Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

War of the Worlds (2005)

14:11 / 01.07.05

Just got back from the cinema from seeing this. Although big chunks of it are a bit pfft! for the most part it's a quality disaster/invasion movie that puts tosh like Independents Day to shame, no jingosim, air punching nonsense, quite scaled down to a family and it's struggle to survive, and the effects are outstanding. Plus there are enough Spielberg flourishes to make this a cut above the usual summer event movie, Mr Spielberg seems to be having a lot of fun making films at the moment. In fact this summer has been a good one so far.

Any other views?

14:26 / 01.07.05

Well, I'm inclined to agree with the critics who've complained that it runs out of steam around three quarters of the way in, and that the Bad Dad turned Good Dad subplot is rather crap.

That said, I enjoyed the build up, and actually found Dakota Fanning a lot less annoying than I was expecting. I thought they did a reasonable job of undermining the cute Hollywood kid stereotype - they weren't entirely successful, mind.

Overall it seemed to suffer from the usual Spielbergian problem: tonal imbalance - although to lesser extent than some of his other recent offerings.

The tripods were ace, however.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

14:37 / 01.07.05

Oh no, she's the annoying little girl from 'Taken' isn't she? (Although not quite as annoying as the girl from 'The 4400')

15:19 / 01.07.05

SPOILERS
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I thought this movie was just alright... after the initial awe had faded it was all pretty boring. I was never really afraid or cared for these characters and quite frankly I found the aliens kind of cute and not very menacing... I think the clincher was that the son survives (after we've all come to terms with his "death")! I don't mind Ray and his daughter surviving.... but the son? The ex? The ex's husband and parents? What a cop out. It should've ended with Ray and his Daughter left alone on a broken world and he's really going to have to be a good father (as it is now... you know he's going to dump them with the ex again.)

Also, why didn’t the aliens just colonize the world a million years ago when they came to hide their ships for the invasion? It seems kind of retarded that they waited and watched until we were pretty far advanced technologically and a threat to call this place home.

17:39 / 01.07.05

SPOIL SPOIL SPOIL

yeah

i totally agree, everyone else should have totally died. Especially " Tim". That guy was a punk.

That plane that crashed was pretty cool.

18:19 / 01.07.05

THis has inflight movie written all over it.

21:02 / 01.07.05

I don't mind Ray and his daughter surviving.... but the son? The ex? The ex's husband and parents? What a cop out.

I saw it coming. When we didn't actually see the son die, I knew he'd be back for the inevitable Spielbergian cheese-out moment. The man just flat-out lacks the nerve the follow his premises to their logical conclusions.

I actually almost left midway through -- not that it was bad, strictly speaking, just kinda boring. It was nearly plotless, I didn't really care what happened to any of the uniformly unlikeable characters/cyphers, the aliens looked like they could've come from any number of other movies, blah blah blah. Thirty minutes in I felt like I was trapped in every disaster/alien invasion flick I've ever seen. It didn't help that the characters were written completely unbelievably -- Tom and the kids flee to the stepfather's house, find the power is miraculously still on, and don't turn on the television?

The ending didn't work either, particularly [SPOILERS FOLLOW] in light of Spielberg's revisions to the premise. The aliens came here in some distant past era and buried the tripods for later use, yet somehow didn't figure out back then that Earth's microbial life is deadly to them? For that matter, is it really all that plausible that a members of a culture at that tech level wouldn't have thought to test the air before exposing themselves to it? Sure, the idea worked ok in the novel, written a century ago, when microbiology was poorly understood at best, but it really doesn't hold up now.

21:21 / 01.07.05

The ending was incredibly weak, and as I said there were some terribly pfft moments, but there were some incredible moments - the car drive out of the city, the camera swooping in and around it for one, the whole first sight of the tripods. Plus it played on a big fear of mine for the end of the first third, namely mob rule and mass hysteria. Made me very tense anyway.

21:37 / 01.07.05

So what did people thing about the insularity that is the heart of the film? The flags, the fear of Europe, the dislike of hummus?

01:13 / 02.07.05

... no jingosim, air punching nonsense, quite scaled down to a family and it's struggle to survive

But isn't that what every American disaster movie's about? Circling the wagons to protect the cosy nucular family from the threat of the foreign Other?

04:14 / 02.07.05

I thought the mob car-jacking scene was the best in the film. It was fucking horrible to watch.

