when we see the--surprise!--three-limbed aliens mulling about in the basement

. That bit was a wonderfully quiet revelation, and this isn't one of Ebert's best reviews.

 

I saw this impulsively tonight and loved it. Very little waiting, ripping right into the chaos. Some of the landscapes were just horrifying, but I think Spielberg could have gotten a little more out of the movie had he pushed to the R rating. I know he doesn't like to make them and I didn't think the movie needed to be much more explicit than it was, but the audience met the first few truly horrifying visions (

the floating clothes, the sudden flood of bodies down the river

with that laughter that signifies "I'm tremendously uncomfortable watching this, so much so that this is all I can do." A little more might have stifled them, but maybe that's just audiences today.

 

Speaking of audiences today...

"So cells killed them?" One of my favorite quotes from the row behind me after the lights came up. I'm not sure how well the aliens' demise will work today, because I'm not sure half the people in the theatre understood what happened, despite Morgan Freeman's nice delivery of H.G. Wells' last paragraph. But I think it still holds up quite well. The George Pal version from the 1950s has always been one of my favorite old sci-fi films because there's nothing but futility and riding out the suffering.

This version is a fine heir to one of the better sci-fi legacies out there.

 

Overall, a really fine portrait of human desperation in the face of pretty much unspeakable horrors. I dig.

[Kardo 0]

I thought it was terrible, bored me and my friends. everything was waayyyyyyyyyyyyy too conveniet. Like way too much. The girl was terrible, "Oh I'm SOOOOOO smart" all the time. Cruise was the only one in the movie I thought was okay. The whole movie should have been so much more.

 

I get the feeling I'm gonna have the unpopular opinion here.

[Kardo 0]

Ebert's main gripes come down to the tripods not working for him.  And I'm not really sure why, especially considering that

Spielberg makes it quite obvious why the ships have that design, entirely wordlessly when we see the--surprise!--three-limbed aliens mulling about in the basement

.  That bit was a wonderfully quiet revelation, and this isn't one of Ebert's best reviews.

 

I saw this impulsively tonight and loved it.  Very little waiting, ripping right into the chaos.  Some of the landscapes were just horrifying, but I think Spielberg could have gotten a little more out of the movie had he pushed to the R rating.  I know he doesn't like to make them and I didn't think the movie needed to be much more explicit than it was, but the audience met the first few truly horrifying visions (

the floating clothes, the sudden flood of bodies down the river

with that laughter that signifies "I'm tremendously uncomfortable watching this, so much so that this is all I can do."  A little more might have stifled them, but maybe that's just audiences today.

 

Speaking of audiences today...

"So cells killed them?" One of my favorite quotes from the row behind me after the lights came up.  I'm not sure how well the aliens' demise will work today, because I'm not sure half the people in the theatre understood what happened, despite Morgan Freeman's nice delivery of H.G. Wells' last paragraph.  But I think it still holds up quite well.  The George Pal version from the 1950s has always been one of my favorite old sci-fi films because there's nothing but futility and riding out the suffering.

  This version is a fine heir to one of the better sci-fi legacies out there.

 

Overall, a really fine portrait of human desperation in the face of pretty much unspeakable horrors.  I dig.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

Funnily enough, I burst out laughing alot of the times, it wasn't the things happening, it was the weak reactions and convience in the characters.

[AndrewTS 0]

"Funnily enough, I burst out laughing alot of the times, it wasn't the things happening, it was the weak reactions and convience in the characters."

 

That's the impression I got from the trailers, and partly why I'm going to pass on the theater run.

[Downhome 0]

If you EVER plan on watching this movie, especially if you plan on watching it just once, then trust me...WATCH THIS ONE IN A GOOD MOVIE THEATER!

 

This one isn't just about the movie, what you seen on the screen. Half of the experience is watching it on the big screen, with the great sound system, watching it with a lot of other people.

 

If you don't see this one in the theater, you'll regret it.

[cabbageboy 0]

Yeah I agree. I might go see it at the new Showcase 16 rather than the Dixie Dozen cheapo theater (not like a 2nd run theater but a bleh 1st run one). The smaller theater is fine for stuff like Land of the Dead but for a big movie you gotta go to the fancy theater. Imagine trying to see ROTK or something at a dingy cut rate place, it would suck.

[Lord of The Curry 0]

Thumbs in the middle for me, leaning up.

 

What worked

 

- Killer special effects and CG work

- Awesome directing when it came to showcasing the destryoyed landscapes and the invasion scenes.

- Tim F'n Robbins.

