The Monk saw War of the Worlds this past Saturday with a buddy of his b/c the Monkette2B is a screed-waiting-to-happen every time the name "Tom Cruise" is mentioned ("I'm not giving a DIME to that son of a . . . he's never been pregnant, how can he have the GALL to say Brooke Shields . . ." -- you see where this goes). The Monk is essentially an early adopter for movies that look like they don't suck (which should include King Kong this December).
Anyway, the situation is simple: Ray Ferrier has his kids for the weekend whilst the pregnant ex-wife (Miranda "Eowyn" Otto) and her new hubby head to Baaaaaastin to see her parents. Ray's a sucko dad whose son hates him, daughter doesn't know him, etc. The day after the two chilluns arrive, the weird weather patterns that had been reported in random other parts of the world -- huge electromagnetic storms causing power to go out, roiling clouds, earthquakes -- arrive in Ray's area of Bayonne, NJ. A series of "lightning strikes" with the ground coming apart. Sure enough, it's more than a storm.
The principle is simple: aliens whose technology makes ours look like we're playing with Lincoln Logs want to exterminate humanity and subjugate the planet for their own purposes. Instead of focusing on people trying to find a defense or even on the military's futile efforts to beat back the invasion, Director Steven Spielberg (Indiana Jones series, The Color Purple, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan [yuk], Catch Me if You Can, Jurassic Park I and II, The Minority Report, A.I., etc.) concentrates on the human element -- a stevedore who barely knows the kids who now reside with his ex- and their stepdad needs to run from a murderous nightmare beyond his comprehension and fight to keep them all alive; the terror of various populations when the aliens arrive and start eradicating the human population; the paranoia of the nutter who wants to hide out in his own basement and then take the fight to the aliens; the mind-numbing fear of people captured by the aliens. Much of this is highly effective and Spielberg merges CGI with actors and sets better than any director not named Peter Jackson. As for the actors: only four really count, Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Justin Chatwin and Tim Robbins. All four do very well and are ultimately believeable (although Fanning's preternatural self-awareness is always a bit strange for a small child).
Ultimately, something is missing from this movie. First, a coherent ending is completely absent and the one that we get is flat. Because Spielberg concentrates on the family interaction and the Ferriers' tribulations, there is no time spent on the efforts to defeat the aliens (contrast this with the 1950s movie that this one updates). Second, there is too much redundancy of Spielberg's former set pieces: for example, one ten-minute scene is reminiscent of both the Jurassic Park escaped-raptors-in-the-lab scene and The Minority Report's searching-spider-robots scene. And there's no climax: just continued build-up of action and fear until the movie suddenly shifts to denouement.
All told, worth your while, but not Spielberg's best by any stretch.
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