06:40 / 02.07.05

Ganesh, maybe, but most feel like a pro-american advert while the rest of the world twiddles it's thumbs (Armagedon, ID4 etc) where as this was about a man protecting his children anyway possible - there were little snippets of moments about the rest of the world, but the main character ignored these and didn't buy into them. It was more about self preservation (from the first scene, where he refuses to work the extra shift onwards) whereas I feel most other disaster/sci-fi films are about preservation of the state or status quo. The films flawed and asks for several jumps of belief suspention beyond the obvious one of aliens attacking, but I thought as a disaster movie it was much better than most others (except maybe the Posidon Adventure!).

09:34 / 02.07.05

The fear of Europe? Whilst I'm inclined to agree with Ganesh - films like WotW can't avoid waving the American flag - I'm not sure what you're talking about. The film actively mocks that kind of mentality with the "is it terrorists? Is it Europeans ?" line. It works as comedy because it's an utterly absurd thing to say.

And as for Hummus. Nnnnyeah, I know what you mean, but I read that as an attempt to undermine the wise child uber-annoying stereotype that Dakota Fanning could have easily become.

The aliens were really rubbish.
Oh, and that car jacking scene was very horrible.

20:23 / 03.07.05

Europeans, hummus, I just took that as a statement on American insularity.
The film is definitely not defending the father's ignorance at "healthy" food stuffs, the "Is it Europe?" joke was played perfectly as a joke, relying heavily on the sort of paranoia that exists in the states for the past few years and just how revealing that can be in extreme times.

I thought all of the mob rule parts were very anti-humanist. The film is right, we won't strive to help each other we'll fight for the one working car to get us the hell out of here. Spielberg schmaltz came back in full force as the son climbed up the side of the boat to pull people up, thereby showing how humanity SHOULD react.

In a way I think it's good that he survives, it was inevitable after all. I was more suprised that the final scene was one of such tranquility... Boston got attacked right? So why is the street the grandparents lived on totally pristine?

Considering this is Spielberg x Cruise it could have been much much worse. Cruise's presence did ruin all of the heavily emotional moments for me though. I kept picturing him professing his love for Katie Holmes instead.

yawn - thing's buddy

10:42 / 05.07.05

just before the attack there was a crescent mooon in the sky.

the revealing of the alien threat involved the sybolic destruction of a church.

hummus was slagged.

tripods had arabesque curves.

boboss first post spot on. as with alex thoth.

why oh why oh why the 'diehard sentiment-stlye' ending?

theorizing: aliens were here for sport, not colonisation. s'only logical explanation for technology and attitide.

also final point: Was umore terrifying when we did not know what the aliens looked like.

showing us them, made it all a bit rubbish.

13:13 / 05.07.05

Stephen King said, long ago, that at some point you have to show the monster and it's gonna be a letdown. "A 10-foot monster with tentacles? What a relief...I was expecting a 50-foot monster and the tentacles to have toothy suckers at the ends!"

I haven't seen the movie yet but maybe I will. I'm betting Tim Robbins' character got zapped, because I gather he stands in for the crazy preacher in Wells' book (and the Jeff Lynne rock opera). That one ranted about the attack being God's judgment on a wicked world, then went out to face the aliens armed only with a cross, and got zapped.

If Robbins does get zapped, it's Spielberg's judgment for Tim obliquely bad-mouthing the US occupation of Iraq. We can't zap any crazy ranting preachers; it would be too fitting an end for Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell (I forget which), who said 9/11 was because America turned away from God.

I think the 1960 version simply left it out. It's been awhile since I saw it.

13:23 / 05.07.05

And, oh Jesus, I'll take a Martian invasion over BBC's journalistic blowjob last night of Tom Cruise, starring Jonathan Ross. It was deftly edited to make Timothy Spall and Billy Connolly appear to rebut all the stories about Tom being a dictatorial Scientology creep. You know, so people would watch that movie and see Tom as just a protective dad, like in that movie out now, by sheer coincidence.

Ross lobbed a few softballs, because the audience expected that much at least, but expressly so that Tom could bat them away. Yes, he's a clamhead, but really a regular guy with a wacky sense of humor.

This makes up for Bashir and Jackson I guess.

I'll go see the movie and walk out before the last 10 minutes so it will have happy ending.

ULLA!!!!!

13:52 / 05.07.05

>>>just before the attack there was a crescent mooon in the sky.<<<

I think that might be reaching. Definitely there are clear and deliberate references to terrorism and attack from scary foreign places, but the moon thing seems like a bit of a stretch.

14:51 / 05.07.05

[Stroppy SPOILER rant alert]

Simplist: I don't mind Ray and his daughter surviving.... but the son? The ex? The ex's husband and parents? What a cop out.

So all the people who scrolled down to avoid the two posts that said SPOILERS, SPOIL, SPOIL, SPOIL, were then immediately faced with your quoted and bolded bits of their spoiler text.

