The War of the Farts!

I went to see the bastardisation known as War of the Worlds tonight. Let me just say I am very much disappointed.


The Warmachines/Tripods look almost identical to some designs I threw up on the internet early last year, I wonder what happened??? I mean the weapon design, catch nets and pretty much everything else is almost identical!!!! I would seek out the place I posted them if I could remember where it was and ask the ownoers of the site to check IP addresses for the past year and check them with locations.

That is a minor matter though, here are the pluses and minueses...

Plueses:
1. Action, pretty good most of the time

2. Acting is also on par

3. War Machines, I liked them, but they look alot like the design I have been planning to use for my WotW article for Gothic Earth that I started planning early last year.

4. Heat Ray, nice effect.

5. Ending, same as the book, more or less, at least with the aliens dying and all that :P

6. EMP, I liked it >:)

7. Eating Blood, nice to see it appear in the book, though it was not fully described.

Cons...

1. Acting, to much OVER ACTING!!! That girl got on my nerves and her older brother was a twat throughout the movie, it really grated my teeth.

2. Tom Cruise... he just HAD to have a few token Tom Cruise moments didn't he??? Sheesh, can't he do one movie without acting like the tough guy??? Okay, there was Legend, but we know he was gay in that movie.

3. Typical American Praise... Europe got wiped out without a fight huh??? Japan didn't do well???? Remember that we had already had WWI won before the Yanks entered the war and in WWII they mostly hid in Australia and let the Ozzies do the fighting in the Pacific. The only time the Yanks entered WWII was for the Normandy Beach Landing and a few that volunteered to help the RAF and a few volunteers for North Africa (not official US Forces fought in any of those areas) :P They had to also have the moment with rocketing the warm machine to death... ho-hum. Typical crap that again ruins a movie.

4. Aliens deisngs. Am I the only one to think they looked crap??? The probe looked crap too :-/

5. CGI. I know they only had 3 months to get it done, but it also looks like it. I swear I saw one alien warm machine leg pass through a building and one alien stepped through some scenery, not around or over, but through it!!!!

6. WHERE THE HELL IF THE SECOND HALF OF THE BOOK???? I MEAN IT IS CUT TO ABOUT 20 MINUTES OF MOVIE TIME!!!!

7. Ogilvy... His role was changed from and surviving shellshocked artillaryman to some hot headed psycho wanting to bring the aliens to their knees. Yes his lan was there with the tunnel but was not mentioned. Please, this was one of the most important parts of the bok and should have been mentioned.

8. Alien arrival. Very poor and over-rushed. In the book they take days, first venturing out of the cylinders and not being able to move well, then sending probes, then building the triods and finally ventiuring beyond the landing sites after a number of days. The machines also failed to evolve in the movie like they do in the book.

9. The Ferry, this was supposed to replace the famous Thunderchild sequence??? Please, it was terrible.

10. Heat ray, not powerful enough and it doesn't destroy clothing? weird, you'd think that if it could turn flesh to dust in an instant, clothing would go the same way, laws of physics ignored once again.

In all it was your typical Speilberg ruining a classic tale that would have worked alot better if it had been set in the original era and context. It had some nice moments but mostly it failed to impress. It scared a 7 year old girl a few rows in front of me and some younger teens thought it was all groovy, but not many others seemed to be impressed. I liked how the first war machine we saw rose out of the ground, but then when the heat ray fired, all sense of the moment was lost when it was so dismal. I mean even the 1954 version had more powerful weaponry on the warmachines :P

In all I rate the movie 5 out of 10. Yes Speilberg has made hit xenomorph movies into a trilogy, yes they are the bad guys this time, the certainly look nothing like ET, but this is one movie I really wish the studia had given the Peter Jackson when he tried to get te licence :(