I'm Bored so Now I'm Doing Movie Reviews

Got nothing to do today, and I'm bored...so here's my review of "War of the Worlds."

It's definitely worth seeing, and I definitely enjoyed it a lot. There were a couple of minor quirks about the movie that bothered me though, and if you haven't seen it yet, you might want to stop reading here. No wait, here.

The first thing that bothered me was the similarity to the book by H.G. Wells. That being; the title, and the first and last 2 minutes of the movie. Oh yeah and one of the characters had a weird name like Oglivy. That's it though.

The second thing that bothered me was the way that the aliens appeared, and I have to say it perplexed me throughout the film, and kind of left a sour taste in my mouth in an otherwise really sweet movie. If you haven't seen it and are still reading, the "space dicks" buried their machines underground millions of years ago before man walked the earth...planning this takeover the whole time. They get into the machines by riding lightening down, which cracks the ground and they slide in and start screwing up the streets of New York. Then they jump out and start evaporating people left and right. This, as I see it, is where the movie fails and the book succeeds.

In the book, the aliens didn't really have planetary travel mastered...or maybe it's because H.G. Wells wrote it in 1898, and a technologically advanced system of interplanetary travel was being shot from a gun in a cylinder. So the aliens lodge themselves into the ground in these cylinders and wait days to unscrew the tops and emerge. When they do finally emerge, they're very sluggish on account of the Earth's gravity being higher than that of Mars'. They build these machines and annihilate most of the planet. So, in the book, it's a lot more feasible that the aliens were "regarding this earth with envious eyes," and planning a takeover for millions of years throughout our evolution; only to unleash their full plan days before most of our population is annihilated.

In the movie, this whole reasoning goes out the window because the machines were buried millions of years ago before man existed. How could the aliens bury machines that we never found, and wait all this time to take over our planet? Wouldn't it have just been easier to formulate an attack when all we had were sticks and stones to throw? Hmm...masters of interplanetary travel, but not the best strategists in the world.

Alright, as a counterpoint...and the only reason that I can see from the movie that they waited all this time, was for our society to flourish so they could have enough blood to fertilize those blood roots that they started growing. Then they have somewhat of an argument thereby; and while I was watching the movie I dismissed my initial thoughts about the legitimacy of their scheme for this reason and this reason only.

So the other thing that bothered me, and it's pretty much what I'd predicted anyway because Spielberg directed it, is that neither of the kids died. I think there was one kid and one kid only that ever died in a Spielberg, and that was the kid on the floaty thing in "Jaws;" and he wasn't in the movie for more than 2 minutes anyway so there was no emotional attachment to him. Alright, Haley Joel Osmet from A.I. also; but he was a robot...robots don't count.

All in all, I enjoyed the movie a lot, it had great special effects, and was just overall fun. Sorry to have released such a shitty post before about Tom Cruise and his Scientology, after I wrote it I was clicking "publish" and thinking, "damn this is a shitty post and I should just print it out and wipe my ass with it...then delete it."