Honestly, who cares?! It was a fun alien invasion flick. Don't think so darn hard. I figure maybe they needed to scare the living bejeezus out of the global population. Much more easily scooped up when having been run ragged, tired, starving and nearly cometose with fear. Harvesting is then a cinch. Some sort of plant. They were obviously immune to whatever came out of our blood, cause the film focused on those little buggy things in the water droplet. I don't think it was bacteria in of itself that felled them, but just that particular nasty one that they somehow missed during the planning stages. They are really very tiny, after all. No excuse for this, he should have croaked. Everyone else on that hill did. Cause they did that in ID4 and I don't blame Spielberg for avoiding it. Also, this happened in a very short period of time. Maybe the armies of Earth were just about to press the button, but hadn't quite given up on finding another weakness without risking the obliteration of our atmosphere with nukes. Who knows, you do silly sh!t when you have a fever. Maybe they thought the fresh air would flush out the nasty little bugs. This doesn't matter. Humans weren't making a scratch and were doomed. It was the bug, and the bug alone that did them in. All of the tripods in the river scene were snatching up humans. They weren't being killed right away.
no no, there was one outside the farm that killed the guy right away. one arm came down and smacked the guy to death then another arm sucked the blood out of him. i did enjoy the movie though. i was just thinking about these questions this morning when i woke up and wanted to hear what you guys had to say.
Just seen it today. Bit poor. Well a bit piss-poor really. All brawns and no brains. And fairly scattered at times without no direction. Felt like I was being led places where I didn't want to be led and was fairly uncomfortable along. First 30 minutes had the making of a real good, sci-fi Spielberg thriller. It then descended into a farce of epic proportions, leaving plot-holes, unanswered questions and quizzical looks all round. Sure, there is no point to the aliens being there and what and why they are doing what they do - but the Tim Robbins bit was strange. The annoying girl shrieking every ten seconds was highly annoying and that kid running off, getting incinerated and majestically coming back from the dead to a neighbourhood seemingly untouched by the devastation elsewhere - made me laugh, and cry. Well not for the sentimental mush. More for the reason, why I paid several English pounds to watch this bilge. Whilst Minority Report was a great sci-fi film that dabbled special effects with an engaging and provocative story-line about the issue of human-rights and capital punishment around a sub-defuse of personal tragedy - this was merely a movie that tried all three and failed, withering on the floor like a mental patient. It had no real story-line and padded most of the film with cool, eye-dropping special effects and Dolby surround sound. The relationships with the son and daughter felt forced and just didn't connect at all. Don't get me started on the wife. What was that? One scene at the beginning and end of the film? Massive gaps starts to finish. Don't even get me started on how he got that car to work - or how that guy's camera worked in the electrical outage. Or the plane crash landing on the house and all the bits being in full view more than a metres apart. I admire the 1953 original and to a greater extent, HG Wells book of the same name. Then, the film and book were a subtle reference to the morbid fascination of war and destruction and of human struggle for survival. This was just pandered too much to the lowest common denominator of the average Hollywood audience - who wanted to be blown away with over the top CGI, crap storyline and mushy endings. Yeah, it stayed mostly faithful to the original - and give it that certain 21st century razzmatazz, but it was severely lacking something. It just needed something in there, to bolster a fairly dull story at the best of times It was a case of what could have been. A real shame really. I was expecting not a lot - but seeing as it came from Spielberg - I expected at least something.
Went to see it this PM. Went in while the sun was shining and came out to a pretty big thunderstorm with lots of lightning right over our heads, which was pretty funny (actually caused the film to stop twice). I thought the first 30 minutes or so worked pretty well, at least in terms of action. Then it went downhill pretty quick. The big problem was that it was hackneyed. All the stunts have been done before and it's not enough to just to soup them up. Random points: Dakota Fanning: Yeah, she screamed a lot but how many kids out there can actually generate an emotional presence like that? You give that Radcliffe kid in those disastrous Harry Potter movies half of what she's got and those films would be great. I had zero problem with the putative logical inconsistency of the aliens waiting 10,000 years or whatever. I just assumed they were doing this all over the galaxy, like the Borg. Maybe they set up likely planets ahead of time and come back to them when it's convenient, when they're needed, or when the accumulated biomass makes them worth the trouble. Whatever, it's a summer flick so I ddn't worry too much. Another problem I didn't have was the van not running out of gas. I figured they'd found plenty of abandoned gas stations. All those escape routes just big enough for the van to sneak through, whether it was nicely spaced cars on the highway or the jet wreckage that a) didn't smush the car and b) left such a nifty path...that was a bit tough to swallow. Cruise: When he was running around with his mouth shut it was fine, when he was talking I just couldn't help but think about how much he knows about psychiatry. Even in films I don't take seriously I can't take him seriously anymore. I know Olivier told us the best actors are a little bit stupid, but jeez. I couldn't escape the feeling that his kids would have been better off with Tim Robbins' character. Which brings me to... Tims Robbins' character: was he the result of some script patching done by Tobe Hooper, or what? Was he a perv or was he just traumatized? And what made Spielberg think he'd laid sufficient groundwork for the audience to accept what Cruise's character did, rather than, oh...say, just leaving while his back was turned while he was digging his tunnel to Boston? Anyway, it was like an old wooden roller coaster: All the fun comes with the big hills at the beginning and the dark flashy part at the end doesn't really scare you, it just tells you the ride is about done.
