War of the Worlds2005

68/100 Yet another weak adaptation of a well-written book, but one with enough substance for me to consider just an average alien invasion movie with some great scenes. The first half of this movie is some really good stuff. Granted, I'm not a huge fan of the family drama clashing with the alien invasion, but there is some genuine atmospheric tension to be found here. The first massacre by the Tripods is really frightening and intense, and this continues throughout to be the case throughout. This is in part thanks to some fantastic sound design and VFX for the Tripods, giving them a futuristic feel. John Williams' score is also brilliant here as usual, and it feels even better saying that since it's been a while since I have. So many iconic scenes in this movie are also very great. I've mentioned the initial emergence of the Tripods, but by far my favourite is the ferry scene. The way there's a slow buildup to the Tripods before they finally emerge, capsizing the vessel, it just great. The movie's action feels very dark rather than fun, but in a good way. However, whenever the movie strays too far from H.G. Wells' original novel, it inevitably becomes much weaker, as the writers are nowhere near as clever as Wells. My primary complaint for this movie is the characters. Now, Tom Cruise is obviously great here, and I loved his character, which makes it even more disappointing that everyone else sucks, especially the two kids he's saddled with. The teenage son is a typical teen rebel character but even dumber. Seriously, what does he think he's going to do against the aliens? Throughout the movie, I just had to put up with his whining, blaming everything on his father and being disrespectful, and it's very irritating. Even worse, however, is the daughter, who seems to hate the fact she's still alive, shrieking at every mild discomfort in the most grating way possible and going out of her way to run right into danger. There's also a plot change made so the aliens sent the Tripods here millions of years ago rather than them arriving along with the aliens, which opens up a new plot hole which wouldn't be there if they'd just followed the original. Thanks for that, we really needed that touch of originality. Really, though, it makes the aliens look really stupid. They've been to Earth before, why would they still not know about bacteria and take proper steps to protect themselves? This is an unneeded change creating an unneeded plot hole, it just sucks. Overall, this movie was definitely primed to be a good horror movie, perhaps even a great one, but it was stifled by the order to make it a Hollywood action movie afraid to get anything above a PG-13. It's really good when it actually follows the book, but outside of that, it's bad enough to lower it to just being average overall.