Honeybeads Blog

After seeing the 135 million dollar remake of War of the Worlds, my opinion of Steven Spielberg has been even more solidified. I just don't understand the fascination and credit that Spielberg receives. I mean sure, Jaws was a fantastic movie that scared people of the ocean and Jurassic Park broke ground in visual effects, that in my opinion still have yet to be topped. However, He just cannot tell a compelling story where the characters are interesting and make realistic decisions. And that holds most true with his latest effort in War of the Worlds.

The movie starts out much like the original, with a voice over narration telling us that these beings of another planet have been preparing this attack on Earth for millions of years. With this narration given by Morgan Freeman, we are to believe we are about to embark on this mysterious, unknown journey with the characters in the movie against something we are unfamiliar with: Aliens. The only problem is, we are familiar with aliens. I think that plagues the film from the beginning, everyone has seen countless movies, tv shows and pictures of what we envision aliens to be. I think that's one reason why the original movie works so well as a film. It was made at a time where no one had really given much thought to the possibility of life forms on other planets. And it was made in the 1950's when technology was not that advanced. No one had traveled into space, there were no satellites, etc. So, basically any kind of alien spaceship would be way more advanced than what we were capable of. Now, our technology is so advanced that the spaceships in the new War of the Worlds seems silly to be designed as a tripod. Three extremely long legs does not seem like a stable, worthy vehicle to destroy Earth with. How did the films go from flying saucers to walking Pods? I think for this movie to have succeeded, it could have taken place back when the novel was written in the late 1800's, or even in the first half of the twentieth century.

Now, more specifically on the plot of this film. It begins with a divorced father (tom cruise) getting custody of his two children for the weekend. One is a sixteen year old son who hates his father and a young girl who seems more mature than her father. Once the aliens start to attack Earth, the plot turns into a series of run and hide events while the father tries to regain ties with his children by saving their lives. It really does become annoying. The only good acting was out of young Dakota Fanning, who has been in a number of films now. The scenes between Cruise and his son are just awkward. The characters never become developed and everything just seems forced when pivotal moments happen in their relationships. No one in the film ever acts realistically to what is happening around them. Many even become in awe of the aliens attacking and at one point some decide to run toward the big tripods shooting lasers at everyone because, "I just have to see this." And not to mention the insanely out of place character played by Tim Robbins. I won't ruin it for anyone, but I felt as though his character came off as something he was not, but then he ended up being a form of that in the end. Confused? Yeah, so was I.

The only saving grace to this film would have to be the special effects, and even then, they really weren't that much better than the original's. I mean sure, the original film's effects sometimes walked the line of hokey, but to think it came out in 1953, when the majority of films were in black and white, leaves something to admire. The use of color was a spectical back then, where here we are just left with clean looking cgi that suffered from no real creativity. Another thing that really bothered me was the end of the film. Not the overall ending, but a specific part of it. I can't really tell much about it without giving it away, but there was a specific part of the end of the film that angered me, but it's not really all that surprising.

Overall: If you want to be completely bored, then go see Spielberg's War of the Worlds, otherwise rent the original and/or read the H.G. Wells novel, but avoid this one. This one fails where the original succeeded, in that the original's characters acted like the audience watching the film: they were completely in shock and awe of the machines/aliens; While in this one everyone tries to play hero and act as though it's not a surprise the Earth is under attack by aliens.