++
Selfish dad (Tom Cruise) gets weekend custody of his rebellious teenage son (Justin Chatwin) and precocious ten-year-old daughter (Dakota Fanning), then gets a crash course in fatherly responsibility after Martians invade the Earth, killing or consuming everyone in sight. "Based on" -- which is to say suggested or inspired by -- H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds. This time, the Martians have hidden their gigantic tripedal fighting machines underground for thousands of years, evidently in patient expectation of the day when their preferred food -- mankind -- will have topped 6.5 billion units. (Had 6 billion been enough, they would have invaded in 1999.) The special effects are state-of-the-art, and the film has its moments, but any story that requires worldwide Armageddon to teach one dad the value of raising kids is not a strong one. And Spielberg, forgetting the lesson he should have learned from Jaws, infallibly substitutes action when dialogue would have served him better. With an even more pronounced sense of anticlimax at the end than the Byron Haskin version from 1953, and that because the screenwriters failed to give Wells the credit he deserved as a writer: while Wells wrote a realistic science-based ending to match his semi-historical novel, Josh Friedman and David Koepp simply tack the same ending on to their much narrower tale of personal redemption.
Selfish dad (Tom Cruise) gets weekend custody of his rebellious teenage son (Justin Chatwin) and precocious ten-year-old daughter (Dakota Fanning), then gets a crash course in fatherly responsibility after Martians invade the Earth, killing or consuming everyone in sight. "Based on" -- which is to say suggested or inspired by -- H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds. This time, the Martians have hidden their gigantic tripedal fighting machines underground for thousands of years, evidently in patient expectation of the day when their preferred food -- mankind -- will have topped 6.5 billion units. (Had 6 billion been enough, they would have invaded in 1999.) The special effects are state-of-the-art, and the film has its moments, but any story that requires worldwide Armageddon to teach one dad the value of raising kids is not a strong one. And Spielberg, forgetting the lesson he should have learned from Jaws, infallibly substitutes action when dialogue would have served him better. With an even more pronounced sense of anticlimax at the end than the Byron Haskin version from 1953, and that because the screenwriters failed to give Wells the credit he deserved as a writer: while Wells wrote a realistic science-based ending to match his semi-historical novel, Josh Friedman and David Koepp simply tack the same ending on to their much narrower tale of personal redemption.
RSS Feed
