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]

Actually, that helps you keep your attention on the FX, which was top-notch.

The biggest problem I kept feeling, though, was if you've seen that one scene with the highway toppling over - the one in the commercial - you've seen the entire model destruction budget.

Come to think of it, the background was more interesting to watch in Harry Potter.