“ … The movie's not-so-hidden subtext involves the way Ray blossoms into a real father in the face of incredible danger and a balky teenage son. I leave it to you to decide whether destruction of much of the Eastern Seaboard might be too high a price for civilization to pay for one man’s maturity.”
That read, I caught ‘War of the Worlds’ with a buddy tonight. Steven Spielberg throws a lot of punches, but doesn’t deliver a knockout. … The plot thickens (and takes your breath at times) as Tom Cruise’s character runs through a mess of people being sizzled to ashes and then leads his two children through mobs in a race to escape the alien creatures.
That’s pretty much where the movie ends. What follows is an odd farmhouse scene with Tim Robbins that falls flat and only stalls the climax, which is jammed together in an ending that never really explains itself.
It also leaves us all asking where the heck did Robbie come from?
The only true positives out of this movie are, of course, the special effects and gut-wrenching 9/11-like destruction and Dakota (Can you believe she’s only a kid!) Fanning’s mostly believable performance.
But this movie, while worth seeing for the decent summer blockbuster it will be, is no ‘Independence Day.’ Instead, Speilberg reuses too many of his old tricks from ‘Jurassic Park’ and runs this one into the ground faster than ‘AI.’
2 ½ out of 5 stars.
Here’s some reviews that wrote it better than I could have …
From the Rocky Mountain News, By Robert Denerttein
From the Associated Press, By David Germain
There's a whole page of reviews here!
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