War of the Worlds [Spoilers]

[sanddrag]

Just saw it. While it was an edge of your seat type of movie (and it made me feel like it was really hot in that theatre) I wouldn't say it was terrifying. The put a lot into the sound effects. The movie would be nothing without them.

Overall, I thought it was just so so. The effects were good, but the story I thought was lacking. For pretty much the whole movie, it is just a guy and a little girl running from laser beams and stuff like that. There wasn't a whole lot of dialog either. Mostly just sounds of stuff blowing up, falling over, etc. And then every now and then a loud too loud imho fog horn blast type sound every time one of those darned things got ready to strike.

The end was wrapped up way to fast. I mean, one minute these things are on their way to destroying mankind (and everything mankind has built) and are unstoppable the next they are being brought down by a canon sitting on a soldiers shoulder? And the whole reason is some microbes or something like that?

That just doesn't do it for me. I know the makers of the film didn't write the story, but I thought there would be more to it. I'd call it a good exhibition of special effects capabilities, nothing more.

[Travis Hoffman]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

The end was wrapped up way to fast. I mean, one minute these things are on their way to destroying mankind (and everything mankind has built) and are unstoppable the next they are being brought down by a canon sitting on a soldiers shoulder? And the whole reason is some microbes or something like that?

That just doesn't do it for me. I know the makers of the film didn't write the story, but I thought there would be more to it. I'd call it a good exhibition of special effects capabilities, nothing more.

I think the point of the story was to illustrate just how powerless humans were against these things and just how lucky we were that something so simple as the common cold could bring the entire thing to a halt when the combined power of the earth's military forces could do nothing. The only reason we were spared was we were lucky enough to have inhabited this world for thousands of years and had therefore "earned" the right to live here (although the armed fight over the minivan makes you wonder - naturalistic survival tendencies aside, humans like to revel in violent arguments over such petty things on a daily basis - can't we all just get along?).

You'd certainly think, however, that a technologically-advanced Martian (or whatever) species would have taken indigenous pathogens and diseases into account during their lengthy study of the earth and its people prior to the attack. I'm sure they had to deal with their own strains of sicknesses back on their homeworld. But that's not the way H.G. Wells laid it out.