I’m mixed on War of the Worlds though I’m largely positive.

Here’s some thoughts:
1. Don’t take the kids. It’s one hellishly brutal movie emotionally and physically (the death rays are just gob stopping). There’s very little humor – it’s played straight and unrelenting… and trust me, totally plays off 9-11… (the little girl asks if its the terrorists… twice!). So the level of intensity and the brutality and the unrelentingness is enough to make it one of the most PG13 – if not R rated – movies I’ve ever seen. The only reason its not an R is that some of the more graphic violence is off-screen or bloodless.

2. The 1950s version of the film is more modern than this film. The 1950s version is essentially what Independence Day copied… that version had armies fighting back, military people as primary characters, war rooms, etc. This film is more like Signs – it’s what happens when the aliens invade all over the Earth and we focus on one family. Perhaps a bit too much…. sometimes you just want to see some aliens blowing stuff up when you get more family dynamics.

3. A lot of stuff takes place off-screen – our heroes aren’t privy to what’s going on in the rest of the world… they hear rumors and at one point see a news video tape, but mainly they see the results of the chaos… fleeing mobs, corpses, etc. They do encounter tripods but its on a small scale (as such). Spielberg said that he was studiously avoiding the Monument Destroying Aliens from Independence Day… which aught to make me happy and it does. This is about New Jersey under attack, or small towns, or whatever… this isn’t about New York City or Washington DC getting got. However, a part of me wanted to see more of the destruction… especially early on where we see more panic in the populace than we have actually seen as movie goers. The 1950s version blew away London and showed disaster in Paris and other cities… the book was smaller scale too (London and outskirts) though it did show or talk about the battle raging between the tripods and the cannons (it was set in the 1890s)… and the toxic black smoke which isn’t in this movie (think chemical weapons billowing through a city and I bet that was too much for the film makers to pull on people these days).

4. Everyman hero – Cruise plays an average joe who is barely adult enough to run his life properly much less deal with his kids. The guy works – he just wants to keep his kids safe from everything and does whatever necessary. It’s a tough role and one that I credit him for playing. The narrator in the book wasn’t like this and the square-jawed scientists in the 1950s were all sorts of noble. However, this does mean you have to really care about this family dynamic and that’s not always easy given the level of bitching and whining that can go on… not to mention Dakota Fanning SCREAMING all the time… its not as bad as Newt from Aliens…. but maybe a distant second.

5. FX – FX are very good – very believable… very not-CG-looking though they are… not sure how much was though. I won’t talk about what happens.

Score: 88