Spielberg’s directing, so it has potential.
It’ll be interesting to see how they do it. Hopefully, they’ll be entirely faithful to the book, and won’t try to update it for modern times.
Does it have tripods? I’m not going if it doesn’t have tripods.
Well, that’s $10 of my money Spielberg won’t be getting.
Why Tom Cruise? Why?
Well, it’ll be hard to keep them as ‘Martians’ (i.e. actually coming from Mars) without that coming off as silly (they could name the lead alien Marvin!) Mars is too familiar a place compared to what it was a century ago.
I find this interesting because I can remember that back when that vile, inane, worthless, piece of shit WOTW ripoff known as Independence Day came out Spielberg was quoted as saying he would never make a movie like that. That is, a movie where aliens were merciless invaders rather than altruistic visitors.
Hope he’s changed his mind.
I would hope they keep the Martians as alien as they feel in the book. I remember having the urine scared out of me as a kid when I read the Martian feeding scene, with the young boy and the hooting and all. If SS turns the Martians into just some more slick-looking humanoids with overdesigned technical toys and lots of explosions, it’s going to be another yawnfest.
And I detest Tom Cruise.
This could work if it was steampunk, and/or period piece. Kinda like Ray Harryhausen had planned.
Which means, of course, that it’s going to star Marlon Wayans as one of the Martians.
So? There’s a John Carter of Mars movie in the works, isn’t there?
What I hope is that they’re faithful to the book and not Orson Welles’ radio adaptation – i.e., the Martians first land in England near the turn of the century, not New Jersey in 1938.
There was, with Cruise picked to play John Carter, but I’ve not heard anything more about it in ages.
I also hope it goes along the lines of the book and is set in England.
I fear the following plot: The martians will invade us because our probes are spreading germs on their planet. The germs are killing them off so they are fighting back for their survival. Tom Cruise somehow gets a message from them or figures it out from some evidence he finds. He tries to explain to everyone that the Martians are only defending themselves. Near the end, humans kills the Martians but Tom Cruise feels all guilty because humans are barbaric and the poor Martians were only trying to defend themselves.
Dude, do you write for Hollywood? Because that’s so close to the kind of crap Hollywood spews out, it’s scary. The only thing you’ve forgotten is the romantic interest for Cruise.
When was Spielberg’s last big hit?
As a WAG, I’d say Saving Private Ryan, which would have been 1998.
Was The Terminal a hit?
I liked it, anyway.
Minority Report (also with Cruise) did pretty well, didn’t it?
That, or he’ll make some kind of “Martians Invading Earth”/“U.S. Invading Iraq” analogy.
In which case, I’ll have to have a cornea transplant after badly scratching my eyes in the tops of my sockets.
Ah, but he’d never fill his brother’s furry shoes! And they’d have to cast Jim Carrey’s brother and Jeff Goldblum’s brother as his shipmates!
Because I’m blonde I don’t have to think
I talk like a baby and I don’t pay for drinks
I don’t have to worry about getting a man
As long as I keep this blonde and keep these tan!
I hope they stay faithful to the book cause it was really fun to read a while back when that time machine movie came out I had high hopes and they completely changed the book with all that nonsense about him trying to save his lost love and shit
I think Saving Private Ryan was the last really good movie Spielberg has made. Since then he’s had a string of fair to middlin’ movies but nothing really great. I though Minority Report was just ok and it didn’t really hold my interest on repeated viewings. The very best Spielberg movies are movies you can watch over and over and over agian and still enjoy (Jaws, Close Encounters, ET, Raiders, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan). He hasn’t really knocked one out of the park like that for a while and I’m not sure if this is the film to do it with.
I think there are really only two approaches to take to this source material. Either do an I Robot thing and simply dump everything but the title and the basic concept updated to modern day (and probably with the Martians not being Martians) or do like a Sky Captain thing and do a retro-science fiction piece which is loyal to Wells’ book and winks a little bit at some of its dated ideas.
I would prefer the seconf approach but my guess is that the studio’s going to want an overblown, popcorn CGI fest with big name actors and no plot.
It made about $130 million from what I can goggle which puts it in the same division as Troy and I, Robot