War of the Worlds

THE BAD:
The aliens that we saw looked like the typical aliens in Sci Fi movies, greenish gray, large eyes, long arms and hands, etc, etc.

The plot in the movie was weak, and only actually appeared once or twice during the entire showing of the movie. Most of it was a series of violent encounters or long, dreary walks, which made up the majority of this pretty much boring and depressing movie.

SUMMARY:
Ah, War of the Worlds. Being a fan of Action films and pretty interested in some of the more recent horror ones, like Saw, the commercials intrigued me. The plot line, in short, is that we areinvaded by aliens who have no intent of slavery, communication or any form of contact at all outside of world wide irradication.

The beginning of the movie had some plot to it that's fairly interesting. Tom Cruise, our lead, is the divorced father of two children, who stay with him when his mother heads to Chicago to stay with her parents until her third child with a new husband is born. Almost right off, you can see that the characters were well thought out and made to reflect the actors that soon would be portraying them. The obvious tension between daughter, son, and father immediately lets you know that you're in for the long haul for a film that was not going to be happy.

Continuing on, we get our first chance to see some special effects. While I didn't think the lightning was something special, seeing close up images of the alien weapon disintegrating people into dust, leaving only clothes, was one of the first things to disturb me about the film. While the effects that were used were astouding, it managed to reach and hit deeper in me than most movies these days could manage, however, I feel it went too far and struck a chord I don't like touched.

In the next few hours of film, I felt as if I was watching a drawn out and pointless execution, filled with backstabbing, writhing bodies in torture, pure terror and needless violence. There is a fine line between enjoying the action and just being desensitized to it, and this movie definitely nailed the latter there. At one point, I considered standing up and walking out of the theatre, just because how it seemed to drag on and on in scenery and plot that should not have been stretched so long.

Movies tend to require balance, and I think that Spielberg managed to miss on this one. There was little to no happiness involved, just an overwhelming sense of tiredness and depression while watching it, followed up by pangs of heavy dissapointment in the work that the director and cast carried out. The movie would have been more enjoyable, if, in my case, they had cut half the slaughter scenes in half.

When it comes down to it, Graphics were the major forerunner in this movie. Not only were they impressive, they immersed you in them as you watched, which is what most directors want with their movies. They are a point of rare innovation in the genre with a "seen-it-all" type of attitude. As mentioned, the alien weapon and the effects it depicts were excellently done, as well as a number of other, more gorey effects that the team decided to add in. The aliens themselves were interesting, if not falling into a similar category how many other Sci Fi movies depict aliens - green or grey, slimy, with long legs and arms.

Moving onto plot, most of it was shoved into five minute moments of revealations which happen four or five times maximum during the entire movie, with most being shoved in at the very beginning. The rest was strethced out action scenes that were not needed, nor wanted, that seemed interspersed by more action that eventually leads up to one of the plot points that are a rarity in the movie.

My feelings about watching this were mixed. I am a fan of action, I'm a fan of Sci-Fi, but I am not a fan of watching the wholescale slaughter of the entire human race. Along with 28 Days Later and other related movies, the depression they wanted to add into the movie was overwhelming. I felt as if I was waiting for anything to happen, just as long as the scene on the screen would actually change from the same bloody cellar I'd been watching for the past forty five minutes. As mentioned, boredom, dissapointment, depression and a majority of other ill feelings just made me want to leave, as I knew I had another five to six hours left.

The conclusion of the movie, while unexpected, was one I throughly enjoyed. Many movies to date still have endings where it is assumed that the deaths of millions of their kind will go unnoticed, while this one places a steadfast defense in our hands for the furture. How it seemed to rumble up with a moral like "The smallest thing can cause the collapse of the largest enemy", etc, was one of the few high moments of the movie, and the somewhat heart warming ending was also well done, as it actually brought me back out of the coma like state I had been sitting through the movie in, so I didn't really have to watch it.

For me? I would not recommend anyone to see this movie at all. While trying to outdo other movies in the genre, they took the enjoyment out the movie and left behind a husk of malignant gore that no movie should have standing alone.