Argus sees: War of the Worlds

I’m in a movie mood lately. I’ve seen all the big Hollywood blockbusters so far this summer, and this week I’m on vacation. Last night, after a week of going to the beach, I was in for a change.

“Wanna go see ‘War of the Worlds’?”

Sure. The reviews all look pretty good, and it’s got the redoubtable Stephen Spielberg behind the lens, with Tom Cruise doing all his usual Tom Cruise Faces for the camera. It’s as automatic a winning formula as you can get.

Except – it wasn’t. War of the Worlds was a big disappointment for me. The critics, for the most part, are way wrong with this movie.

If you’ve read the book, or seen the 1953 original screen adaptation, the 2005 version will have no surprises for you. Throughout the movie, I sort of held out hope that Spielberg would pull some magic out of his director’s hat, but it never happened. Keep in mind, the original story was written in 1898, so the plot turns aren’t as fresh as they could be – but essentially, this movie is "Signs" all over again, except the premise is even worse, right down to the scary basement scene, which did not work for me at all [Spoilers follow]. Tom Cruise and family are hiding out in a basement while enormous alien tripods stomp around outside, and which could rip apart the little house in which they were hiding in zip flat. But for some inexplicable reason, they sent in some kind of floating probe-eye (just like the 1953 version) to find them, instead of vaporizing the house as they had been doing everything else. Oh, and despite the alien’s obvious and incredible power, the Cruise family isn’t found. Huh? How big was that basement, anyway?

The other major plot point is the eventual demise of the aliens (no thanks to the humans in the movie), and although I won’t reveal it, various clues dropped along the way throughout the movie leave this device wide-open to critical flaying. So – we are to believe that 1.) the alien tripods have been buried under the Earth for millions of years, 2.) the aliens have been “drawing their plans against us” in all that time, but 3.) are taken out by…something even more stupid than the fact that 70% of the globe is under water? How could the aliens not have forseen this, in a million years of planning? Hopefully this next won't give too much away, but even we puny humans know enough to get a malaria shot before we visit Africa, as a precaution - but this kind of foresight was beyond the aliens. How?

Also, I got to see a cool vintage Mustang in the movie for about three seconds, teasing me into thinking it would show up later, but it didn't. What a letdown. You don't put a cool car into a movie unless you're going to use it for something. That's a rule, just like when a guy gets bad news on the phone, he throws it across the room, or when a guy says how great things are going in his life, he's about to die. There's a formula to follow.

This entire movie had the feel of a director and cast going through the motions. E.T. or First Encounters this ain’t. Wait for the rental.