Does no-one read the sodding spoilers thread? Grey Area even started a lovely thread about how to 'colour' out spoiler text. Not bold it just to make sure everyone reads it. See how difficult it is to ignore it?

It's totally unfair on the people like me, who would maybe choose to read this thread to find out what people think about a film before they spend money on seeing it, but don't want to be told what fucking happens in it.

FFS, it's not string theory.

Cheers for that.

[End stroppy SPOILER rant]

15:58 / 05.07.05

>>>It's totally unfair on the people like me, who would maybe choose to read this thread to find out what people think about a film before they spend money on seeing it, but don't want to be told what fucking happens in it.<<<

But surely you must also be aware that choosing to read a thread about a film in wide release, written by people who have already seen it and are discussing the story, means that you are very likely to wander into a minefield of spoilers. If I genuinely don't want to know anything about a film then I steer entirely clear of anything that might possibly ruin it for me, and if I feel that strongly about it to avoid reading or seeing anything in advance then it's pretty obvious that I intend on seeing it anyway, regardless of what others think of it. You rolls the dice, you take your chances.

I had one of the plot points in Batman Begins wrecked for me in advance because I read a talkback thread on AICN - and at first I was really pissed, but then I took a step back and realized that it was my own fault.

I hate having to put spoiler warnings. I do it out of courtesy but I think it's stupid.

16:04 / 05.07.05

Oh, and a good spoiler-free way of aiding decision as to whether a movie is worth your time is to head over to Rotten Tomatoes. If you're unfamiliar, it's a site that collates all the print and web reviews of films and assigns a rating based on the percentage of positive reviews. There are single-line spoiler-free excerpts from all of the reviews and you have the option of reading each in full. Seeing the rating and scanning the excerpts is usually a pretty handy resource for determining the consensus of opinion...

17:10 / 05.07.05

If a board has agreed that people will put spoiler warnings in, then that is what people should do. It doesn't matter whether you think they are stupid, as a board we have made (or I thought we had made) a decision to use spoiler warnings for people who still want to read the other posts which aren't spoilers in a thread.

We manage it in other theads.

It's really the priniciple of the thing. It's sloppy posting, lack of care for board etiquette, and lack of respect for other board users.

17:14 / 05.07.05

I did say that i put spoiler warnings in my posts - and I do - out of courtesy.

I just don't necessarily think I should HAVE to.

But I do it, so relax.

17:21 / 05.07.05

I hope that wasn’t meant for me cause I did put a spoiler warning and left enough space so wandering eyes don’t inadvertently read the post… I have no control over people quoting my posts. Sorry the film was ruined for you, though.

17:30 / 05.07.05

Look, just to clarify - it's not the spoilers, it's the warnings (or lack of them).

I actually came to this thread to see whether there were any ratings comments. It's a 12A and I'm interested in what age child should be allowed to go. It's the kind of thing I would trust opinion on here, but not necessarily elsewhere.

I know you put a spoiler warning in Alex, and that's totally cool, it's what we agreed as a board.

I expect I sound grumpy and itching for a spoiler fight, but I'm not. I just hate it when something gets decided and it takes everyone ages and a lot of discussion and then it just gets ignored.

17:39 / 05.07.05

>>>Look, just to clarify - it's not the spoilers, it's the warnings (or lack of them)<<<

I understand that.

Alright, an example. There's a thread on this board called something like "Fuck the Naysayers, the Return of 24." I love 24, it's one of my favourite television series. However, I don't watch it when broadcast on tv, preferring instead to watch the dvd box sets when released, so since I see it much later than most people I have to really avoid hearing anything about it. I really enjoy the show and its constant surprises and plot twists, and so the best way to experience it is to go in completely "clean" with no advance knowledge.

Hence, I have never, ever clicked on that thread. Maybe I'll go back and read it when the series is finished but until then, nope, won't read it, because I know that despite whatever spoiler warnings or whatever I just MAY have something ruined for me.

Now, if someone posted some massive plot spoiler for 24 in THIS thread on War of the Worlds, THEN I'd be pissed, because it would be in a spot where I would least expect 24 spoilers. But if you come in here and have something spoiled for War of the Worlds, its kind of your own fault. You can't play Russian Roulette, put the gun to your head and pull the trigger, and be surprised if a bullet comes out.

I know the board has agreed to the use of spoiler warnings, and I go along with it, but I think it's kind of silly. If you don't want to know, don't read. Simple as that.

Deep down, you know it's true.

18:01 / 05.07.05

I can understand if the thread was created BEFORE the film was out on general release but unfortunately it wasn't. From the off this thread was about people discussing the film now that it is out. There really should be something about spoilers in the summary but there isn't.

