MEMO TO SPIELBERG: TOM CRUISE + SCARY ALIENS DOES NOT EQUAL GOOD MOVIE
The $120 million dollar film War of the Worlds starring Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Tim Robbins, and Miranda Otto fails to impress. Steven Spielberg does everything technically right with this movie--the aliens are frightening, and the machines are spectacular, but where this movie goes wrong is the story itself. This movie was hyped up to be one of the best movies of the summer--Tom Cruise when asked, described the movie as "Spielberg at his best." Well if that's really true, then it's all downhill from here.
The characters are all one-dimensional: Tom Cruise plays the deadbeat dad; Dakota Fanning at first seems to be playing a precocious youngster, but as soon as the aliens hit, randomly becomes a kind of "Lois Lane" of the film--constantly being picked up, grabbed, pushed out of harm's way, and frankly at quite the expense of the annoyed audience member; Justin Chatwin plays the rebellious teenager who refuses to accept Tom Cruise as a father figure.
The beginning of this movie actually seems very promising. Relationships began to be established among the characters, and as the audience member, knowing what was about to happen to these characters made it all the more interesting. But it's obvious when this movie starts going downhill: when the aliens arrive. All the writing goes for a dive into the mud right when it's needed most: when the action begins. The entire movie quickly becomes a dull, irritating, and redundant game of "duck here," "jump there," "grab Dakota here," "steal a car there." If you want to see a movie where this is done (and a million times more effectively, might I add), go see Jurassic Park, because War of the Worlds will have you leaving the theater wondering why Tom Cruise gets paid 30 million a film, and why Steven Spielberg is the biggest director in Hollywood.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Sandra
I completely agree with you!
2 - Brent
Yeah, I was expecting great things from this movie, and I left extremely disappointed
3 - Christina
Eh...I sat in the theater wondering how in the hell Steven Spielberg could have approved of this screenplay. This movie was apalling...
4 - Serori
I was very disappointed in Spielberg this time around
5 - Naoto
Dakota's screaming in this film made me want to die.
6 - Jake O'Hara
This review said everything I thought while I was watching it. Everyone in the theater at the end was like..."??????"
7 - Matt Paprocki
If you didn't understand the ending (except for the kid surviving for which there is no explanation), you weren't paying attention. It's foreshadowed in the beginning, and explained again at the end.
As for Dakota, what do you think a kid that age would do in a situation like that?
I always find it funny when people go to a movie like this and expect deep characterization. It's an aliens-blow-shit-up flick. That's what people want to see, and WotW does it better than any before it. It provides a singular viewpoint, and most of the film takes place from it.
And the aliens did not go out from their 3-legged tripods. I don't know where you got that idea. It was their own stupidty. That was the point. Their egos and technology proved useless.
8 - chloeJaz
This movie fell apart in the last hour. And yes, some aliens did get out from their tripods (remember those aliens in the basement?).
9 - Chris Evans
"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 two. Three legs are inherently not stable, as the movie demonstrates when one leg of a giant tripod is damaged, 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. 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." - Roger Ebert
10 - Matt Paprocki
No, no, I didn't mean it like that. I was responding to this line:
"yet let themselves go out because of a flaw as stupid as not realizing things don't stand too good on three legs,"
They didn't die because of the tri-pods. Sorry, I worded that badly.
And I'll say it again. They weren't here for a million years. The person who tells us this is a nutjob. He wouldn't know either. No one would. We don't know why they're here because Cruise's character doesn't know.
And of course they'll start blowing people up at first. Scare the hell out of people, show them thay mean buisness, then start the harvest once demoralized.
11 - Chris Evans
Yeah, but the thing is...they would have had to have been there for QUITE a long time--if NOT a million years, because they had their stuff under the surface of the earth.
12 - Chris Beaumont
I actually really liked the film, I liked it even more upon realizing that it was not about the invasion, or what the aliens wanted or any of that. It was about Ray's fear of losing his kids, the alien invasion is the physical manifestation of that fear. He is living out his nightmare, and in nightmares, it doesn't have to make sense. The epic story of invasion is actually a more personal tale of one man redeeming himself and facing his and finally growing up.
