Filmmaker

With all due respect, I think you're confusing plot holes with David Koepp/H.G. Wells respecting your intelligence enough for you to fill some of the blanks in as you see fit. A plot hole is, for example, establishing that a character is allergic to peanuts, then having him eat peanut butter without il effect later on. Your issues are just open-ended curiosities.

As has been mentioned umpteen times, this was inherent in the plot of the original novel, and the first filmed version. If you take issue with it, the ultimate blame lies with H.G. Wells, not Spielberg or Koepp. I simply cannot grasp why this issue has not prevented the novel from being considered an unparalleled sci-fi classic, and no one derided the plot device in the '50s film, but now, because Spielberg is attached to the story, everyone is in attack mode.



I don't know, and I won't presume for you, but really, are you lambasting films that don't fill in every nook and cranny for you? That actually have a sense of nuance and mystery?

Oh, I see--you wanted INDEPENDENCE DAY 2.

Josh Z

Respecting our intelligence?! Are you joking?! Not thinking through the logical implications of the plot they've written is not respecting anyone's intelligence. Quite the opposite, actually.

You know what, the ending might have worked if not for the scene in the basement where the aliens prance around naked, completely unprotected from the elements, to look at old photos. If they had just stayed in their war machines and been infected anyway (from all the humans they were grinding to pulp), it would have been fine. The addition of that scene, however, shows us that these aliens are just frickin' morons.

Where are you getting this stuff? For the record, I hated Independence Day for the same reasons I didn't like this one, because it was utterly mindless. What I wanted from War of the Worlds was a movie that wouldn't be totally idiotic, whose writers would put more than 5 minutes of thought into the story they'd written. Unfortunately, that isn't what we got.

Filmmaker

From you--if you hated the film because it concentrated on the microcosm of the attack, rather than the macrocosm, then it sounds like you just wanted a replay of INDEPENDENCE DAY.

None of this addresses why you're holding Koepp/Spielberg accountable for the perceived sins of H. G. Wells; frankly, it just sounds like anti-Spielberg sour grapes to me. None of your gripes stopped the original novel from being considered a sci-fi classic, nor the original film. I fail to see how or why they would do so now.

Josh Z

Perhaps if you'd bother to actually read all of what I've written, rather than just one sentence, it might be clearer to you. Koepp and Spielberg didn't just copy Wells' novel. They took one solitary element of the novel and placed it into a new context where it just doesn't work, and failed to justify it in any logical way.

This isn't anti-Spielberg sour grapes. I have great respect for Spielberg as a technician of amazing visuals. Unfortunately, he's a terribly sloppy storyteller who has been getting worse and worse with each new movie he's made over the past decade or so.

Filmmaker

Trust me, I read it in full--I never pass up good comedy.

Funny, other than the requisite dialogue changes necessary for modernizing the story, a location shift to better entice the "home" audience, a shift in family dynamics from the book's husband/wife to father/children and a slight spin on how the tripods initiate their invasion, I'd say the film was nearly a play-by-play remake of the novel--far from one that only retained "one solitary element" (which, by the way, in the banquet of your complaints, what "one solitary element" are you now prepared to focus your ire on?), and FAR closer to the original text than the 1953 film that receives only affection from the cineaste community.

I still say it sounds like sour grapes because your complaints narrow down to either it wasn't close enough to the original text (in which case, you should be exalting Spielberg's version as, at least, a great improvement over the 1953 film) or it was too close (in which case, you should direct your ire to Wells, not Spielberg or Koepp). So far, I don't see any complaints you are making that are not better directed at a different source except, perhaps, some of your complaints about plot vaguaries which, again, I maintain is sad to see--it reads as Josh Z Needs Everything Spelled Out For Him In 6-Foot Tall Neon Letters, Hollywood.

Adam Tyner

This is getting a little nasty. Try to tone down the insults.

dadaluholla

I thought War of the Worlds (2005) was pretty entertaining except for the ending.

It's just a movie. Ehhh?

al_bundy

in the book didn't Wells have the aliens come via meteors or what looked like meteors? I didn't get the reason for sending the machines in millions of years before the aliens arrived.

And why does everyone always want to make a movie with stupid aliens that can't talk, don't wear clothes and don't seem to use their limbs to make things? Aren't the basic precursors to modern technology the ability to communicate and to manipulate objects with your limbs?

mbs

My guess was that they did this on many planets as a type of "backup" plan. Perhaps they were worried about the end of their planet (star going supernova, perhaps) and could predict this 1 million years ago. Thus, they placed machines on many planets. In the end, they chose to attack Earth, maybe it seemed better suited than the others. Perhaps after the movie ends and their advances foiled on earth, they go attack another planet they had previously seeded.