I wanted a poster of Rita Hayworth covering the tunnel he was digging

 

What didn't

 

-

Weak-ass ending. WEAK. Everybody is happy and everybody lives. The son survives getting his ass firebombed to hell? Bull-fucking-shit

 

- Dakota Fanning annoyed the shit out of me with her "I'm strong and smart" attitude one minute and then switching to screaming, useless waste of space.

 

-

Cruise being the one to spot the force fields being down. Like not a single other person would've noticed before then

.

 

-

So the aliens have crafts buried in the earth that they planted millions of years ago but they can't do something as simple as run a diagnostic of the atmosphere or check the biophysical structure of the planet to see if anything has changed since then? Not exactly smart for a plan a few million years in the making.

.

[bobobrazil1984 0]

I thought this was a pretty awesome movie. Cruise may going off the deep end in real life but he did a really great job. One of his stronger performances I thought.

 

the effects and destruction and shit was just nuts and genuinely horrific. Great buildup,

and the cellar scene kicked ass. Tim Robbins was a nice surprise there.

 

Only small complaints, the tone seemed to variate at points going from deadly serious and grounded, to cruise with grenades, which is more ID4-ish. And Speilberg kinda took the schmaltzy way out with the son at the end.

 

Beats the shit out of ID4 as best alien attack movie though

[Lord of The Curry 0]

If I hadn't seen the movie I'd say you were spoiling it for those who haven't. Tag it up, skippy.

[Edwin MacPhisto 0]

-

So the aliens have crafts buried in the earth that they planted millions of years ago but they can't do something as simple as run a diagnostic of the atmosphere or check the biophysical structure of the planet to see if anything has changed since then? Not exactly smart for a plan a few million years in the making.

.

 

Re: the ships:

This was one of the stranger bits about this version. Cool visual of the tripods pushing up out of the earth, but yes, a bit odd. Bacteria killing the aliens is easily plausible in the older versions, when they come to earth and attack it immediately, but a little odd if the crafts have been buried/Earth's already been scouted. Still, it didn't bother me that much; I didn't find that worth focusing on amidst everything else.

[RavishingRickRudo 0]

You don't find the aliens' actual demise to be "important"?? WHAT THE FUCK?

 

The whole movie, 99.9% of it, was "OMG Aliens are here! OMG what are we going to do?!" and the 0.1% of it -the ending- was "We won? Whoopee?!"

 

They put so much time and effort in building the aliens, building the threat, building the notion that Earth is FUCKED, and the ending is literally 2 minutes long.

 

And THE HOUSE WAS UNFUCKINGTOUCHED! The family, EVERYONE, lived. That's bullshit. The aliens have enough time to take out countyside-America, but don't have enough time to take out parts of BOSTON?! The kid lives despite there being NO WAY he could have survived? They didn't even TRY with the ending. It was like Speilberg forgot he had to conclude the story and was running short on time and decided to give it 2 minutes and leave everything just peachy. He prepared a 12 course meal, and the desert was a fucking bowl of ice cream.

 

The ending really hurt the movie IMO. It made sense in one way, but as LOTC mentioned, these Aliens possess intergalactic technology and have been planning this for hundreds -if not millions- of years, and they never bothered to see if they could LIVE HERE?!

 

Dakota Fanning was awful. She would have been more tolerable if she didn't have so much fucking screen time, but JESUS, she had almost as much time as CRUISE! Certainly had more time than the aliens. And what kid -in real life- is that neurotic? Such a useless character.

 

And why were people so stupid? Taking the boat? Standing around WATCHING the giant machine come up from the ground? Grouping together to make it easier for the aliens to find out? To quote UHF - STUUUUUUPIIIIIIIIIIIID!!!!

 

In the end, it wasn't a particularly "bad" movie, but the ending was very unsatisfying and cheap and there were lots of gaps in logic. The special effects were tremendous, as there was only maybe 1 or 2 scenes that didn't look "real" to me. There were a lot of great scenes in the movie, like when Cruise is driving the van through the crowd and the gunplay that ensued. The floating bodies, the falling clothes, the tripods at night. Some really good suspense. Cruise and his other kid were ok, though I didn't really buy Cruise as "the bad dad" nor did I buy his relationship (or lack thereof) with his kids.

 

The message of the story is a bit odd. I would venture to say that the "real" war of the worlds happens when man is in crisis. Then you can do two things, fight each other and be selfish, or help each other out. The thing is, Cruise didn't really "learn" that lesson, so there goes that theory. So, in the end, the lesson SS was trying to convey was "family = good" and quite frankly, that lesson sucked.

