War of the Worlds
If you know the original story then you can happily read all of this up until the nitpicks without worrying.
So, there you are, living a perfectly reasonable life, living through the same mixture of peace and inter-tribal conflicts that punctuate history, safe in the knowledge that most of the trouble is far enough away that you can get on with the day to day moments of everyday life.
And then, as if from nowhere, come huge machines, piloted by remote creatures that seem to show no wish except death and destruction. They arrive in a blare of noise and death. Oh, yeah, they've got your Shock and Awe _right here_, indiscriminately killing multitudes for their own mysterious ends.
So you flee, terrified, taking those things that are most precious to you and heading for anywhere that might be safe, only to find that _nowhere_ is safe - the invaders can appear at any time, impervious to your attacks. You hear rumours from far-off lands, but nothing really makes any sense, and whenever you see conflict between your own troops and the alien machines it ends with annihilation.
And then you discover that they aren't just here for the death - they want your land - they want to make it there’s, make it unrecognisable to you, and uninhabitable to you. Soon your world will be their world and they will have all of your natural resources.
You fall to bickering over survival, becoming a threat to each other more as much as anything else, the ownership of anything useful being as much a threat to the owner as it is a help to them.
And you have to hope that somewhere out there someone is looking out for you - that someone is leading a successful resistance, or working on a secret weapon, or that the invaders have overlooked something vital that will mean their doom, because there's nothing left for you to do.
The first 9/10 of this movie are great - Spielberg does a great job with the direction, using Cruise as a viewpoint character, you get to see nothing he doesn't see himself and you get to live through the sheer lack of understanding and powerlessness that all of humanity is facing. There's no learning experience, there's barely any character development, there's just someone dealing with the problems in front of them, one tiny step at a time, trying to survive on a human level, because dealing with things on the larger scale is completely beyond them.
The problems I have with the film are in the penultimate section, and if you didn't want to read them, you should have stopped reading by........now.
Suddenly the whole mood of the film changes from something approaching realism to what seems to be a dream sequence. The whole sequence starting from the pair waking to see Tripod eye watching them up until their arrival in Boston is completely out of keeping with the rest of the film. The most glaring example of which is that Cruise, having failed to be instantly killed by the tripod, is in his car when it's flipped upside down, from where he looks out and sees his daughter standing _exactly_ in front of his car, highlighted through the only hole in the car windscreen, as she stands highlighted perfectly on a rise with a huge moon right behind her. The scene looks gorgeous - but it's from a completely different movie, and I spent a good 5 minutes waiting for Cruise to wake up from a dream sequence.
The ending is also abrupt, and we could have done with a little more time between leaving the house and Boston, to get some idea of the countryside and how they coped - I'd even have settled of a montage of them hiding out and moving carefully from place to place.
However, this apart I'd definitely recommend seeing it for the first 9/10 of the film. The movie was originally written 'about' the effect of the British Empire on the countries it colonised and it's just as applicable to events now as it was then (and to events throughout history - if you wanted to read it as a metaphor for Napoleon's invasion of Russia, falling back only because of the freezing winter, that'd be easy to justify).
8/10
ObQuote: This is no more of a war than there is a war between men and maggots. This isn't a war... this is an extermination.
So, there you are, living a perfectly reasonable life, living through the same mixture of peace and inter-tribal conflicts that punctuate history, safe in the knowledge that most of the trouble is far enough away that you can get on with the day to day moments of everyday life.
And then, as if from nowhere, come huge machines, piloted by remote creatures that seem to show no wish except death and destruction. They arrive in a blare of noise and death. Oh, yeah, they've got your Shock and Awe _right here_, indiscriminately killing multitudes for their own mysterious ends.
So you flee, terrified, taking those things that are most precious to you and heading for anywhere that might be safe, only to find that _nowhere_ is safe - the invaders can appear at any time, impervious to your attacks. You hear rumours from far-off lands, but nothing really makes any sense, and whenever you see conflict between your own troops and the alien machines it ends with annihilation.
And then you discover that they aren't just here for the death - they want your land - they want to make it there’s, make it unrecognisable to you, and uninhabitable to you. Soon your world will be their world and they will have all of your natural resources.
You fall to bickering over survival, becoming a threat to each other more as much as anything else, the ownership of anything useful being as much a threat to the owner as it is a help to them.
And you have to hope that somewhere out there someone is looking out for you - that someone is leading a successful resistance, or working on a secret weapon, or that the invaders have overlooked something vital that will mean their doom, because there's nothing left for you to do.
The first 9/10 of this movie are great - Spielberg does a great job with the direction, using Cruise as a viewpoint character, you get to see nothing he doesn't see himself and you get to live through the sheer lack of understanding and powerlessness that all of humanity is facing. There's no learning experience, there's barely any character development, there's just someone dealing with the problems in front of them, one tiny step at a time, trying to survive on a human level, because dealing with things on the larger scale is completely beyond them.
The problems I have with the film are in the penultimate section, and if you didn't want to read them, you should have stopped reading by........now.
Suddenly the whole mood of the film changes from something approaching realism to what seems to be a dream sequence. The whole sequence starting from the pair waking to see Tripod eye watching them up until their arrival in Boston is completely out of keeping with the rest of the film. The most glaring example of which is that Cruise, having failed to be instantly killed by the tripod, is in his car when it's flipped upside down, from where he looks out and sees his daughter standing _exactly_ in front of his car, highlighted through the only hole in the car windscreen, as she stands highlighted perfectly on a rise with a huge moon right behind her. The scene looks gorgeous - but it's from a completely different movie, and I spent a good 5 minutes waiting for Cruise to wake up from a dream sequence.
The ending is also abrupt, and we could have done with a little more time between leaving the house and Boston, to get some idea of the countryside and how they coped - I'd even have settled of a montage of them hiding out and moving carefully from place to place.
However, this apart I'd definitely recommend seeing it for the first 9/10 of the film. The movie was originally written 'about' the effect of the British Empire on the countries it colonised and it's just as applicable to events now as it was then (and to events throughout history - if you wanted to read it as a metaphor for Napoleon's invasion of Russia, falling back only because of the freezing winter, that'd be easy to justify).
8/10
ObQuote: This is no more of a war than there is a war between men and maggots. This isn't a war... this is an extermination.