Rate Spielberg's War of the Worlds

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

I was really disappointed when the aliens weren't the same kind of aliens as in E.T. That waould of been so cool.

E.T. Kill Earth.

 

[DonTadow]

I really, really liked this movie. It is about the best adaptation of H.G. Wells' novel that I can imagine. Rated it a 9.

I really enjoyed the human drama that many people here are complaining about. After all, the original novel was always far more about how people struggled to survive the alien invasion rather than telling a story of how a bunch of aliens wipe out humanity. And I don't think that the characters acting irrationally hurt the film at all. Rather, I think it made the "suspension of disbelief" all the more powerful. The characters acted human. They were scared, terrified, angry, confused, and had no idea what on earth to do. The characters weren't a bunch of D&D characters metagaming themselves into a perfect calm and possesing perfect insight into what to do in order to survive. They acted like people really would in that scenerio. And I am really impressed that Spielberg pulled off that effect.

All the special effects were perfect.

Spoilers below.

I don't agree with nitpick #14 above. Why would the martians use bio-suits? How could they? There are two big problems with expecting that.
1: To the invaders, the humans were neither real enemies, nor pests to be exterminated. Humans were food to them. Things to be consumed and eaten raw. How do you biologically isolate yourself from your food?
2: Not mentioned in the movie, but in the book the narrator made theories that the martians had already completely annihilated all forms of disease on thier own world, and it had been so long since then they didn't think of the possibility.

I completely disagree. They acted like people trying to move a plot along.

Examples= girl runs up stairs towards the end... why? obviously so we can speed this up and introduce the tripods capturing the humans

girl gets "lost" why so that we can have ton cruise get captures and blow one of them up (all the mechanical high tech devices on the pods and they use the equivelent of a reverse anus to convert people to fuel . And why do one at a time , why not two three or all of them. )

Boy runs up the hill to ... see whats going on.. (at least thats what i get) for no other reason as to make the next few seens with tim robbins more plausible (we don't want four people running around a crowded basement)

The water emerging tripods come up just when the ferry takes off, despite the fact that the other pods came right after the lightening strikes.

1. Examples aside, you have to take yourself out of the novel for a minute and take the movie as it is. In the movie, the the people looked as if they were being exterminated. The plot of the movie showed that they humans were being exterminated. The weaponry on the ship was not to consume people but to dicentegrate them into nothing more than dust. I don't know about you, but I don't mash my foood then burn it to dust before i eat it.

2. Again set aside the novel , we have to take this movie for what it is. There was no mention or suspician that the aliens had wiped disease out on their own planet. These aliens seemed to plan for every possible contigency but the most simple one.

In your first paragraph you mention the people acting like "normal people" and that is farther from the truth. AGain, many of my inconsistencies show this. MIlitary commanders not laying out the best course of action "getting those cars off for more people". All of the people watching and starying continuosly as the church falls apart and the tripod comes out the ground. That felt like I was watching some cheesy horror movie. Only people in cheesy horror movies do that.

It seems that everyone was always really close to the action, as opposed to getting far away from it. It just didn't seem like normal peoples actions.

 

[Jerome Steelsides]

All you people who disliked what you call a horrid story, humanistic POV, etc. - did you ever actually READ H.G. Wells' novel? The book IS the story of people. The Martians are really only secondary.

And I agree, the virus ending is a bit deus ex machina. But it always was.

I give it a 9.

 

[DonTadow]

Yes, and again its a great story. But if you're going to remake that story you almost have to put it in the 19th century. Its a history piece. Speilberg tried to stick to he original as much as he could, however he put them in this century. Unfortunately, he had to change a number of things to "Fit" make the attack make sense in the 21st century. While doing that he didn't do enough and wound up with a whole bunch of inconsistencies and a horrible ending for a 21st century movie.

Again, Signs did a lot better job with a 21st century of this plot. It actually ended the same way. I walked out of signs though with the feeling of triumph over humans surviving as opposed to War of the Worlds, which I walked out of confused and bewildered.

Speilberg actually made a mistake by putting too much emphasis on the aliens making us notice the inconsistencies more. More than likely, it was the great special effects that were emphasised over substance that led to this. Completely opposite of signs.

Everyone keeps clammering over the special effects. Man It's dreamworks for sakes. They have some of the best minds at MIT working on this stuff. I have no doubt. They could put a broomstick on the screen for 2 hours and still pull off a wonderful special effects banaza.

 

[Mark Chance]

I really, really liked this movie. It is about the best adaptation of H.G. Wells' novel that I can imagine.

I can imagine a better one. For example, the idea that the Martians managed to hide hundreds of huge warships underneath major cities is silly. Much better for the Martians to just arrive. The clumsy addition of the EMP lightning could have been avoided entirely as a result.

The movie would have been improved by leaving out Tim Robbins's character, Cruise's character's teenage son (who was little more than a glorified extra), and by casting someone other than Cruise in the lead. How this wooden, second-string character actor ever became a top box office draw is one of the great mysteries of life.

