2005 H.G. Wells adaptation
Rating: 12/20 (but that could change if I ever saw it again when not being interrupted to actually do the job that I'm paid to do when I watch these Urine Couch movies)
Plot: Al Qaeda's ticked off again and dreams up an elaborate plan to take American lives and knock down our buildings--bury wobbly tripod things and wait subterraneanly for the perfect moment to bust out of the soil, destroy churches, and vaporize some fools. A noted Scientologist tries to keep his mopey son and young Drew Barrymore safe from the death rays and gut-slurping. George W. points to anybody harboring tripod things and promises retaliation.
The idea with the Urine Couch AM Movie Club, in case I haven't made myself completely clear, is that I'm watching a movie I probably wouldn't watch on my own. There's just not much going on at Indianapolis's dumpiest motel in the middle of the night, and after I get my paperwork finished, I can chill on the Urine Couch and watch whatever HBO, the other HBO, TBS, TNT, or USA has to offer.
It sure looks like this movie took a lot of money to make. For one, Tom Cruise costs something like fifty million dollars. And before you ask: Yes, I'm aware that there is a couch connection here. Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah's couch while promoting (I think) this motion picture. He also jumps on a couch and does a triple flip over a tentacle thing to evade harm. That or he trampolines off Oprah. If that's the case, this movie just got more expensive because Oprah wouldn't allow somebody to use her as a trampoline in a film without a hefty fee. So there's a Tom Cruise/Oprah Show couch and the Urine Couch. And to complete the couch trifecta, a customer who had called me the previous day to ask if she could have a working telephone and, you guessed it, a couch moved into her hotel room, came in to ask for toilet paper and then not leave for a while. I couldn't really get a grasp on this movie because the viewing was interrupted multiple times by needy customers and a shady guy in a truck without a license plate that I had to chase off the property a few times.
It's too bad actually because I was kind of liking this movie, especially the first half. The apocalyptic alien attack imagery with the zapping and the flashing storm clouds and the bursting was really impressive. There are a handful of exciting set pieces, and Spielberg shows off his talent for using little things to create big moments and creating tension in unique ways. The scene where the first of the tripod things pops out of the ground in front of a church and starts turning the fleeing citizens into dust is really impressive. There are so many panicking people, and either the computer graphics were seamless or a really immense little neighborhood was constructed and then destroyed. Looked really good to me, and I was watching it all on a cheap little television. I imagine it would have been even more impressive on the big screen. And it was impossible not to think of 9/10 (Wait a second. That date doesn't look right.) while watching some of this. Not sure if that was intentional or not. I also liked the look of a big chunk of the movie that took place in Tim Robbins' basement, too. I liked Tim Robbins' character, too, but this is still where the movie gets a little too silly for me. The suspense is thick throughout most of the first half of this movie while Tom Cruise runs around (I liked him in this movie, by the way) even though you know that Spielberg is not Hitchcock and that the star isn't going to die before the movie reaches its halfway point. A lot of the family stuff gets in the way, and things get really ludicrous near the end. And then mega-ludicrous when Spielberg decides that the big unnecessary tragic moment that is tossed into the middle of the movie was a bad idea and that he still has a chance to wave his magical movie wand and undo things. I might be exaggerating a little, but it might have been the worst ending ever. Only in Hollywood. Another Spielberg mistake: Showing the aliens. It was unnecessary, and they looked pretty silly. Shouldn't they all look like E.T. anyway? That would have made as much sense as the rest of the last third of this movie.
So in summary: War of the Worlds is a pretty bad movie with one really excellent scene (with a solid John Williams score, I should add) and a handful of other OK scenes and one of the worst endings in movie history.
3 comments:
I pretty much agree with this review. The opening 30 minutes of this film (Minus the idiotic dad and kids scenes) are among the best done science fiction action sequences in history. I have noticed over the years, that for some reason the special effects in Spielberg movies are always at the cutting edge of technology. If you can sit through AI, its incredible how perfect the effects are, yet they never overwhelm anything. Same thing in this film, except of being subtle, they are over the top amazing. The sequence where they are running, and that bridge comes down behind them? Freaking incredible.
Unfortunately, Spielberg decided to do the exact opposite of how they handled this subject matter in the original, far superior, War of the Worlds from 1953. While the original movie starts out small, with aliens landing near a tiny California town, it grows to encompass the world. You see attacks on major world cities, and the entire US Army going against the invaders. By the end all of Los Angeles is used.
In the Spielberg film, it starts out fairly big, with a New York suburb being destroyed in a spectacular fashion....and then the movie gets smaller and smaller, as we only see what is happening from Tom Cruise's point of view. Everything from the opening scene on is seen in glimpses, and you never get a feeling of the world being in jeopardy, just the highway from New York to Boston being our only indications of there being any trouble. We never learn what is happening anywhere else, and that makes this a highly claustrophobic film. Its why it fails, in large part, because Spielberg wants to show the micro units, (The tiny family of Tom Cruise) while ignoring the true family of humanity that the aliens are trying to wipe out. The movie ends up with a ZERO mortality rate for anyone even remotely related to Cruise, and thats really not the way to create the idea of danger. If Cruise and the kids had just stayed at the house of his ex wife, they would have most likely been fine. Boston itself looked almost pristine, and the Ex-wife was just sitting there at the grandparents unaffected.
The kids in this movie are absolutely dreadful. The boy is as obnoxious a character as possible, while the Dakota Fanning kid shrieks...and shrieks...and continues to shriek for two goddamn hours.
Anyway, big time disappointment for me, as this is the sort of movie that Spielberg should have been able to make into a classic...instead its now a little footnote in his career.
Except for ignoring how the film totalling went in the tank with the arrival of Robbins, Barry's comments were excellent. I never thought about the film in those terms. Very nice. There are enough powerful and amazing scenes in the first half (I was blown away by the ferry scenes) to recommend the film, but what should have been a 17 or 18 is just a 14.
Yeah, see, it was weird for me with Robbins. I like him and I even liked his character, but I thought the chunk of the movie with him was completely unnecessary. I'm pretty sure there was a character like him in the book. It's been a while.
Watching those first 30 minutes, I couldn't figure out why people seem so lukewarm about this movie. I was thinking that it was pretty great. As it went, I just got more and more disappointed. And bored! And then kind of mad with the stupid ending.
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