War of the Worlds -- What a Waste!!

Finally got another post completed! It’s amazing how much time you lose when you take a few trips out of town and then the new TV season starts and you’re enjoying your new DVR WAAAAYYYY too much (I actually think I had something like 70 or 80 hours of TV shows & movies recorded at one point. Admittedly, I'd been out of town for about 4 days, but it was till pretty out of control). But I’m FINALLY getting back to it. I'm caught up on my TV watching, I've watched quite a few of the movies (although lord knows I've got plenty left), and now it's time to get moving forward again with my blog! Of course, the first thing I had to do was go in and clean out some of the comments on my blogs and turn on word verification for comments to deal with the wonderful spammers out there (what a joy!). Those of you actually reading my blog on occasion should please post comments on now and then, just so I know you’re out there. Or not. Hell, I’ve been talking to myself for years, so why change now? ;-P

So two weeks went by after Batman Begins before I saw another movie at the theater. In the intervening period, 4 movies came out that I didn’t get around to seeing: The Perfect Man, Herbie: Fully Loaded, Bewitched, and George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead. Of those, there was only one that I actually had any interest in seeing at all (and if you guessed anything other than the last one, you obviously haven’t been paying much attention to my previous blog entries). It’s one I still want to see, but I just never got around to getting to it while it was at the theaters.

So following these came the highly, highly anticipated sci-fi thriller collaboration between Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise – War of the Worlds. Pretty much a must see for any sci-fi fan, so naturally I made sure I saw it at the theater. Well, I shouldn’t have wasted my money. And I truly wish I could have gotten this review out soon enough to prevent others from wasting their money. If this movie isn’t worst movie of the year so far, I don’t know what is. Hell, this thing even beat out a certain other horribly, horribly disappointing sci-fi film that came out back in May (that I don’t even want to name, or I’ll start going off on it again). That movie at least had some pretty cool space battles in it, even if they were cut way too short so the writer/director could have more boring scenes filled with crappy dialogue (see, there I go). War of the Worlds doesn’t even have THAT going for it!

Believe me, I wanted to like this movie. I tried to like this movie. Really I did. Even after a good friend of mine who managed to see it before I did warned me that it was really disappointing, I still went in with an open mind, hopeful of at least a fun movie, if not an intellectually stirring movie. Even as the movie got more and more progressively dumber and more pointless, STILL I tried my best to focus on the positive elements. Finally about halfway through the movie I was forced to accept that the movie just didn’t have any real redeeming values (okay, so Dakota Fanning gave a wonderful performance like she always does, but she just doesn't add enough to the movie to make it worth seeing). And it just kept getting worse and worse and worse!! So why did I find this to be such an incredible waste of time and money? Where do I start?!

There are spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t seen the film yet – well, keep reading so you’ll know why NOT to bother seeing it. In movies like this, there’s naturally a certain amount of suspension of disbelief required. That’s a given. So when the aliens send out some sort of EMP blast that shorts out everything electrical, and Tom Cruise is the only person who knows exactly what part to replace in a car’s engine so that he has a working vehicle when no one else does, you just accept that as standard Hollywood nonsense and don't let it bother you. But when he’s running from the aliens as they’re blasting everyone with their disintegration rays, and they zap people on both sides of him but somehow manage to miss just Tom Cruise, that’s pushing believability a little too much for me, especially when it is as incredibly, horribly blatant as it is in this scene. And it gets worse from there (as hard as that is to believe)! Scene after scene, Cruise and his kids somehow manage to barely escape from the aliens while everyone around them is getting killed.

I can more or less put up with this sort of stuff as part of your standard, cheesy Hollywood action blockbuster. Let’s face it, there are a lot of movies out there that do about the same thing, but there’s enough action and explosions and chase scenes and cool effects that you can forgive quite a lot and just enjoy it as a mindless popcorn movie (although War of the Worlds pushes that limit even for me, and I’m pretty forgiving, especially when it’s not just an action movie, but an action sci-fi movie). But then the movie takes this bizarre morbid twist as it attempts to become a sci-fi thriller or something, and we suddenly find our hero and his daughter in a basement with Tim Robbins. I won’t go into the details, but the scene ends with Tom Cruise killing Tim Robbins. It’s just a weird, grim, pointless scene. And the movie steadily loses coherence from there. And of course it has to have the sickly sweet Hollywood happy ending where we find out that the son who disappeared and was presumed dead halfway through the movie is really alive and well and with his mom waiting for Dad and sister to arrive. How lame and predictable and disappointing is that??? You’d think Spielberg of all people would know better than to deliver such a cookie cutter, by-the-numbers ending, predictable Hollywood ending. Come on, let's show at least a little originality!

The only positive thing about this whole mess is that the original story ended in such a way as to pretty much rule out any possibility of a sequel (which is a good thing, because despite being a horrid piece of trash, it made enough at the box office to absolutely guarantee at least a trilogy if it wasn’t for the fact that the original story doesn’t really leave room for anything further). Admittedly there was a TV show a number of years ago that put forth the idea that some of the aliens DID survive by taking over human bodies and plotting the overthrow of Earth from there (and it was actually a surprisingly good show for the couple of seasons it was on), but somehow I don’t see that idea really working as a movie sequel (thank God!). Well, that’s it for this entry. More to follow hopefully before too long (and looking at the next movies, I should actually have some POSITIVE reviews in store for you). I have decided, however, that because of how far behind I am and how much trouble I’ve been having finding time to work on my blog, my next entry will more than likely just be a quick overview of the rest of the summer and fall, just covering the highlights of movies I saw, as opposed to the full reviews that I’ve been doing. That way I can get caught and actually start writing about movies that just came out! :-)

Serenity, of course (being the greatest film to come out so far this year by a long shot), will of course get a nice long, full review so that I can sing the praises of all things Whedon (it’s a damned shame that Serenity is easily 10 times the movie that Episode III is, but only made a fraction of the money at the box office – but I’ll rant further about that when I get to my review). So, until next time, bye for now! :)