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

They had legs in the book and radio adaptation.

[Dangerous A 0]

Here is Roger Ebert's take...

 

 

War of the Worlds

 

 

BY ROGER EBERT / June 29, 2005

 

Cast & CreditsRay Ferrier: Tom Cruise

Rachel: Dakota Fanning

Mary Ann: Miranda Otto

Robbie: Justin Chatwin

Harlan Ogilvy: Tim Robbins

 

 

 

 

"War of the Worlds" is a big, clunky movie containing some sensational sights but lacking the zest and joyous energy we expect from Steven Spielberg. It proceeds with the lead-footed deliberation of its 1950s predecessors to give us an alien invasion that is malevolent, destructive and, from the alien point of view, pointless. They've "been planning this for a million years" and have gone to a lot of trouble to invade Earth for no apparent reason and with a seriously flawed strategy. What happened to the sense of wonder Spielberg celebrated in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and the dazzling imagination of "Minority Report"?

 

The movie adopts the prudent formula of viewing a catastrophe through the eyes of a few foreground characters. When you compare it with a movie like "The Day After Tomorrow," which depicted the global consequences of cosmic events, it lacks dimension: Martians have journeyed millions of miles to attack a crane operator and his neighbors (and if they're not Martians, they journeyed a lot farther). The hero, Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), does the sort of running and hiding and desperate defending of his children that goes with the territory, and at one point even dives into what looks like certain death to rescue his daughter.

 

There's a survivalist named Ogilvy (Tim Robbins) who has quick insights into surviving: "The ones that didn't flatline are the ones who kept their eyes open." And there are the usual crowds of terrified citizens looking up at ominous threats looming above them. But despite the movie's $135 million budget, it seems curiously rudimentary in its action.

 

The problem may be with the alien invasion itself. It is not very interesting. We learn that countless years ago, invaders presumably but not necessarily from Mars buried huge machines all over the Earth. Now they activate them with lightning bolts, each one containing an alien (in what form, it is hard to say). With the aliens at the controls, these machines crash up out of the Earth, stand on three towering but spindly legs and begin to zap the planet with death rays. Later, their tentacles suck our blood and fill steel baskets with our writhing bodies.

 

To what purpose? Why zap what you later want to harvest? Why harvest humans? And, for that matter, why balance these towering machines on ill-designed supports? If evolution has taught us anything, it is that limbs of living things, from men to dinosaurs to spiders to centipedes, tend to come in numbers divisible by four. Three legs are inherently not stable, as Ray demonstrates when he damages one leg of a giant tripod, and it falls helplessly to the ground.

 

The tripods are indeed faithful to the original illustrations for H.G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds, and to the machines described in the historic 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast and the popular 1953 movie. But the book and radio program depended on our imaginations to make them believable, and the movie came at a time of lower expectations in special effects. You look at Spielberg's machines and you don't get much worked up, because you're seeing not alien menace but clumsy retro design. Perhaps it would have been a good idea to set the movie in 1898, at the time of Wells' novel, when the tripods represented a state-of-the-art alien invasion.

 

There are some wonderful f/x moments, but they mostly don't involve the pods. A scene where Ray wanders through the remains of an airplane crash is somber and impressive, and there is an unforgettable image of a train, every coach on fire, roaring through a station. Such scenes seem to come from a kind of reality different from that of the tripods.

 

Does it make the aliens scarier that their motives are never spelled out? I don't expect them to issue a press release announcing their plans for world domination, but I wish their presence reflected some kind of intelligent purpose. The alien ship in "Close Encounters" visited for no other reason, apparently, than to demonstrate that life existed elsewhere, could visit us, and was intriguingly unlike us while still sharing such universal qualities as the perception of tone. Those aliens wanted to say hello. The alien machines in "War of the Worlds" seem designed for heavy lifting in an industry that needs to modernize its equipment and techniques. (The actual living alien being we finally glimpse is an anticlimax, a batlike, bug-eyed monster, confirming the wisdom of Kubrick and Clarke in deliberately showing no aliens in "2001").

 

The human characters are disappointingly one-dimensional. Cruise's character is given a smidgen of humanity (he's an immature, divorced hotshot who has custody of the kids for the weekend) and then he wanders out with his neighbors to witness strange portents in the sky, and the movie becomes a story about grabbing and running and ducking and hiding and trying to fight back.

