posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by Jason Abbadon:
$$$SPOILERS$$$$


Okay, I just saw it.


Er....It's visually stunning, the tripod WAr Machines look great but I dont think anyone involved with the movie read the book.

Biiig flaws:
-The aliens are not from Mars (at least no mention is ever made one way or another).
-The War Machines have been buried underground (somehow without ever being discovered) for millions of years.
Why? Who the fuck knows....no reason is ever given why the aliens would have come here, left their shit underground (somehow knowing they would need it long before humans were alive) or why they chose now to come back and start making trouble.
-The aliens arrive in a biig spooky cloud (sound familliar?), though their ship is never seen, it emits powerful electromagnetic pulses that knock all electronics (even cars) out- the cloud fires lightening strikes over and over exactly where their buried tripods are...
That's not so bad, but the aliens get to their deeply buried tripods via lightening.
No shit.
They have dart-shaped capsules (chock full of aliens) that shoot into the ground...on...a bolt of lightening. Yeah.
Metalica should have done the theme song.
-The tripods have force-fields that stop any projectiles/missiles before they can get close.
-The tripods use a fog-horn...just for kicks mainly.
-The aliens themselves are nothing like Wells described but instead look a LOT like the aliens from Independence day from the neck up-
their bodies are a torso, two arms and a central leg. They move kind of like monkeys.
They have no tenticles.
-The aliens do not use the Black Smoke chemical weapon and do not have any flying machines.
-The Heat Ray is not hot: somehow it turns the person in their clothes to dust but the clothes float away on the wind- what wind? Who knows, but it's an effect used over a dozen times- so many floating jeans, I thought Levis was a sponsor.
Each tripod has two heat rays that it fires from the hips- like a three legged gunslinger from space.
-The aliens drain people of their blood- aparantly to spray it all over the redweed as fertilizer or something- they are never shown ingesting it and the tripods spray it all over. Why? Who the fuck knows: in the book, the aliens ingest blood because they are just big brains and need fresh blood to live. At the end a tripod opens up and about 50 gallons of blood-looking stuff spills out-
Mabye they just had a big punch-bowl full of blood or something: I cant see these guys floating around in blood.
-Tom Cruise is SUPER-DIVORCED-DAD! Only Tom Cruise manages to destroy a tripod!
Goooooo Tom!
-You foreign types should be prepared for a visual assualt of american flags in Tom's all-american-blue-collar niighborhood. There's a "are we being attacked by terrorists" line from Tom's son.
-Tom's kids are so annoying, I wanted them dead for the entire movie- his daughter screams endlessly in the shrillest voice imagineable and his rebelling dickweed teenage son goes out of his way to get killed because he "needs to see this".
After all is said and done, Tom's family is re-united with NO INJURIES or personal loss at all- fuck, even the windows on his ex-wife's brownstone are spotlessly clean, although the rest of Boston is in smoking rubble.
Though it's several days later, the kid is still wearing the same clothers as before and although his family is spotessly clean, he's still a dirty mess.

It sounds like I'm bashing, but I'm only relating the major issues.

The GOOD things: Tom Cruise delivers a great performance and I think he did an amazing job with the script given to him.
Tim Robbins is very good as well (taking on the role of the Curate in the farmhouse- though he's a paramedic).
The acting is good throughout- Speilberg really pulls on the "hate" and "outrage" emotional strings but there is not much real suspense (at least not among the group I went with).
Again, visually it's incredible and the desctuction is on a grand scale. These aliens could teach Godzilla a thing or two.
Morgan Freeman narrates the very start and ending of the movie with (updated) exerpts from the book- a nice touch.
-They used the same "alien arm falling out of the war-machine" scene as the George Pal version (unfortunately followed by a closeup of a petrified-looking alien's face).

Overall, I'd give it a five out of ten.
Worth warching but not worth buying on DVD.

---