As for your question about suitability, why not ignore all the text and ask the question? It's not as though there are pages and pages of replies which might include the answer somewhere...
As for your question it's a bit dark in places but in the cinema I was at there were PLENTY of younger children watching the film and no obvious crying or parents removing them for their own piece of mind.

For my part I apologise for not putting in spoiler tags, I was just so excited that Barbelith had propped itself back up again.

18:23 / 05.07.05

I've just asked for a spoiler notice to be put in.

I get the spoiler warning thing, I really do, and think that I follow it pretty well.

On a personal level, spoilers don't generally bother me, especially in film, as I've always been more interested in how a story is told, rather than the story itself - plus I've never really forgiven the Terminator 2 trailer cutter for (SPOILER) making it clear that Arnie is a good guy in the film, when the way that the film is edited and the opening played it is so clear that a big part of the script was the ambiguity of this.

Anyway, I don't mind, but know others do, therefore don't mind spoiler warnings, but also go by the rule of not reading about something if I don't want to know about it.

As for the content for kids, I'd say it's quite a harsh film for the very young, and also quite distressing (the crowd scene, plus Dakota spends a chunk early in the film in near panic and distress).

18:59 / 05.07.05

Scarier than Batman Begins?

As for your question about suitability, why not ignore all the text and ask the question? It's not as though there are pages and pages of replies which might include the answer somewhere...

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I dare you to say that in front of Haus.

Keith, like a scientist

19:05 / 05.07.05

i really liked the treatment of the Tripods. i thought they were very "real" looking.

and the movie rules simply because my friend and I can tell his girlfriend to "put up the arms" every time she starts freaking out about something (which is often).

but movie as a whole: it's good solid action fun, but no real substance or narrative. eh.

19:22 / 05.07.05

well, Batman begins is scary in a visible monster attacking you kind of way, where as this is just unsettling in many scenes - there are moments of destruction which are fairly action packed, but there is also a disaster element about it, with masses of people panicing, which could upset kids as there is no real monster just fear from lots of people.

02:50 / 06.07.05

Personally I think Batman Begins is scarier... but I wouldn't take a kid under ten to see WOTW. Though, I guess it depends on the kid.

Scrubb is on a downward spiral

01:15 / 07.07.05

Aaanyway...

So I didn't really see the whole pro-America/anti-restoftheworld slant that other people are mentioning; as Benny says, I think it's more about *personal* survival in the face of overwhelming and fucking terrifying odds. A few points on that:

* I took that "hummous thing" to be more of a statement about the class divide between Ray and his ex-wife. She's a rich girl, brought up in a huge house in Boston with well-dressed parents; he's a rough'n'tumble New Jersey dock worker who'd rather be eating pizza than some weird shit from the health-food store.
* There's a bit in one of the crowd scenes where one couple are saying how America got it worse and Europe hasn't even been touched, and another couple saying that Europe's been wiped out - no-one really knows what's going on, and it's not an expressly anti-US attack.
* The Tim Robbins character makes the point about the tripods collapsing in Japan - the attacks are also *stopping* elsewhere whilst the US is still under siege.

yawn - thing's buddy

12:34 / 07.07.05

lest anyone think i was serious re: crescent moon in sky, as a result of cameron stewart's response ('stretching it'), i shall clearly state I was joking. (for jaweh's sake, i even said, 'hummus was slagged' - i thought that might have flagged up the humour . . .)

And cock to whoever thinks reading this thread reveals the ending of War of the worlds.

surely you know what happens?

duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

D Terminator XXXIII

15:21 / 18.07.05

Exactly. The opening shot of the bacteria made me whisper to myself: "Please, don't let the fucking bacteria be the deus ex machina" again and again until I put myself into a trance.

Dissatisfied of having missed it, I went to see it again.

I think Spielberg's best work have darker elements to them. Unfortunately, it seems as if he has a compulsion to negate those brilliant pieces by introducing ill advised mushy sentimentality. Cases in point:

Minority Report - Up until the stupid Leo Crow twist, this movie had it all. It was fun, dark, unsettling, taut, demanding, beautiful. Too bad.

A.I - Up until the stupid 3000 years later twist, this movie had many things going for it. It was fun, dark, unsettling, taut, demanding, beautiful. Too bad.

Saving Private Ryan - Until the 23 minutes of mayhem ran out of steam, and were replaced with stupid, stupid soldier porn, this movie was perfect. Too bad.

It's not too surprising WOTW should follow something resembling this path. Up until the stupid twist with the son (which carries itself to the ending), this movie definetely rocked. Too bad. Maybe he should do a 'Psycho' next.