I like Dakota.. I think she's adorable and a great young actress. Her screams started to irritate the hell out of me though. In the beginning when she is screaming over and over in the van, I just wanted someone to punch her in the face.
Oh, no doubt. Me too. But it's not unrealistic for a kid to react to extreme situations (like not getting candy from the checkout aisle at a grocery store) that way, and it's not unusual for people who don't love them as their parents do to wish instant death on them.
ya the movie has a billion plot holes but I went to the theatre to be entertained and I was. Those ********ing tripods were some of the sickest things Ive ever seen in any movie yet. The movie kinda went a bit downhill when the basement scene with Robbins dragged on a lil too much. Btw when the machine captured them and put into those lil cages and that red thing sucked them in what was that for. Did they feed on humans??
Perfect! Why can't people just go to a movie sometimes and shut off their brains and enjoy the ride! Who cares that there were plot holes and other stuff that didn't make sense this never pretended to be an award contender nor should it have. It was a fun blow up a whole lot of ******** and scare people movie! With this goal in mind it was very well done. My only problem with the end is it felt rushed like they felt that we couldn't have sat for another 20-30 min for it to develop like the rest of the movie had. Up until the end I was on the edge of my seat, but at the end I was like "that’s it?! I want more explosions!" As much as I love the artsy thinking movie these have a place as well. Life would get pretty boring if all you had was vegetables and no candy, same goes for movies !!
While I was entertained and didn't feel like they stole my money, the story was real weak. By the end, I didn't care if any of them lived or died. Especially Tom Cruise. I was kind of hoping he'd get abducted and his blood drained.
did anyone else laugh their asses off when the first tripod shot out of the road up into the sky? I don't know about you, but me and my friend couldn't contain ourselves.
I think because expectations were obviously high due to this being a Spielberg picture based on a classic science fiction novel. People thought he may bring more to the table than guys like Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin would have. He didn't.
I'm getting a bit tired of people making excuses for this movie's story line. Action and plot are not mutually exclusive -- even something as downright silly as Pirates of the Caribbean made sense if you wanted to dissect it afterwards. I know I'm just becoming an old coot, but I long for the days of something like Robocop or Terminator that was packed with great action scenes but also took a little bit of time to set up plot and didn't treat every audience member like a Mountain Dew addict with ADD. The reunion scene in WOTW is without a doubt the worst ending in Spielberg's history. This film made 1941's house falling into the ocean look like Chekhov. From a filmmaker of his caliber, I expect something at least mildly coherent. I think riverplate's comment above this is right: if this was Emmerich, complaining about this would be pointless. Then again, I don't watch Emmerich films because they're crap. My wife and I went to this based on the reviews (especially Turan, who gushed on NPR about it like he never does about anything) and the filmmaker, and we both left wondering what the hell the reviewers saw.
If you go into a movie with expectations you will almost always be disapointed. If you are going in expecting an instant classic how can you expect to get anything close to that? As I said before it was a good blow em up science fiction movie and no one pretended that it was anything else, including Spielberg. Movies that I would be disapointed in would be ones such as Troy or Alexander that tried to protray that they were going to bring back the epic and fell miles short. If this was supposed to be a classic it would not have come out in the summer, but that is what it has always been a summer action movie.
Hadn't thought of that. Because Cruise, like Wayne, is left on the outside looking in despite having reunited the family?
Well at least he didn't steal the whole "figure on the outside seen from the inside through a portal" thing that Ford used to symbolize Wayne's character's separateness from things domestic and home-like. I'll give you "homage" but not "rip-off". Maybe "dorky homage." Will you accept dorky homage?
Well Cruises character was pretty much seperate from all things domestic and homelike - engine on the kitchen table - much like Uncle Ethan
Mmmmmmaybe, but I think you're stretching it. I mean Ethan was coming home from the war and Cruise had made his own trouble precisely by screwing up (we assume) in the domestic area to begin with. Anyway, there's no way this mediocre film should be mentioned in the same breath as The Searchers, if that's what Spielberg intended.