Movie Review: War of the Worlds (4/5)

So I went out and watched War of the Worlds on Thursday. This is a sci-fi horror movie. There are several freak-out moments in the movie that were well done, as well as some real "holy crap" moments like the “fire train“. They've taken more license with an adaptation of the original H G Wells story by playing out a story of Cruise on the run with his family. Count on Spielberg to run with that. Cruise's character has 2 kids, a teen boy and a little girl. The girl is played by Dakota Fanning, the boy is played by an unknown (to me) local Nanaimo, BC kid Justin Chatwin. The 3 actors did a fine job of building tension and fear throughout their panicked flight from their homes.

Elements of this movie remind me of many big-budget disaster type movies, such as Deep Impact (another one of my favourites), where much of the movie is spent fleeing from some kind of almost personified natural force. Here the forces aren't natural, but you will find common themes like a mass evacuation of cities, vigilantism, theft, etc... this is always good for some emotional impact when dealing with families on the run.

Picking it apart technically:

1. spaceships buried for thousands of years and nobody noticed them?
   Right... so thousands of spaceships buried underground for thousands of years or more and nobody ever notices them. Not through mining, exploration, construction, earthquakes or anything?
2. spaceship pilots "injected" into underground spaceships through "lightning"?
   Why? I mean, if you're not going to explain how the ships are there for so long, why bury them without pilots?
   Frankly, I'd find it much more plausible if the ships were rained down on earth from orbit as projectiles like in the good old days!
3. Harvesting blood from humans and spraying it around as fertilizer?
   Why? Grind 'em up and spit them out. There's more good stuff in us than just the blood, you know?
   How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
4. What was the purpose of the aliens waiting so long before they invaded?
   Why would an invading force that was present before today wait until now to invade? What could the possible reason be?

The Ending:

One of the things I was looking forward to finding out was whether or not the story would stick to the original ending, or if they'd "adapt" a new one. I'm glad to see they stuck with the original ending after all, but I didn't expect the ending to be as anticlimactic as it was. This will likely be a common criticism for the movie.

The Verdict:

It's not perfect, and not good enough to become one of my all time sci-fi favorites, but over all this movie is definitely worth seeing on the big screen.