Now Playing: Supertramp - Breakfast in America
Topic: Grunts, rants, and others
It started off well enough: a "cosy" portrait of a typical, dysfunctional American family in Newark, NJ (never mind that the docks Cruise "works" at are in fact in Brooklyn). Two kids, a wise-ass, screaming Dakota Fanning, and a moronic teenage Justin Chatwin; one mom not old enough to have had them both; her new, SUV-equipped second husband, and the errant dad unable to cope with the kids for the weekend. It would have surely ended in disaster, except that daddy got lucky: the Martians intervened!
Right you are, you guessed it. I have gone, betrayed my instincts, and watched Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds". And to make a long story short: the special effects team could well earn an Oscar nomination for their untiring efforts trying to save what soon became a doomed movie. Everyone else involved in this abysmal venture, including Mr. Spielberg, should receive a two-year ban from the movie industry. Maybe then they will think before they "act" the next time around.
As I said, it really started off well enough. H.G. Wells' concept of the aliens has been splendidly updated; the introduction of the protagonists almost succeeded in making you forget all the negative propaganda that led most of tonight's visitors to the theater. And the first appearance of the Martians, whose ships were apparently buried beneath our world for eons, was a remarkable piece of digital special effects. But then the idiosyncrasies started to set in and from then on it was a downhill affair. Like: just after the magnetic storm caused by what appears at first to be 27 lightening strikes into the same spot knocks out all the cars, power supply, cellphones and even watches, Cruise & film family promptly find the only car still working. One that obviously never needs gas, despite being a van that at best of times only gets about fifteen miles per gallon.
It goes on like that. Mr. Cruise manages to knock out the huge alien ships with less than a handful of hand grenades. Ms. Fanning, naturally, never learns her lesson(s) and constantly wanders off, runs off, and is generally off, in a wide-eyed still reminiscent of the cheesy "bug-eye" postcards that Hallmark used to sell.
The nearly packed midnight audience mostly laughed throughout the movie. American theater crowds are strangely participative, and this one literally exploded with four-letter expletives when - with most of the Eastern Seaboard destroyed - the aliens miraculously missed the Boston neighborhood where the ex-wife, new hubby, and her parents appeared on a stoop, obviously unruffled by the world-wide catastrophic events.
In summation it is clear that Byron Haskin's 1953 version, starring Gene Berry and set in small town USA, was clearly more believable and better acted for a tenth of the cost. And that neither film even comes close to to Orson Wells' 1937 radio broadcast that cause real-life panic among the far less jaded listeners of the New Deal era.
