War of the Worlds 
War of the Worlds: Review
Monday 08.07.2006
alice ttlg || 04:22 PM
The Tom Cruise/Steven Spielberg collaborations are interesting, not necessarily the best of movies but interesting nonetheless. I re-watched War of the Worlds on HBO last night and sinceI had to pause it to feed the cats, that meant I could also fast forward thru the too slow parts I couldn't stand (where they lose the van to the crowd and with Tim Robbins being a crazy guy) which made it better than in the theaters.
Things I liked best, the flawed hero, he's a rather lazy dad, doesn't know his kids that well and has given up making any serious effort to change that when the aliens come. After they arrive, he's scared but he keeps moving and is totally focused on getting his kids to safety in the form of their mother, because she's the adult, she'll know what to do, she'll be able to protect them. While the older son sees that as cowardice, to me it was the best thing he could do, the telling moment was when the son wanted to join the army convoy and the dad shouts that he should come up with a plan that doesn't involve his ten year old sister joining the army.
The aliens and all the special effects are very good, scary and fascinating and beautiful. Touches reminiscent of other films, the long metallic eye scoping out the basement reminded me of the watery finger thing in The Abyss, the metallic one here being the evil twin of the watery one there and both ended up chopped in half. The car he's hiding in being tossed and turned upside down reminded me of the similar scene in Jurassic Park where the tyranosaurus did the same with the park SUVs. The red weed growing everywhere, the red mist, all these little touches gave a wonderful eerie, spooky feeling to it all. The best spooky effect was the flaming train sweeping thru the crossing on the road to the ferry.
So all in all, a good movie, at least I could watch it a second time whereas I couldn't do that with MInority Report, found myself bored out of my mind five minutes in when I tried to re-watch it.
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