War of the Worlds

Went to see 'War of the Worlds' on Friday with Kris. Not bad, but not the best movie ever, either; there's a (pretty negative) review over on the IMDb, and I agree with most of it (except for the fact that I did enjoy the movie, contrary to that person). But really, there are just way too many loose ends and unlikely things in this thing. Characters that are introduced for just a few minutes and then disappear, contributing exactly nothing to the story; a plane that crashes on a house, destroying the entire neighbourhood except for the getaway car which is parked right in the middle of that neighbourhood and conveniently doesn't even have a scratch; those are just two examples. Retro-SF doesn't appear to be Spielberg's thing.

For those of you who've never heard of this story: War of the Worlds is a novel written by H.G. Wells some 80-90-ish year ago, and was also adapted for radio once, although I'm not sure whether the novel or the radio adaption was written first. Anyhow, the radio adaptation was famous in that it was written such that it contained news flashes and so on, making it sound as if it was happening for real. The result was that people would go on the street, panicking, because the Earth was being attacked by aliens... or so they thought. In the end, the police had to go to the studio and shut down the program.

Considering the age of the story is important when thinking of some choices that were made—such as the idea that hundreds of the alien's "tripods" were buried under the ground for millions of years without us detecting them, or the way in which the aliens were eventually defeated (no, I won't tell you what that is ;-P ).

All that being said, it's still a nice movie; the special effects are quite nice, and the story is still great, even if Spielberg didn't do a great job; that probably tells me I should go and read the original WotW instead, though.