Saw War of the Worlds last night with the buttonWife. She wasn’t sure what to expect and wasn’t keen on seeing this particular movie. As we were walking out she couldn’t stop saying “Wow!” War of the Worlds is an intense, non-stop exercise in making your audience feel sick and helpless. I’m personally not a big Tom Cruise fan but I make exceptions for movies that look too good to pass up. I’m glad I didn’t pass this one up.
It goes without saying that the effects and sound were top-shelf. We’re talking about Speilberg here. I’m only casually acquainted with the source material but what I recall was faithfully represented. The noises those alien tripods make will definitely haunt my nightmares.
I thought this would have more social commentary than it did, but it seemed to shy away from it at times. I didn’t care for Tim Robbins’ side-ways political jab with his little “occupations never work,” comment but I’ll let it slide (if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know why I’ll let it slide). While WotW surrendered to a few movie cliches it took itself serious enough to work but not overly so. Definitely makes you think about your own mortality and what’s lurking beneath the surface.
I give it a button-mashing thumbs up.
I have not seen it yet but I will.
Yeah, definitely see this one. Take out one unnecessary scene and this movie is pretty darn good.
I thought it was decent at best, but mostly average. I wasn’t very excited by this movie and I didn’t particularly care if the main characters survived or not. Where you liked the sound of the tripods, I thought it was too goofy and made me laugh. Not terrible, but not Spielberg’s best by far.
occupations never work
I can’t think of many that did. I guess I could point to the occupation of Japan after WWII and maybe the occupation of Cuba after the Spanish/American war and of course Rome occupied most of the known world for a thousand years or so. It easier to call out the failures of occupations than the successful ones. For the most part occupations do seem to fail. The word ‘never’ should not have been used I guess. Perhaps “occupations hardly ever work” would have been better.
I still have not seen the movie but I wonder if people jump to quickly to political conclusions about scripts. I heard a guy at work complain that Darth Vader made some kind of anti-Bush comment in Star Wars III. Maybe but I doubt it. The script was written 30+ years ago. I remember a similar line about tyrants in the first Star Wars.