Just my best guess for an explanation...

TimeandTide

Everyone knows that aliens are so advanced on the evolutionary scale that they a.) communicate telepathically, b.) have developed Goretex-like hides and c.) enslave opposable-thumbed humans to make all of their stuff.

Regarding the film, which I saw for the first time this weekend, I felt the whole "daddy issues" bit was a weak attempt to inject some melodrama into what really was just a better shot and more graphic Independence Day. Was seriously let down by the abrupt ending but if Spielberg did indeed remain true to the source material, then no fault of his.

Richard Malloy

I have my issues with the film, particularly Tim Robbins' poor performance (uncharacteristic, but not without precedent) and the survival of the son (who's death would otherwise be one of the more poignant aspects). And I cannot buy Tom Cruise's middle-America cheesiness and shit-eating grin cast in the role of a blue collar Brooklyn guy. But I loved the way the extermination took place with ease and grim finality, the unceasing and unsparing destruction of everything in the paths of the tripods, the horrific images of people's insides being sucked out to (nourish?) the transformed ecosystem, and the easy brutality of humans in distress, turning on one another for the slightest perceived advantage. There were enough morbid, true elements to counterbalance the inevitable cheese, and Spielberg continues to get away with the most extreme PG-13 content.

I love the ending, always have loved the ending, even given the notion that a highly evolved alien race should probably understand such microbal dangers. It's an elegant critique of anthrocentrism, a perfect little twist that undermines the presumption that homo sapiens are somehow more significant than the rest of the fauna and flora of the planet, that we are the planet's sole masters and defenders. So, the humans despair that the war is essentially lost and all but line up for the inevitable slaughter, only to discover that the truly dominant and enduring species on this planet had been quietly waging a most effective if purely instinctive war against the intruders all along. Flashing back to the opening pullback shot, from the micro- to the macro-scopic, and the realization that our hubris was perhaps only exceeded by that of the aliens.

Not a great film, but a very good one I thought.

al_bundy

the whole terraforming thing was a nice add on

from what i remember HG Wells said the only thing they had was a death ray laser type thing and all they did was destroy with it. The whole thing of taking people and using them as some kind of terraform feeder material was kind of spooky.

DVD King

I tend to agree with Filmmaker -- for all the complaints about plot holes, one aspect that shouldn't be forgotten is that the story is told in first person. I don't understand how tom cruise is supposed to get in a conversation, or come across some alien plans that make it apparent as to how and why they left their tripods in the earth for millions of years. If aliens are attacking the planet, I think that some of the details can be left to speculation.

I thought it was a decent movie, not excellent. I did like what Savant had to say about it being more of a modest update of a genre-classic. I also don't agree with Gary Tooze's extreme view, Speilberg is too smart a filmmaker to make a straight-up, mindless exploitation film.

Josh Z

I don't need everything spelled out for me, but if the Filmmakers are going to include illogical and patently ridiculous plot elements in their movie they need some sort of justification for them. This movie offered no justification, because Spielberg and Koepp can't be bothered to spend any time on little things like logic or plausibility when they could be zapping more people into dust and setting trains on fire. Who needs to waste time on a decent script when you can stage cool set-pieces like those?

Richard makes a good case for the elegance of Wells' ending, but the movie has no such elegance. The subtext of humanity's insignificance compared to micro-organisms is almost completely absent in the movie. The movie just inspires reactions of: "Ha ha, those aliens sure are dumbasses!!"

The real reason for this is that Spielberg didn't want his movie compared to Independence Day or to hear the inevitable "Been there, done that" complaints if he staged a traditional aliens-descend-from-the-sky invasion. So instead he had the aliens come up from the ground, which is a novel and "cool" idea, even if it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense.

You have to ask why Spielberg chose to stage the story as a microcosm. He could have chosen to develop an interesting storyline about why things were happening the way they did, but it's much easier instead to ignore all that stuff and tell the story from an "average joe" perspective instead, so that we can get all weepy when he and his cute-as-a-button precocious daughter are put in harms way. The child-in-danger plot conceit is lazy, and Spielberg relies on it way too much in his movies.

DVD King

If I get what you're implying, I don't think the details of the plot had anything to do with his decision for a first person account, that was probably what attracted him to the job to begin with. His films all tend to concentrate on a few center characters, or a family, rather than the going-ons around them. So at least that omits him from being lazy and not filling in the blanks.

