War of the Wars.

[pasithea]

So. Stacey and I went to see War of the Worlds tonight. Not sure what I should say about it. The machines were designed closely off The Tripods Woe that the story had not been. Speilburg takes a prefectly good, dark, human-slaughtering film and makes sure that the tension of a real drama is broken every couple of minutes with some ignorant chuckle scene, none of which made me laugh. The aliens got little screen time, instead, he (ironically) goes for the 'human' angle by spending 98% of his camera time on Tom Cruise (A man who believes he's part alien.) The scientology and religious intervention stuff is tangible and overstated in about half the scenes, giving me a (what's the opposite of feel-good moment?) Spielberg also makes an ass of himself by replaying images of the World Trade Center disaster (dust, smoke, falling shredded materials) and in a lot of ways glorifying the noble sacrifices of the military and, much like in Iraq, hides their utter failure off-camera.

This movie was just utter propagandist crap and the few seconds of sleek alien spacecraft vapouring (not nearly enough) pathetic quivering humans does NOT make up for it. He also goes with the ham-handed 50's ending where it was GOD who planned all along that the aliens would be defeated by our viruses! 1) Wells was a hard-line atheist and the whole POINT was that we'd evolved to handle our bacteria and the bacteria had evolved along with us and the alien's data was incomplete. 2) That idea played well in Wells' day when people died left and right of seemingly mysterious diseases but the story seriously needed to be updated to take into consideration things like remote controlled drones, biotechnology, and the rest. In the book, Wells explains the gap in the alien's technology by giving other examples where they have gone in a different direction from us and not made the same discoveries. The movie does nothing of the short. It's all Mystical Shit

All in all, it COULD HAVE BEEN a fantastic movie as awe-inspiring as Close Encounters and it could have scared the crap out of you and made you feel weak, powerless, small, and insignificant. Instead you feel like 'I want to strangle these kids, Tom Cruise is an ass and DUDE! Where's my WAR OF THE WORLDS WE NEVER EVEN SEE ANY FUCKING WAR! ARMY VERSUS ALIENS!?!? ALL OFF CAMERA! There's only massacre of a few humans who are running in less than convincing 'terror'.

GODDAMNIT! I wanted this movie to be good! AT _LEAST_ It could have been half as good as the 1950's version but I'd rather watch that than this again. Fucking assholes. *sigh* I wish I had the comic.

Comments

[centauress.livejournal.com]

Yikes, I was the one ranting as we left the theater!

Yeah, they used the brackets and intro they slipped into the 50's movie over the objections of the director.

For some reason, they did things like show people being shredded by electron beams full screen, but didn't pay for a single tank to be blown up and only did one scene of walkers bull-dozing a city.

The walkers in the 50's version rode limbs of light (still tripods, though) because that allowed easier animation and was a 'twist' to the tri-theme of the units. Their battles were epice, beautiful, and even included hitting units with a nuclear exchange and losing.

Also, this version dwelled entirely too much on any one action, showing it at least five times each: The power was out, so we see two light switches fail, the refridgerator, the tv, and then repeat it again in the next room with a ceiling fan and the light switch again... They did the same with the lightning, the lightning-guns, the clothes falling from the sky, and the 'they planned for millions of years because the walkers were buried' line which was only a kook's theory in HG Wells's version.

The pacing was off as well, with the walkers unfolding and deploying not in triads, but singles or pairs; taking minutes to go from EMP, litho-insertion, and deployment...

...The prior versions all had better pacing, even the stupid 80's TV series.

It was pretty, though, and you spend most of the time trying to look around the stupid Cruise character acting like and ass and 'protecting' his daughter from seeing things she obviously (and demonstrates in the begining of the film she's smarter than him, five times, of course) already knows and has observed.

Grr. It takes about five exchanges before he even answers her honestly about the attacks...

"My horse is probably ash by now. Do you think so?"
"He's... I... I don't know honey."

[centauress.livejournal.com]

PS, I need a suitably Sci-fi icon, as well as a sad one. Hmm. Maybe an angry one, too...

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

I'll get on that. I need more than one pissed-off icon, I think. I use Medusa too much and she's getting dated.