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War of the Worlds (2005)
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Movie Review by AJ 
April 14th, 2006
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Maybe I'm spoiled. I followed Buffy Summers and the rest of her "Scooby Gang" through seven years of ambitious metaphor, mind-boggling psychoanalysis, and blistering humor. I grew up with Peter Parker, sympathizing with his desire for fame and fortune as well as his conflicting concerns that if ever he went public that he truly was Spider-Man, things would be phenomenally worse; simply, though he wanted success, for the sake of the world, he was better off without it. I own most of the films penned by Charlie Kaufman, and watch them over and over again, delighting in their playful psychology and, most often, thought-provoking psychadelia. Like I said, maybe I'm spoiled...but I like, and expect, thought in my science fiction. This is one of the major problems with the average to mediocre epic in hum-drummery that is Steven Spielberg's new take on H.G. Wells' revered 1898 novel, War of the Worlds...it absolutely refuses to think.
Surprisingly actually very faithful to Wells' book, this new spin on the tale finds modern day Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), a deadbeat divorced dad who apparently is still living the life of his high school self, scattering Chinese food all throughout his apartment and refusing to believe that his children are growing up and becoming individuals, suddenly swept up in a grand-scale alien invasion. Ray has custody of the kids for the weekend, much to the behest of his ex-wife Mary Ann (Miranda Otto). Ray awakens on a Saturday morning to ominous flashes of light in the sky, howling winds, and booming bouts of thunder. Before long, alien tripods are bursting out of the ground, and Ray must take his small daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) and rebellious teenage son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) on a manic trip to Boston to get to their grandmother's (Ann Robinson, who played Sylvia Van Buren in the 1953 War of the Worlds, as well as several episodes of the late 80's television series).
On the way to Boston (very literally over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house...more like over the corpse-strewn river and through the blood-stained battlefields, though), Ray, Rachel, and Robbie, or the three R's, encounter more of the alien tripods, which are able to vaporize anyone in their way into nothingness, though their clothes inexplicably remain behind. They discover retaliation attacks from the ill-equipped U.S. military, a wacky nutball named Ogilvy (Tim Robbins), and the true meaning of human desperation, all in a slick popcorn coating that never manages to penetrate the higher ideas it pretends to ruminate on.
As a run-of-the-mill Hollywood destruction-fest, it's a little above average, but as a Steven Spielberg film, it is incredibly disappointing. The man who managed to dissect communication in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, discuss morals and ethics in comparison to science in Jurassic Park, and who delivered two stunning definitions of patriotism and humanitarianism in Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan here seems quite ready to lean on conventional disaster movie clichés and the kind of soulless monster mashing that his movies usually avoid. The film starts off excellently, with a heavy dose of doom and dread. There is a creeping feeling of foreboding as the otherworldly storm crackles through the sky, the ground begins to break, and a menacing looking tripod proceeds to destroy everyone in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, after that brilliant opening, War of the Worlds devolves into little more than a pyrotechnics show bogged down with sappy melodrama.
There is a father-son bond between Ray and Robbie that is poorly-written and never really explained or believable, which is one of the things that holds the film back from becoming a rip-roaring juggernaut of all-out havoc. Robbie is sullen, depressed, and rebellious almost to the point of being a whiny goth punk; more sulky than Joss Whedon's Angel on a bad day and more annoying than, well, his sister Rachel, played with a ceaseless, glass-breaking shriek by Dakota Fanning. After the three encounter a battle over the hill between the Army and the alien tripods, Robbie realizes that he must fight and Ray lets him go. The fact that Robbie feels like fighting is a complete surprise to the audience, even a little confusing in its abruptness, and seems to be added by the writers out of simple clichéd habit. In fact, the script by Josh Friedman and usually reliable blockbuster scribe David Koepp is littered with such inconsistencies. The movie, though it is easy to understand, never really makes sense emotionally nor does it have solid characters...they're more like stereotypes on the run from a completely ambiguous extraterrestrial menace, who has apparently "been plannin' this for a million years," according to Ogilvy. What they're planning no one knows, including the audience. We just know that they're evil and they want to kill everybody.
--Full review at REELPICKS.CJB.NET--
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 | Jessica
Jan 31, 2007 10:24 PM
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| This Film is a Huge Disappointment!! |
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