War of the Worlds is a well-made movie of astupid book. The special effects are cool, the acting is good. Better than expected all around. The biggest problem it has is that the plot is essentially ridiculous. When War of the Worlds was first published in 1898, the suprise ending made sense. I trust that as I am writing this 107 years later, no one will be too offended if I give away that surprise ending. The Martians, having easily overwhelmed all of man’s military might, essentially catch colds and die. The bacteria get ’em. Ha ha, what a trick. In 1898, that was clever and plausible, at least plausible enough for science fiction. Nowadays, it is absurd.
We are expected to believe that these Martians are incredibly intelligent. The opening of the movie, narrated by Morgan Freeman (all movies narration must be by Morgan Freeman or James Earl Jones, it’s in the SAG bylaws), specifically states how smart they are. But not smart enough to have figured out germ theory! Smart enough to have created weapons of war that smash our puny tanks like so much kleenex, but not smart enough to make their vehicles airtight.
Now the Martians didn’t just truck on over to ol’ Terra to invade. No, Morgan tells us that they waited one million years underground, waiting and waiting for the right time to launch their attack. That’s right, one million years. Think about that. One million years ago, Homo Erectus was barely more than an animal. Their defenses consisted of sticks of varying sizes. Nowadays, we have missiles, tanks, guns, nuclear weapons, etc. If they’d given us another 100, we would have beat the pants off them. What kind of strategy are they employing? What were they waiting for? And in that entire million years, they never figured out the first thing about germ theory or bacteria. That’s a higher intelligence for you.
Anyhow, in the movie they managed to avoid a lot of this ridiculousnessosisty by just ignoring the aliens. Most of the movie (and the book) is not so much about the aliens, but about how our protagonist deals with all the change going on around him, which is mostly the fellow humans. Those were the good parts. Whenever the aliens came on screen, you had to force yourself to ooh and aah over the awesome lasers, and not think about how much easier it would be to invade Earth if you had the merest sliver of a brain. (If there ever is such thing as a war of this kind, there is one sure tactic. Bombardment. With gravity on your side, move asteriods into orbit around Earth and let them fall. A city-sized one likely killed the dinosaurs and most other terran life 65 million years ago, it would be childs play to wipe us all current lifeforms the same way.)
(On a sidenote, I am stunned by the hatred directed at Tom Cruise by friends of mine. He was a dipstick who made good movies his whole career, now he’s a dipstick who makes good movies. Whatever. Scientology is nuts, if it takes Tom Cruise to make you realize that, great, but the man’s got a right to be nuts. Who cares?)
I strongly disagree. LESS Tim Robbins, MORE aliens. He was so over the top, he was in the stratosphere.
More Tim Robbins, less aliens.
And another thing. The movie would have been much, MUCH better if the son hadn’t magically re-appeared at the end of the movie. He should have stayed dead. That whole end thing sucked.
TRIVIA – the grandparents were played by the leads from the original WAR OF THE WORLDS.
I was also really bothered by the whole “hide for a million years” strategy the aliens employed. It makes no sense. Furthermore, if the tripods represent their technology as of a million years ago, think about how much better their equipment must be now! It’s like they buried Fred Flintstone’s foot powered car, and when they came back a million years later, the aliens decided that it was still a better weapon for invading than the new anti-grav hover cars they had invented in the intervening millenia. So, did they have to “down train” their soldiers to use the old tripod technology? I guess they kept the manuals in storage for those million years.
Exactly! As long as you just focused on the cool lasers, it was a lot of fun.
I completely agree with what you are pointing out. It seemed like quite a stretch that the aliens are perfectly happy to “breathe our air, drink our water”, etc. Even we dumb humans wouldn’t do that on some strange planet with a strange atmosphere that needs terraforming…
Other than that it was great!