I liked the microcosm aspect, if he would have expanded it could have started to resemble independence day. As overused as the family-in-danger plot is, there's no doubt it's effective. I thought it was one of the most suspenseful movies to come out of hollywood in awhile, of what i've cared to watch.

Filmmaker

As has already been noted, it would have taken the most extreme and unlikely contortions of plotting to have this first-person type of narrative fill in every little mystery of the nature of the invasion (did you know exactly what happened on 9/11 and how and why? Did the people at Ground Zero?). You can hem and haw all you want but the fact is, you're still asking for Spielberg to spoon feed you information that, were Tom Cruise's character and situation real, he would have NEVER discovered on his own. Just fess up to it, man.

I'm now convinced you've never read the novel. The film incorporates the very TEXT that was in the novel--neither does a better or more complete job than the other for conveying "elegance" in its resolution.

mbs offered a pretty compelling explanation--are you too prideful to admit such? Would it have the unfortunate effect of supporting my argument that there is value in Spielberg leaving some mystery for the audience?

And here lies more proof that you've never read the original novel. This is where my ire comes from--you continue to insist (with the solitary exception of the underground tripods, which I've defended above) on holding Spielberg accountable for "sins" committed by Well's original novel AND the 1953 film. If you don't like the film, fine, but lay blame where it truly lies--on the source material from the outset. And if you haven't read the book and haven't seen the '50s film (which seems to be the case in both respects), then I humbly request you respect Spielberg enough, since you're such a self-professed fan, to check those out before you hold him accountable for no greater crime then remaining as true as a modernized retelling can be to the original source material. If you continue to steadfastly refuse to do so, then I will continue to call a sour-grapes-on-Spielberg spade a sour-grapes-on-Spielberg spade.

al_bundy

Spielberg is the kind of storyteller that likes to hone in on an individual story in the context of a larger event.

D-Day, he tells the story of a small unit searching for one person and the movie is more about the interactions of the unit members and their reactions in a stressful environment than how D-Day happened and what Rommell or some other general did. Everyone knows what happened, but he likes the individual story.

Schindler's List. Everyone knows about the holocaust, but he concentrated on a few people and how they survived it.

Band of Brothers. Everyone knows how the allies won the war in europe. He tells the story of a group of soldiers and their perspective. In The Battle of the Bulge he didn't show any tank battles, but instead how the soldiers lived in their little part of the battlefield holding off the germans.

War of the Worlds. Everyone knows the basic story and ID4 covered it from the top down already. Spielberg wanted to tell it from an individual's perspective which was pretty good in spite of my opinion of the film as a whole. In spite of what I think of some things being dumb like buried tripods, the movie didn't need to explain how or why the aliens attacked except for some rumors here and there that a normal person would pick up while fleeing from the aliens.

It's like when you watch the news or read the newspaper. The reporters always mention one or two people and what happened to them to make you think that this is happenening everywhere but to give the story a personal perspective.

eXcentris

I agree. The problem here is that the father/kids relationship is too thin to carry a whole film. Also, I don't particularly like Cruise but in this case he din't make or break the film. The two kids however were annoying. And that scene in the basement just seemed to me to have been thrown in there as a "oh geez we better see them interacting with someone, preferably a lunatic". That whole bit seemed out of place.

Filmmaker

But...it's...in...the...book.

al_bundy

i thought the basement scene was dumb. The aliens have all this technology to travel the stars, but they can't detect people hiding out in a basement with simple sensors?

maingon

I loved the movie and I thought the acting was terrific espeically from Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning, she really was fantastic, Dont know any young kids and can act as good as her

eXcentris

So...what...? I haven't read the book, I don't care bout the book, I'm not reading a book, I'm watching a movie. If Speilberg wanted to remain faithful to the book, it was his job to make the material works on screen. Dismissing every criticism of the film with "but it's in the book!" just doesn't cut it.

chipmac

I watched this again last night with my 15 year old son. He's read the book and has seen the 1953 version while I did neither. At the end he immediately knew who would show up and how it was ending. Since I've read a fair amount about the book and earlier movie and how they were slightly different from this version I asked him how he knew. His response was that it just made sense to end that way if they were following the original story line. So even if the characters are different it seemed to follow close enough for him to extrapolate the ending in this adaptation.

ItsGreekToMe

Wait a minute. HOLD IT! I've got to say ONE thing before this goes ANY further!






The horror in this film pales in comparison to the horror of PLAYING CRIBBAGE!


Seriously, I picked up the 2-disc set as a blind buy and watched on Thanksgiving with the family and I was not disapointed. A very entertaining film! I pretty much agreed with JM1's review.

ItsGreekToMe

I can think of a certain shark that would disagree with that.