Am I missing something or does this movie simply suck? Sure I can see that it’s told from the POV of an ordinary person caught up it it, but I simply didn’t enjoy it.
You’re not missing anything. Nice visuals, as always, but Spielberg’s still not able to bring it all the way home.
it sucked. Simple reason: the characters, especially Cruise’s, were all too fucking stupid to live. After the first half hour, I was rooting for the Martians.
Speilberg. Makes a few great looking scenes in a movie but can’t seem to put together an interesting enough 120 minutes without a lot of cliche’ filler.
Maybe not true of his older stuff but his most recent stuff just looks like he’s too lazy to put a full 2 hour film together. Just kind of wants to put in a few signature scenes.
I think a lot of it is great. What kills me is the Spielberg ending and the handling of the germ ending.
Scenes like the first appearence of the Tri-pods and the flaming train are great.
It wasn’t great, but the visuals and atmosphere worked well. Frankly, I thought it was more disturbing then the 1953 version.
If only the family weren’t so annoying…
Did you watch it on DVD without having seen it in the theater?
I thought it was pretty good when I saw it in the theater, but I think if I would have seen it for the first time on a small screen it would have been more sucky. The special effects, music etc are pretty cool on the big screen.
I loved the original story and watched the '53 version every chance I got as a kid. When I heard that Spielberg was going to make this movie, I thought WOW! However… I was disappointed in it. A few scenes looked great, but overall, the movie just felt flat. I wasn’t interested in any of the characters.
On the other hand, the version released a few days before Cruise et al. hit the screens was much more engrossing. Asylum Pictures (the studio that brought us such fluff as "Jolly Roger: Massacre at Cutter’s Cove :dubious: ) did a decent job. The special effects were pretty humble and the production has a bunch of technical errors and obvious shortcuts, but the character development was terrific. When characters and dialog catches my interest, I can forgive a cheap production. With J. Thomas Howell, Rhett Giles (both very good) and Gary Busey (his usual insane self).
In fact, I bought the DVD. Think I’ll go watch it now!
The story may not hold up well under scrutiny, but I saw the film in the theater, and for those two hours I wasn’t concerned one whit with continuity errors or plot holes; I was sitting on the edge of my seat, occasionally trying to relax when my wife would whisper, “You’re squeezing my hand way too hard.”
It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a good, taut thriller.
It sucked, it blew, it was inconsistent. The actors were annoying beyond belief. Nothing really made sense. Nothing was explained. It was far worse the the classic 1953 movie except for the special effects that seems almost gratuitous.
Jim
It was far worse except in one critical area, which was the 1953 movie’s major failure: it made the disaster represented by the Martian killing machine seem real. Probably out of a paucity of special effects ability and a paucity of budget, the Martian killing machines never seemed to be that … bad. You never saw them destroying Los Angeles, like you saw them destroying Boston. In the current movie they did get one thing right: when you heard that loud groaning sound the tripods made when they moved, you knew that the shit was about to hit the fan whether you could see the bastards or not. It sent a chill up the spine. Nothing in the 1953 movie at any time or place ever seemed scary in any way.
It’s really too bad they didn’t have characters anyone could give a shit about because they were so fucking annoyingly stupid. Would have been a GREAT movie, under those circumstances.
Well the classic movie also added a gratuitous romance, but at least the characters were likable and intelligent. Cruises character was stupid and I found myself annoyed that his idiot son lived. I really regret having gone to see it.
My take on the movie was pretty much the same as yours, Quartz. See this thread if you want to see how other people felt about this stinker. Okay, it wasn’t the worst movie ever made, but I think the big crime here was how little effort it would have taken to make this a great film - so much potential wasted.
It ain’t a bad movie,
it just don’t click.
Think 1941,
We just rented this movie tonight. I saw about an hour until I got bored (this was my second time).
I found myself really caught up in a lot of what was happening the first time, when I saw it in the theaters, but the second time it was kind of lame. A lot of it is from the ending. Sure, the way the Martians lost was true to the book, but it didn’t work for this movie. I really didn’t care too much since I knew things would be okay anyway this time.