WARNING: Tons of spoilers ahead! But it’s not like it really matters, lots of people know what happened before they went and saw the movie since it is a book and all.
I have never read the book War of The Worlds. I haven’t seen the original movie. I haven’t heard that big radio broadcast that freaked the crap out of everybody. But I saw the new movie. And was kind of disappointed. Well, maybe a little more than that. It’s not a good sign when a movie has characters so un-relatable that you want to smack them in the head every minute. It is also not a good sign when you can find every single one of the hundred billion plot holes a movie has thirty minutes after leaving the theater. It’s too bad that all of these bad signs apply to War of The Worlds.
I mean, I was excited about this movie. Maybe a little less excited recently due to the whole Tom Cruise Scientology thing. The trailers made it look ultra-cool. You know, the bridges and houses being thrown into the air, stuff being blown up, creepy stuff…. The movie had all of those things. And for that, it was good. But all the plot holes, the bad characters, the terrible plot…. all of that just made the movie kind of suck.
Cue the voice of Morgan Freeman. “We have gone about our daily lives, completely unaware of their existence. They watched us for millions of years, calculating our every move—” See? That’s the first problem with this whole movie. If you’re going to take over the world, why wait a million years? Why not just get up in there during the time of Jesus and blow the hell out of the planet then? I’m sure it would be a whole bunch easier, considering that there are no hand grenades to swallow or anything like that. The modern world is actually the biggest thing that makes the movie seem so pointless. This story was written over a century ago, not in 2005.
The story is supposedly pretty much the same in this movie except for one big change. Instead of coming all the way from Mars and straight out attacking us, these aliens went and buried some tripod robot thingamajigs and waited a million years for us to get all advanced and stuff and then went and dug them up to kill us all. Okay. So you have robots. You bury them. But you wait a million years? I would say these aliens are pretty advanced, considering that they can get to earth and all that stuff. So. Why are they going around in ONE MILLION year old tripod robots? If they really wanted to kick some serious butt, they should have upgraded their weapons a bit and you know, invented VACCINES. I mean, a million years is kind of a long time. I’m sure they could have improved their models just a tad in that time span.
So anyway. We’ll get back to that later. For now, let’s talk about the people in the movie. There’s Tom Cruise. He plays this really unlikable, immature, car-fixing, construction-worker whatever guy. Then there’s that other guy. He plays the misunderstood teenager who wants to fight for his country and stuff. Then there’s Dakoda Fanning, one of the only good things about this movie. She screams a lot.
The plot in this movie is pretty straightforward. Just running around and stuff. It was all really painful to watch. Not because of stuff being blown up and blood and guts being sprayed all over the place. That was cool. It was because all of the characters seemed to be mentally handicapped. Several times, I wanted to shout out, “WHAT are you doing, you IDIOT?!”
Like when Tom Cruise decides to go and check out the mysterious thunderstorm outside of his house. And then when he goes to the site where all the lightning struck. And when he gets really close to the hole in the ground that was made by the lightning. And then when he stays and watches even after a giant tripod robot thingamajig has sprouted out of the ground and is vaporizing people.
Or when all of the people are trying to get onto a ferry to get across the water and they see the tripod things coming towards them. And instead of thinking logically and going, “You know what? A boat is kind of like a big target on water, isn’t it?” they all run frantically onto the boat.
Or when, instead of going and hiding in a cave in the middle of nowhere, since obviously these aliens are going to go wherever people are gathered, all of the people hang around in these big clusters on main roads. And then they get eaten. Which is also really weird. Because earlier in the movie, the aliens were vaporizing humans. Why on earth would you vaporize your dinner?
The biggest thing that really ticked me off about the movie was the ending. I get that the ending was all true to the book and stuff, but really. If you’re going to make up that retarded plot-change about the aliens actually planting robots underground a million years ago, you might as well tweak the ending to be more logical. It makes no sense that aliens who have been studying us for millions of years would overlook such a thing as disease. I was like, “Wait. What? They got sick from drinking our water? That’s it? That’s the end?” If you come a trillion light years to freaking kill off a bunch of people, why can’t you learn to vaccinate yourself? Or at least purify your water? You aliens probably know all about that since you probably needed to turn your pee back into water during your long trip. And really. How could you overlook disease if your diet consists of raw humans? Raw food is full of diseases! Honestly. You aliens are not too bright.
So what is the lesson that we’ve learned from this movie? That human beings are stupid. Really, really, really stupid. But aliens are also stupid. Really, really, really stupid. It seems that the only beings smart enough to end an alien attack are microbes living in water. I can’t see why this movie is getting such good reviews. I guess reviewers are also just really, really, really stupid.
[Image from imdb.com.]
