MovieChat Forums > War of the Worlds (2005) Discussion > Watched again. Very disappointing!

Watched again. Very disappointing!

posted 8 years ago by BrickNash
2 replies | jump to latest

I watched this again today after a few years. I used to enjoy the film for what it was and it always seemed to leave me satisfied.

I have to say I was incredibly disappointed and in my opinion the film has not aged well at all.

The characters are as bland as bland can be with no chemistry whatsoever and everything just looks so sterile and boring from the flat locations to the drab and horrible colour grading to the really, REALLY obvious sets and sound stages doubling for outside shots.

Weird character flips like the son (can't remember his name he was so bland) running off to fight the aliens with no gun or training and Tom Cruse actually letting him was just nonsense. Tim Robbins was also horribly underused with a really random character.

The aliens seem to have a bit of a scattered goal too. One minute they are just randomly killing people with clumsy lasers and then next they are pinning people to the ground and sucking the guts out and then some time after they are harvesting them. It's all so crazily unfocused it's stupid.

The VFX are looking very dated as well with some of the obvious CGI almost looking TV quality. Of course FX dating isn't a reason to take points away from a film but Independence Day looked better than this and it was released a full 9 years earlier.

Plus points were that some shots looked really good and gave a tremendous sense of scale which was really cool and I thought Dakota Fanning probably gave the best performance out the lot of them.

I think what bothers me the most is the same thing that bothered me at the time. We've so far had two big screen versions of War Of The Worlds and both have dumped the original story in favour of a modern day setting in America.

The original story set in Victorian London would have been FAR more interesting as we've seen a million sci-fi alien invasion films set in America plus the context of the aliens in a non-technological era is an infinitely more interesting one than just following present day 'Joe Forgettable' around for a couple of hours.

In my view, some occasional Spielberg sheen can't save what is a pretty boring film and a waste of a good opportunity.

[–] SinisterCreep 8 years ago

Couldn't agree more. mind you I didn't like it when it came out either. I hope the ITV version with Peter Harness gets made.

Walking on water is like finding a non fake female profile on a dating site...a miracle!

[–] AlexTheGreyWolf 8 years ago

I completely disagree. Watched it again today and it's just as awesome as when I first watched it.

Ray only let Robbie go because a crazy lady was trying to kidnap Rachel. As for the aliens there's so many humans that they're not worried about killing a few, they'd still have enough humans to terraform the planet. As for the harvesting well they already had that area covered with blood so they were probably gathering people to move to another location to do the same there.

Robbie wanting to fight back against the aliens wasn't weird. Remember earlier when Ray stopped the car so Rachel could use the bathroom, humvees with soldiers passed by and Robbie wanted to join them. It's a natural reaction for a teenage male to want to fight back against impossible odds when they're shocked.

As for the VFX they still look great to me.