 

There are scenes in which poor Dakota Fanning, as his daughter, has to be lost or menaced, and then scenes in which she is found or saved, all with much desperate shouting. A scene where an alien tentacle explores a ruined basement where they're hiding is a mirror of a better scene in "Jurassic Park" where characters hide from a curious raptor.

 

The thing is, we never believe the tripods and their invasion are practical. How did these vast metal machines lie undetected for so long beneath the streets of a city honeycombed with subway tunnels, sewers, water and power lines, and foundations? And why didn't a civilization with the physical science to build and deploy the tripods a million years ago not do a little more research about conditions on the planet before sending its invasion force? It's a war of the worlds, all right -- but at a molecular, not a planetary level.

 

All of this is just a way of leading up to the gut reaction I had all through the film: I do not like the tripods. I do not like the way they look, the way they are employed, the way they attack, the way they are vulnerable or the reasons they are here. A planet that harbors intelligent and subtle ideas for science fiction movies is invaded in this film by an ungainly Erector set.

 

 

I'll be seeing this tonight or tommorrow. Sounds to me like Ebert was real hung up on the tripods and aliens themselves.

 

Just to be a dick, this is the guy who recommended "Van Helsing".

[Spicy McHaggis 0]

I liked it a lot.

 

[moron]Did they ever explain the

red plant and why they needed human flesh

?[/moron]

 

I never read the book.

[Edwin MacPhisto 0]

You don't find the aliens' actual demise to be "important"?? WHAT THE FUCK?

No, because I'm pretty familiar with all the source material.

It's obviously important and one of the cruxes of the film, but I just didn't get caught up in the "planning for millions of years!" nonsense when there was so much else going on. Yeah, it was dumb to have the ships all buried and never noticed. Death by bacteria remains one of the great ironic finales in all of sci-fi, even if the execution is somewhat botched.

 

$22 million on Wednesday, by the way. Yikes.

[Vern Gagne 0]

Ebert's idea about setting the movie during the time HG Wells novel took place wouldn't be a horrible idea.

[WrestlingFan4Ever 0]

Spielberg said he hates that time period and finds it boring. I agree with him.

[Guest Vitamin X]

Of course, the better part to setting the film in that timepiece is that it's been said H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds as a criticism of the British colonization of Africa that was going on during that time period.

 

I agree kind of with half of what RRR said, and half of what Ebert said. I just got back from seeing it, and it left me a bit disappointed. The movie starts out really strong, then kinda withers from thereon out. It felt like an awful hybrid of Signs, Independence Day, and Jurassic Park. The last one in particular being demonstrated in the

scene with the big eyeball-camera type thing, chasing around Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning's characters. They mirrored the kitchen scene with the raptors almost exactly at some points

.

 

I'm not sure what to think of this movie. There were things I liked about it, but there were almost just as many things I hated about it. The character of Robbie consistently annoyed me throughout the whole film, and had I not accidentally went over one of the spoiler tags in this thread,

I would have been wishing for his death the whole movie, only for it not to come

. Cruise did his usual great self, but there were an incredible amount of BULLSHIT! WTF? moments, in particular

when the first tripod comes out of the ground and starts incinerating everyone around him, and is just so ridiculously lucky to avoid ANY kind of injury or incineration himself

.

 

It's worth seeing, but don't go in expecting too much. The gorier parts were certainly worth it.

[The Ghost of bps21 0]

Apparently when I need some crack...I'll just come to where you guys hang out.

 

This movie...

 

Seriously...

 

You liked THIS MOVIE?

 

We are talking about War of the Worlds, right?

[Guest Vitamin X]

Mind explaining what you disliked about it rather than contributing absolutely nothing to the thread?

[The Ghost of bps21 0]

I'll make this easier:

 

Here is what I liked about War of the Worlds:

 

...

 

...

 

Hey, Was that Morgan Freeman as the Narrator?

 

He's cool.

[AndrewTS 0]

Hey, bps, haven't seen you around in a long time.

 

However, if I want to hear Morgan Freeman's voice, I can go see March of the Penguins or Batman Begins, both of which interest me about 100x more than WotWs.

[RavishingRickRudo 0]

The Shawshank Redemption fan in me had me marking out for Tim Robbins' character digging a tunnel in the same movie Morgan Freeman is narrating.

 

Edwin:

"Death by bacteria remains one of the great ironic finales in all of sci-fi, even if the execution is somewhat botched."

 

I agree! I really liked that part because, to me, it makes sense. So why did they have to be buried? Why did they have to be there for a long time? Something like that is not "nonsense", it's an integral part of the story that contradicts the ending. It's a reflection of sloppy storytelling by someone who should have known better.