- Joined
- Jun 20, 2004
- Messages
- 3,527
- Real Name
- Richard W
The Cruise version is NOT true to the spirit and theme of the novel. "the humblest things God put on this Earth" is tacked on to the end as an afterthought so that people would leave the theater thinking they'd just seen H.G. Wells. It isn't planted or foreshadowed earlier on so that it emerges logically out of the story like in the 1953 version, perhaps because it has nothing to do with the new revisionist story being told: H.G. Wells did not write that. The male characters in his novel were protective, caring, self-sacrificing, and very responsible without making a point of it. This revisionist storyline works against the very concept and premise of the novel and of the film because it's more important to the film than anything else. You can see this storyline in 30 films per year; it does not belong in War of the Worlds. Nothing is right and everything goes wrong with this idiotic and condescending storyline in place. How anyone can sit in front of the screen and accept this storyline as War of the Worlds even for a microsecond is beyond me.
An alien attack forces a divorced dead-beat Dad to learn how to take responsibility for his children.