Kill it! Kill it with fire!!
9:10 AM 7/10/08 · Say what you will about the War of the Worlds that Tom Cruise starred in...it was still the most accurate version to the novel that's been out yet. The only flaw all of the versions have is that the invasion is supposed to have taken place literally after the turn of the century of the early 1900's when humanity had no technology that was even close to defending themselves. The novel's a pretty good read even given the ye olden English standards but what do you expect from the artist who wrote The Time Machine?
At the same time the most recent movie hit the big screen, another on appeared on the SciFi channel. It wasn't very good but it still had my attention as much for the subject matter as well as that C. Thomas Howell (gonna have to look up what the "c" is for someday) was in it and I'd not seen him in years.
Growing up, he was one of my favorite actors.
I picked up War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave out of morbid curiosity. The basic description is that it's a sequel to the one I saw on Scifi and this time humanity attacks the Martians on their homeworld. I wasn't expecting it to be that good and moreso when I found out who made it...
...Asylum Films.
Sadly, I've not kept track of them but I've reviewed a few films they've made here before. I can't think of any other movie company that so consistantly makes crappy movies...but I suppose it's possible there's another out there. I would highly advise you not rent this for the movie itself because you'll most likely kill yourself.
Although, the making of it is worth seeing. Also there's a section called "The Magic of C. Thomas Howell" which is kinda fun too. Apparently he's an impressive, if a tad cheap, magician. To keep things interesting between takes he performed some low scale but amazing little sleight of hand tricks. That's worth seeing in and of itself.
There's a 2 minute flashback to the previous film in the beginning that is more exciting than the movie itself before you're notified this takes place 2 years later. The Earth has not quite recovered from the invasion, everything is fairly low tech and even George Herbert (Howell's character...and also a possible play on words as H.G. Wells wrote the novel) only has power at his place because he kinda uses his son as slave labor to ride a bicycle to power the battery storage that keeps everything at home running. He's monitoring signals from space and with a contrast to observations by his backyard telescope he discovers a second invasion.
Okay, to be fair this guy worked on deep space observations in the past, which is how he detected the previous one. Still, this is quite a leap.
To keep this short, because I have better things to do and even they are quite boring, there's a nearby base where some scientists are preparing for the possibility of another invasion and it's staffed by friends of George. They've been backwards engineering the alien technology and outfitting fighter jets with it. If there's another invasion they want to be ready. Keeping in mind that at the onset of this film there's no contact with the satellite around the Earth anymore and everything is fairly low tech, they work out that the Martians have created a time point, a wormhole, to travel so far so quick. When the fighters go into space to attack the mothership, bit of a leap there, they get sucked into it and wind up in Mars' airspace.
Where does this film go wrong? There's some unusual leaps in logic that bother me. They talk about doing one thing and then, as if no time has passed, they're suddenly doing things they said earlier they're not sure they could do. The scientists don't toally but the aliens are back when informed and without showing how they found out...suddenly they know they're coming. There's a lot of repeated scenes involving the fighter jets fighting the Martian ships, the tripod vessels are capable of flight in this, which wouldn't be so bad excepting that when they're above Earth and then Mars the landscape looks exactly the same and very red...
...that and the emotional level remains very flat throughout.
It's kind of looking at one of those Magic Eye pictures that you're supposed to see a sailboat in but never actually being able to see it.
This is really not a good movie. While I was happy to see C. Thomas Howell again...I was a bit bugged to see he directed it too. Another blast from the past, if you remember the rap duo Kid'n'Play...Kid's in this. Haven't seen him in years and he still can't act. If anything, he's gotten worse. Main reason I watched the House Party movies was never him.
At the same time the most recent movie hit the big screen, another on appeared on the SciFi channel. It wasn't very good but it still had my attention as much for the subject matter as well as that C. Thomas Howell (gonna have to look up what the "c" is for someday) was in it and I'd not seen him in years.
Growing up, he was one of my favorite actors.
I picked up War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave out of morbid curiosity. The basic description is that it's a sequel to the one I saw on Scifi and this time humanity attacks the Martians on their homeworld. I wasn't expecting it to be that good and moreso when I found out who made it...
...Asylum Films.
Sadly, I've not kept track of them but I've reviewed a few films they've made here before. I can't think of any other movie company that so consistantly makes crappy movies...but I suppose it's possible there's another out there. I would highly advise you not rent this for the movie itself because you'll most likely kill yourself.
Although, the making of it is worth seeing. Also there's a section called "The Magic of C. Thomas Howell" which is kinda fun too. Apparently he's an impressive, if a tad cheap, magician. To keep things interesting between takes he performed some low scale but amazing little sleight of hand tricks. That's worth seeing in and of itself.
There's a 2 minute flashback to the previous film in the beginning that is more exciting than the movie itself before you're notified this takes place 2 years later. The Earth has not quite recovered from the invasion, everything is fairly low tech and even George Herbert (Howell's character...and also a possible play on words as H.G. Wells wrote the novel) only has power at his place because he kinda uses his son as slave labor to ride a bicycle to power the battery storage that keeps everything at home running. He's monitoring signals from space and with a contrast to observations by his backyard telescope he discovers a second invasion.
Okay, to be fair this guy worked on deep space observations in the past, which is how he detected the previous one. Still, this is quite a leap.
To keep this short, because I have better things to do and even they are quite boring, there's a nearby base where some scientists are preparing for the possibility of another invasion and it's staffed by friends of George. They've been backwards engineering the alien technology and outfitting fighter jets with it. If there's another invasion they want to be ready. Keeping in mind that at the onset of this film there's no contact with the satellite around the Earth anymore and everything is fairly low tech, they work out that the Martians have created a time point, a wormhole, to travel so far so quick. When the fighters go into space to attack the mothership, bit of a leap there, they get sucked into it and wind up in Mars' airspace.
Where does this film go wrong? There's some unusual leaps in logic that bother me. They talk about doing one thing and then, as if no time has passed, they're suddenly doing things they said earlier they're not sure they could do. The scientists don't toally but the aliens are back when informed and without showing how they found out...suddenly they know they're coming. There's a lot of repeated scenes involving the fighter jets fighting the Martian ships, the tripod vessels are capable of flight in this, which wouldn't be so bad excepting that when they're above Earth and then Mars the landscape looks exactly the same and very red...
...that and the emotional level remains very flat throughout.
It's kind of looking at one of those Magic Eye pictures that you're supposed to see a sailboat in but never actually being able to see it.
This is really not a good movie. While I was happy to see C. Thomas Howell again...I was a bit bugged to see he directed it too. Another blast from the past, if you remember the rap duo Kid'n'Play...Kid's in this. Haven't seen him in years and he still can't act. If anything, he's gotten worse. Main reason I watched the House Party movies was never him.