fpw Wrote:Wanted to see this on the big screen but schedules didn’t mesh. Heard bad things about it and, yes, the whole traveling-down-the-lightning-bolts-to-machines-they-left-here-a-million-years-ago-that-nobody-happened-to-trip-over-in-those-million-years thing was crap, but man . . . watch this thing in SurroundSound with the subwoofer cranked up and it’s freaking awesome. Yeah, you could have cropped the whole Tim Robbins sequence and not missed a beat, but I was glued. Tom Cruise may be a major a-hole, but he did right by this film . . . although I don’t know if he’d have been half as good without the amazing Dakota Fanning to play off of. (Jeez, that’s an awful sentence, but I’ll leave it be.)

FF= 0

Quote:
Is your review of War of the Worlds based on the ending or Tom Cruise and his public display of idiocy? Or something else, like the demise of the Tim Robbins character? I really liked War of the Worlds except for the three elements above. The action sequences were quite good and Spielberg pulls out some great crowd scenes, but the ending was a joke (not the end of the "Tripods", at least that was consistent with the original, but the "family reunion").

Scott Hajek Wrote:This was my comment in an different thread:


I actually find Dakota Fanning to be overhyped. The "child-actor-du-jour" usually is.

And, why can't the aliens have seeded the earth with their tripods millenia ago? The million-years-ago quote was obviously an exaggeration with no scientific analysis in the vein of "I must've read a million books," or "I could eat a horse."

I truly despised the ending. How the hell did the son survive? Great skill, blind luck, or poor script writing.

Peter Wrote:I saw this in the cinema and, given that the film is nothing if not spectacular, I think it was well worth it. BUT I do think they made it hard for themselves by setting it in present day America. This meant that they had to use the weak "the machines were already here, the crews just came down in a storm" idea to avoid anyone asking how come we never saw the spaceships coming. Also the equally weak "force field" to explain why modern weapons couldn't harm them. If they had followed the book then the spaceships were originally thought to be meteors and the Martians (Oh yeah, cant have Martians now either) were vulnerable to a degree. Going from memory one was destroyed by artillery and one was rammed by a warship. I'm afraid this all spoiled it a bit for me, I just kept thinking they could have done it so much better.

And dont say that setting it in the past wouldnt have worked because we know different about Mars now, anyone going to see King Kong even though we know that there (probably) are no giant gorillas about?

Oh, nearly forgot, as an extra plus setting the film in H.G.Well's time we wouldnt have been able to have Tom Cruise as the star! To be fair I think he did a good job in his role though.

Quote:And I think Spildberg is still the best director out there. Tom Cruise is also really good. I think he's got a bad rap. He isn't Ben Afleck. Think of some of the great movies he's been in (A few Good Men, Born on the Fourth of July, Magnolia, Color of Money) and it's seems hard to chalk him up as being a bad actor.