Overall, WotW was just barely above mediocre. Gene Barry did better facing down the invaders.

 

[Andre]

All you people who disliked what you call a horrid story, humanistic POV, etc. - did you ever actually READ H.G. Wells' novel? The book IS the story of people. The Martians are really only secondary.

And I agree, the virus ending is a bit deus ex machina. But it always was.

I give it a 9.

I've read the novel and found it too preachy and, even worse, boring (which is a good summary of all of Wells' novels). I agree that the movie tried to follow the novel, but updating it to our time left huge holes in consistency and verisimilitude. I also didn't like the father as an anti-hero, nor did I like the dysfunctional family. I felt the acting was fine, especially Fanning, but it couldn't make up for a defective script.

Personally, my favorite version of the story is still the operatic War of the Worlds by Jeff Wayne, narrated by the incomparable Richard Burton.

 

[nikolai]

SPOILERS

I thought it was typical Spielberg. Lot of short cuts to establish cardboard cutout characters at the start. It then just turned into another "End of the World" film, it had some great FX set pieces and some interesting visuals at times. But I didn't think this rescued the movie from mediocrity, most of HG Wells' ideas were lost in translation. And he mucks it up by being overly sappy - as usual - the son should have stayed dead, it was like a repeat of the problems with Minority Report, which should have ended when Cruise got haloed.

 

[The Serge]

Read the novel and was okay with it. Saw the movie and was okay with it. I thought that the movie adaptation was wanting and wasn't all that well done with regards to the whole human drama thing (although I can understand some of the little girl's reactions... She's only what? 10?). I gave it a 7.

 

[KenM]

I just saw it. Gave it a 7. Pretty good but the plot had some major logic flaws.


1. When they get to the ex wifes house, all Ray does to look for food is what they brought with them? They are in a place with electricty and did not check the fridge?

2. Amazing that there was not ONE PLACE when they drove the mini van that was totally jamed and they could not get though with it.

3. Said mini van is TOTALLY fine after a airplane crashes close to it, but everything else is trashed.

 

[Seonaid]

I gave it a 4. I thought it was a bad movie and gave me flashbacks to that other Spielberg disaster, AI. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to answer some of DonTadow's complaints. The ones I don't quote I agree with, at least partially. Click the spoiler block if you care.[sblock]

5. The overzealous mob attacking the van. It was just silly. They are all heading toward a river and their killng each other over a car.

The mob was crazy. Crazy people do ridiculous things. Mobility seems like a good thing in the face of a threat.

8. Everyone travels in packs in this movie. Despite the fact that it seems the aliens always attack the packs. And the cruise family alwaysgoes back to the pack

Yes, as an impartial observer, this does seem ridiculous, but I'm sure that it's nice to have the comfort factor. Plus, the aliens went out of their way to hunt down individuals (as demonstrated by the ridiculous scene in the farmhouse).

9. Cruise kills an innocent man, because in the next scene they get caught anyway/???

This has been addressed, and I agree with the comments already made.

10. Dakota runs up the stairs to the aliens. Also no one set up any kind of watch.

I agree with the first part, but not the second. If you're running for your life, it's kind of hard to 1) think ahead and 2) stay awake.

11. The force field protects from bullets, missles, rockets, possibly even nukes, but there is nothing like a trusty axe

It never was stated (or shown) exactly how the force field works. But that brings up a similar point--what happened that the birds could land on the tripod at the end? The aliens start dying and their machines start randomly malfunctioning? I wish we had had a bit on the structure of the tripods, maybe it was some sort of biotech.

12 Why did hte aliens get out of the ship

Why wouldn't they? I wouldn't want to hang out in a spaceship if I could get out and breathe fresh air. Humans do this all the time in sci-fi.

14 Millions of years of planning and no one remembered to bring the Off!! Man. Seriously these were the smartest dumbest aliens I"ve ever seen (and i saw Mars ATtack) They are smart enough to know all the major cities in the world millions of years previously, they are smart enough to hide these monsterous weapons deep into the core, They are smart enough to have weaponary that would destory beings that havnt even evolved yet, but they didn't bring ANY bio suits. Even us humans are smart enough to do that.

I assumed that the placement of the pods was luck/random. They couldn't know ahead of time where our major cities are, except for proximity to resources such as water. And if it truly was "a million years ago" it's also possible that they didn't even know that life on the planet would need water. And we happened to only see the ones that were near people. It's not very exciting to have a pod erupt in the middle of nowhere. Poor aliens who landed in Siberia. And as was said earlier, they had no reason to suspect they needed suits of some sort. They'd been studying the planet for hundreds of thousands of years (if not actually a million). Gives enough time to make them complacent.

15 How the heck did the boy survive? Everyone on that hill was burned.

That part irritated me as well. As in AI, Spielberg sure knows how to ruin a "good" ending.[/sblock]