from the very beginning of this movie it was clear that it was going to be an agonizing 2 hours. but it wasn't until the "aliens" attacked that the underlying propaganda of the film began to surface. when tom cruise's character runs home to see his children after witnessing a huge fucking alien - machine - thingy destroying his city he tells his kids they are under attack. to this his son asks... is it the terrorists? wow, great screenwriting there. fast forward... they get into the only working vehicle on manhattan (tom happens to have ran by his (work?) mechanic friend on the way to see the aliens earlier in the movie after all the cars die, the mechanic is trying to fix this minivan, he is calm and collected like its not too strange of a day, as tom runs by the guy asks him what he thinks is wrong, "replace the cyllinoid", tom replys without stopping to accually look at the vehicle, seriously what the hell is that crap) and his daughter spots the alien - machine - tripodie thingy zapping people to dust with a big blue laser o' death ray. no she asks, quite louder this time in case we didnt catch her brother asking before, "IS IT THE TERRORISTS????". now keep in mind that tom cruise's character is an undereducated blue collar dead beat dad who drives an old ford and works on cars, good old american boy with good old american ingenuity. it gets better. the son, throughout the movie, keeps on trying to run off to go with the military to fight the bad /aliens/machines/overgrown tripods, his dad wont let him and his sister cries because she wants her brother to stay. in the end dad lets him go (literally) because he realizes its what his son needs to do, and since he saw him being extremely altruistic on this ferry earlier maybe he thinks his son will make a good little soilder. 2 minutes later his son gets blown up, or so you think, we cant have ambitious young soldiers dying on the big screen, don't worry he's safe and sound back with his family in the end. there is other stuff too. like how the aliens are portrayed as childlike and ignorant. e.g.. they can pretty much exterminate the human race but they cant figure out the mechanical wonder of a wheel. keep in mind this invasion has been in the works for "like a million years" and these aliens still have a really super hard time understanding the mechanics of a wheel.
a personal favorite that eli pointed out is that when everything electronic dies when these aliens come over each city, were talking cars, phones, radios, watches, everything, somehow this one guys digital camera still works and he films part of the takeover. they later find out these aliend suck out all the blood of humans, for reasons that remain a mystery, this doesnt really follow for me since the machines were turning everyone to dust earlier in the movie. also these machines are really fancy yet they seem to only be able to register noise and sight, no heat or motion sensors, they are easily fooled by a mirror. how does tom take one down? well he gets sucked up into a butt on the thing and detonated a couple grenades, independence day anyone? tim robbing plays a pedofile that wants to "take care of" dakota fanning. the most awesome quote from this movie is when tim robbins is frantically trying to burrow a tunnel to the city single-handedly with a shovel while screaming "not my blood, not my blood" over and over thus giving away their location to these blood sucking spherically challanged aliens.
please someone stop this man from making movies, i will never again pay to see a spielberg film, i refuse. poor wells, he used to have a good thing in the war of the worlds, in fact he still does. do yourself a favor and go read the book you'll be glad you didn't waste two hours of your life to see this piece of crap. it takes ol' stevie 2 hours to get to the narration at the end of the film, this 1 minute ending is the only piece of the movie that pays any respect to wells story, too bad it is completely out of place and follows nothing of spielbergs new glorified, more explodier, be all you can be version of a story that would have been better served if he had never even looked at the book in the first place.
it really is that bad. there's more but im not going to go on forever.
spielberg actually said that he made this movie as an allagory for 9/11. seriously.
Comments