13 - Chris Evans
See, Chris...the film you just described...is one I'd really like to see. Because if the screenplay had accomplished what you just described...I would have loved it. But it didn't really succeed at doing that in my opinion, which is why I hated it.
14 - Matt Paprocki
What's with the bold type?
Anyway, I don't think they had to be there. Who's to say they didn't come down in the first set of lightning strikes? Sure, they show the pod (how they got that footage is beyond me), but what about cameras that were cut off when the lightning first came down? Who's to say that's not when they came down? Again, what Cruise doesn't know, except for the alien demise, the audience doesn't know.
And just to throw it out there, who was the women he met before they got on the ferry? I couldn't hear the dialogue cleanly.
15 - Chris Evans
The women...Lol...were yet another plothole.
16 - Chris Evans
By the way...can anyone tell me why Dakota Fanning (who I think is a terrific little actress) screams in this movie SOOOO much...and it's the most ear-splitting scream on this planet?
17 - Matt Paprocki
I repeat again: What do you think a 10-year old is going to do when she see's a tanker truck blow up a housing district after being thrown off a bridge by alien invaders? Be happy? Play with dolls? She's terrified. Of course she'll scream.
The lady isn't a plothole. They talked for a few seconds, I just didn't pick up what they said. Speakers in my theater sucked for low volume stuff.
18 - Chris Evans
Yeah...but the thing is...sometimes she would scream at the most RANDOM times...like when Tom is telling them to get into the van, and yes, I'd expect screaming from any old 10 year old girl...but the character they try to portray her as earlier in the movie, is a precocious, intelligent, mature-for-her-age little girl (like Dakota usually plays because that's what she's good at), and then all of a sudden she's randomly some whiny little brat? Please get a better screenwriter because these characters and this plot is all over the place. If you want better movies of similar genres, try the very well-written disaster movies like Independence Day or Jurassic Park--that had something more to offer than really pretty special effects.
19 - Matt Paprocki
Independence Day well written? Wow, just wow. Hey, I love the flick for what it is, but an alien computer that's conviently Mac compatible? A drunk crop duster that saves the Earth by kamakazi-ing the ship in a F-16? Come on, you're bitching about the plot holes here??? JP is my all time fave flick, so I'm not going to argue there.
I can't say I ever found a moment where Dakota screamed and it hit as wrong. Most of the film is nothing but them running from ships.
20 - Chris Evans
What I meant when I was referring to Independence Day is the development of the characters and making you actually care what happens to them. Because honestly, in WOTW...I couldn't give a rat's ass if any of them lived or died. I just wanted Dakota to stop screaming, and Tom to stop running, ducking, and jumping.
21 - Matt Paprocki
ID4 was one of those flicks that was there just to be there. It was overloaded with characters. Jeff Goldblum is one of the best actors, oh I don't know, ever, and he was the only real attachment I had.
WotW makes it personal. That seems to be what you're missing. It's the story of a common family being sucked into an unbelieveable situation and fighting to survive. You don't really need to learn their story or what they do. They're the common everday Amercian citizens trying to avoid being blasted to hell. In theory, you already know them.
And since I haven't said it yet, people complain about the son surviving. That much I can understand. He could have went over the hill, said "oh shit," and ran off to the left. Quite plausible, really.
What I can't fathom is how the hell he made it back to Boston before Cruise. Not to mention the family reunion that looks like they were having a Thanksgiving dinner with an interstellat war going on down the street...
22 - Chris Evans
I'm not sure if you have some superhuman ability or what...but I just can't possibly see how you could relate to the human story in this film. There wasn't one. The characters were so completely general (whether intentional or not--it wasn't effective), and I really wanted them all to die.
23 - Chris Beaumont
Opinions, gotta love'em!
I thought the film was successful, and I stand by my statements.
My Review
24 - AnthonyP
Totally amazing movie, i dont know what a lot of you guys are on about. I no i am in a majority of people outside this place who loved the film.
This is an great movie, with flaws. Almost every Spielberg film has major flaw, this is no exception.
The essence that the film carries is the same fear and horror that the great revolutionary book carried.
Anthony
25 - Charlisse
Yeah, this review is spot on, I think. By far, Spielberg's and Cruise's worst film.