fine whine

I've been doing some thinking. My earlier dismissal of the recent War of the worlds may have been a disservice to a $200 million grossing film with A-listers on both sides of the camera. A movie that bad deserves far greater attention.

I haven't changed my mind. It's most likely the worst movie made this year that I've seen so far. What we need to ask ourselves is: what went wrong?

Was it Tom Cruise's off-screen antics and the whole Scientology debacle that distracted me? Nope. While he may be a raving loon in his personal life that hasn't impaired his acting abilities too much. His agent might need to brush up on his skills though, as Tom makes a very, very unconvincing blue-collar New Jersey native, let alone a card-carrying stevedore.

Moreover, he's the person the latter two thirds of the movie shows. Of all the people to care about... him? And two kids, and Tim Robbins?

While I harbor no ill will toward any of them (though his son's character played by Justin Chatwin isn't particularly interesting, or fleshed-out convincingly) I find the need to wonder why, with an entire planet in turmoil, we only see the briefest glances at what the rest of the population is experiencing. Such a small focus works when you've got a smaller-scale situation, like, oh, three guys on a boat and the giant shark trying to eat them, but when an unknown number of giant alien machines is tearing up cities willy-nilly (I believe we know there are at least four, based on how many are shown at any one time) there's literally a world of possibilities for people to follow and scenes to show.

Perhaps screenwriters David Koepp & Josh Friedman wanted to make sure Spielberg didn't repeat his 1941 mistake of too many characters and too much bloat*. But they took away too much. Spielberg knows how to handle reasonable groups of people in horrifically dramatic situations (like the Holocaust, though the Nazis and the aliens in this film are at once very similar and yet so different) but here he seems unable to juggle more than three people at a time.

At one point our protagonists are running to get onto a ferry, along with a throng of several hundred other people. Somewhere in the chaos they meet "Sheryl" and a child with her, though no explanation is give as to who she is other than someone Tom's character knows. She disappears from the action quickly enough, though, and isn't mentioned thereafter. Extra characters in Saving private Ryan were treated much better.

In Ryan we can find a much better example of following a small group of people against the backdrop of a larger evil, but in this case they're all believable soldiers, not a pretty-boy dockworker, an overprecocious little girl, fifteen stereotypes wrapped up into a fifteen year old, and a survivalist who might have just gone a bit over the line. All the time I watched it I was aware that these people were actors acting, and never bought into the suspension of disbelief at their characters, let alone the special effects behind them.

Some of the CGI was painfully obvious, too. Physical sets looked pretty good, and however the rich neighborhood/jet crash was put together it looked quite convincing, but far too much of the movie looked much too fake.

And I feel the need to point out that the back windows of a mid-90s Dodge Caravan do not slide down like that. They just don't. They can't. I realize that it was probably necessary for filmmakers to fake so they could fly a camera around, inside and outside of the minivan, but it was all the more distracting, and equally pointless.

Some of the effects sequences were pretty impressive, but almost all of them ran on as long as a painful Saturday Night Live sketch, well past making the point. The emergence of the tripod creature from the ground is one such scene. Likewise the eyeball tentacles late in the film, seemingly a cross between the water tentacle from The Abyss and something much more sinister.

I won't even address the jarring discrepancies in the aliens' technologies, other than to mention that they've mastered intergalactic travel and an incredible form of personal transportation, yet they rely on inefficient designs and needlessly complex solutions to easy problems. Want to clear out a bunch of people from a planet? Why zap them individually when you could just pulverize the buildings and wipe out the people en masse? Or why not build bigger death rays, say, the size of more than one person at a time?

The fact that at least once 'terrorists' were mentioned shows that everyone's still well aware of the whole 9/11 thing, but was this really necessary? I suppose I'd need to find an overprecocious ten-year-old and ask him or her what the first guess at a big attack would be, terrorists or space aliens.

Maybe I should read the book. I'd bet that ol' H.G. had New Jersey in mind when he wrote it a century ago. You should read the book too, or watch the old movie, or listen to the radio adaptation. Just skip this one.

* And not enough entertainment. If you haven't yet watched 1941, don't. It's a disaster/war/comedy/farce with a cast numbering in the 50s and jokes numbering in the low 10s.