Valuable Explosion Time

And it wasn't even one of Dolph's good movies, either

Published on December 19, 2005 By stutefish In Life Journals

So I watched the new War of the Worlds movie this weekend.

Spoilers!

As far as I can tell, the best part of the movie comes at the very beginning. Tom Cruise is working in a shipyard, using a crane to move giant shipping containers around. It's hard, exacting work, and he seems to be incredibly good at it. When his shift ends, at the end of the scene, his foreman pleads with him to stay and work another shift, since he's the only crane operator that can keep up with the workload.

But then, I have a soft spot in my heart for shipping containers and the cranes that operate them.

As for the rest of the movie? Let me put it this way:

I have seen a better movie with Dolph Lundgren in it.

Seriously, this War of the Worlds is a bad, bad movie.

About the only movie worse than this one is Battlefield Earth. What is it with Scientologists and bad movies?

Comments

sushiK

on Dec 19, 2005

What aspect of the movie did you think failed?

stutefish

on Dec 19, 2005

Where to begin?

First of all, Cruise's character has mad skillz with the container cranes. It seems to be one of the very few areas of life in which he excels. But these skillz, showcased in the opening scene, never come into play against the aliens. I don't know exactly how operating a container crane could be used to defeat invincible space aliens, but I could damn well come up with something. Otherwise, why bother? Why not make him an accountant, or a grocery store clerk, or something?

I mean, he doesn't even make use of the hard-working, get-the-job-done attitude that he shows in that first scene. Maybe container cranes specifically weren't useful, but what about that whole blue-collar can-do attitude towards the problems of the day? It's like as soon as he leaves the job site, the character turns into Mister Incompetent.

Also, I dare anybody who saw the movie to lie to me, and claim that they didn't want to see those two kids zapped by the Space Aliens by the time the movie was half over. At least the boy got what was coming to him.

I swear there was not a single sympathetic character in the entire movie. Cruise's character spent the entire movie being completely useless. Sure, he saves his daughter, but mostly by accident, by pure luck while doing the wrong things. I understand that a Space Alien invasion would freak out even the toughest people, but come on! If you wanted to tell the story of how Woody Allen would fail to cope with Alien Invasion, then cast Woody Allen so that I know to stay away from the damn thing.

And he loses his son by being possibly the most incompetent father to grace the screen since A Christmas Story. Not that the whole father-son subplot was very well developed, or made very much sense at all. Even George Romero's Land of the Dead does a better job stitching together a patchwork of half-baked Hollywood cliche's than this movie does.

My favorite part of the movie--paraphrased:

FATHER: Watch out for people who might want our car.

SON: Whatever.

FATHER: You drive. I'm going to take a nap.

SON: Drives into a crowd of people who trash the car and then kill each other trying to hijack it.

This wins over my second-favorite scene, where the son follows the National Guard into battle against the Tripods. That was my second favorite scene only because the idiot child is not blown up, explicitly, on screen, for being such a tiny party hat for my behind.

And that daughter. What were they thinking? They could not even make the damn daughter a sympathetic character. Seriously, there was not a single sympathetic character in the movie. Except possibly the Tripods. All I know is, I could certainly sympathize with the Tripods' desire to burninate as many of these asshats as possible.

As far as "daughter in jeopardy" movies go, Man on Fire was a better movie, and it wasn't even as good as Blackjack (Man on Fire had Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning, but Blackjack had John Woo).

Long story short: every moment spent on Tom Cruise's character and his troubles was a waste of valuable explosion time.

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