*** Official WAR OF THE WORLDS Review Thread - Page 2

I just found the tripods a bit ungainly and the overly long sequence in the basement with the mechanical 'eye' reminicent of the Abyss (which was done with quite a bit more subtlety by Cameron).

We see him at the start refuse to do an extra shift at work - we suspect not because he had the kids to look after but because he wanted to annoy his boss. Later, it's his son who helps passengers onto the ferry, not him. It is only when he finally does a selfless act by trying to destroy the tripod by attempting to commit suicide using the grenades that redemption comes and others help him. And the reward is that the machine is destroyed and he and his daughter escape.

Look what happened to ex-wife and new husband's house.

he has now reached a stage of emotional awareness of his kids that should have been there all along - he is now at a point where he can begin. The contented safe household in front of him is the goal he can now realistically aim for. In more than one sense, it is the small simple things of life that matter.

like when men murder innocents without hesitation such is their desperation for a leg up in the game of survival. I was inspired by moments of humanity's best, as when the son risks helping a couple people onto a ferry after he has already made it to safety. I've seen masterpieces with one view or the other, but by placing them in sharp relief within the same movie, Spielberg allows the reality to finally cut through the editorializing. The matter-of-fact presentation is the opposite of what we expect from him, and gives the money shots real power. When we see bodies floating down the Hudson, for instance, he allows the image itself to do the talking — its lack of fanfare caught me off-guard and shook me to my core. Likewise, there is a sequence where Rachel sings herself a lullaby while her father does what must be done behind her that is a formalistic masterstroke, presented in the most realistic of ways. I have seen other sequences in other movies that operate off the same principle. None achieves what this does here, surely one of the best of Spielberg's career.
Both War of the Worlds and Mars Attacks! feature tripods firing heat rays that vaporize people. The fact that the former never once reminded me of the latter throughout its entirety speaks to the staggering level of verisimilitude achieved here. They operate as opposite ends of the same spectrum, with the decision to shoot the majority of exteriors on-location grounding the proceedings with an inherent reality that the other apocalypse movies can't even approach.
The aliens here are also a revelation. The sheer practicality of their methods is staggering; in horror movies you expect people to die, but I was blind-sided with how the aliens made use of them afterwards. Likewise, little touches like grabbing a canned food in their search of home and passing around a discovered photograph to be looked at by each in turn instantly sold them to me as intelligent beings in a way the grandeur of their technological monstrosities never could. More than another other alien invasion on film before it, this one gets the scale and the stakes exactly right. For once the heroes don't escape abduction, allowing us into the heart of the invader's world. The details of their insidious operation are finally shown up close and personal, never slipping from the human scale that makes it all so effective.
People say the characters were bland, but I think that's absolutely not true. They were everyman, certainly — a necessity of creating an audience surrogate — but they are also complex, flawed, and surprising. Only the son strikes a one-note tone, the filmmakers' apparent need to poke fun at patriotic idealists overriding their efforts at creating a compelling, three-dimensional character. But Rachel and Ray are flawed so that they can triumph in overcoming them; even Tim Robbins's gun-nut is a character whose mania is a logical result of who he was and what has happened to him. The scenes between Cruise and Otto at the beginning are also dead-on; the way she reacts to him shows exactly how they could have gotten together to begin with; they way he conducts himself shows exactly why she didn't stay with him. Fanning too is at the top of her game; there is one shot that particularly wowed me later on in the film when Rachel is resting on top of a sleeping Ray on a couch in the basement of the farm house, and the bass rumbles across the soundstage. The close up catches Dakota's eyes searching for the source of the sound; what attention to detail!
So it is that an ending which very nearly undoes everything the movie has worked so hard for previously cannot entirely rob this film of its power. Snip off that final scene and move right into the closing narration, and this film would have surpassed Batman Begins as the best film of the year. Even as it stands, there's far too much greatness here to be ignored.

Nothing seemed to move me, whether it was the "developing" relationship between Tom Cruise and his children or his zeal to get them to Boston.

I was neither relieved they got to Boston safely, not upset at the deaths in the film,

flashes of news reports regarding electrical storms in Europe, The news crew showing Ray the tape of an attack with multiple tripods, the rumor of people in Japan destroying a handful of tripods.

I think his surviving the attack weakens his position in the film.

about the aliens being killed by earth bacteria. This is not a lame or just give up ending. Billions have died due to lack of immunity. Nearly 10 million of my people were wiped off the face the Earth due to smallpox, chickenpox, mumps, measles, and the common flue. Sure the aliens should have protected themselves but with great technological advancement comes great carelessness and a sense of invincibility

Ray and his daughter finding Boston completely destroyed and littered with downed pods and dead aliens. Possibly find the mother but with everyone surviving it lessened the impact greatly.

How come the word “aliens” was never uttered, or did I just miss it? In their intent to make this look like a serious fare, was Spielberg & company afraid to have that word uttered in the film to make it sound cheesy? Very weird but that’s how normal people would refer to these creatures. If it was uttered, disregard this comment.

The camera probe was okay, but I think I would have liked it better if the aliens had used some kind of tactile feedback to explore the cellar. Also, I was just dying to see one of the tripodless aliens get shotgunned in the face. It would have shown that they were vulnerable outside of their machines.

the aliens dying of our microbes, since that is the way the original story was written. I will say that Wells probably sold it a little stronger, since his Martians had troubles adapting to our world from the beginning. Gravitational differences were the reason they needed their tripods and other machines, for instance. But, I was fine with it, and the imagery of the dead tripods was very effective. Two things I wish were different about it: the aliens' ullaling should have been constant and nerve-wracking at the end, and we should have been shown the birds pecking an exposed alien. Maybe I'm sick on that last point, though.

I know some don't like the happy ending of Robbie being alive. I can go along with that--maybe Ray shouldn't have come through the experience basically unscathed--but it didn't really bother me too much. That's the movies.

One last thing: we had birds in the air, so why didn't we drop a few daisy cutters on those suckers? I guarantee their shields wouldn't have helped them then.

I cannot buy into the fact that Ray's son earlier in the film runs into a battlefield that becomes a blazing inferno full of those tripod machines and at the end turns up safe and sound. With all that destruction and death occuring around them throughout the film, it would be more plausible that not all the main characters would survive in the end.

laid waste to entire blocks as easily as a kid at the beach kicking over another kid's sand castle!

Cruise' son making it and the happy ending stuff

the alien forces are brought down by water.

and then they just...keel over.