War of the Worlds (NO SPOILERS, please!)

[SandwormPhish]

Originally Posted by Saruman

I had it in my hand at Sam's Club the other day and I put it back. I really wanted to get it just to actually see how horrible it was, but then I thought about all the reviews and just said NO.

Good for you. That's three hours of your life that won't be wasted, and one of science fiction's greatest stories that won't be in the slightest bit tainted by this.. horror.

It's like I said in my original review, this is a film that WISHES it had the quality of your average sci-fi original picture.

[Spiral Fire]

SWEEEET the Martian fighting machines have been revealed! Be sure to check often, its a TV Trailer/Spot/Whatever.

[SandwormPhish]

The reviews are starting to come in:

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/war_of_the_worlds/

[Zigra]

The reviews so far are positive, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Though, I do have to wonder how many, if any at all, of those people have any familiarity with Wells' novel.

[SandwormPhish]

Remember, it doesn't have to be just like Wells' novel to be good. Lest we forget the lesson of the Pendragon release so soon. :P

Anyway that's a fun little tidbit.. all that dust you see on Cruise when he's looking in the mirror?

*teeny spoiler*



IT'S PEOPLE! /Charlton Heston

[Zigra]

Originally Posted by SandwormPhish

Remember, it doesn't have to be just like Wells' novel to be good. Lest we forget the lesson of the Pendragon release so soon. :P

'Tis true. I'm simply hoping for a movie that's more than just a really well-made WWINO.

Anyway that's a fun little tidbit.. all that dust you see on Cruise when he's looking in the mirror?

*teeny spoiler*



IT'S PEOPLE! /Charlton Heston

Heh heh

[SandwormPhish]

Originally Posted by Zigra

'Tis true. I'm simply hoping for a movie that's more than just a really well-made WWINO.

It's not how many details they get right, it's which ones. That's the reason I don't consider ID4 a WOTW retelling like so many others do.. they miss the wrong details (like the main characters actually managing to help stop the invaders, or humanity managing to save itself).

As I recall the primary objections over GINO for instance have nothing to do with the setting change.

[Zigra]

My sentiments exactly. My biggest concern was never the setting of this WotW movie, but rather how the aliens are portrayed and how the story progresses. The fact that the aliens are no longer Martians (some reports claim that they are from a "parallel Earth"; I don't know if that's true or not) leaves me very concerned about just how faithful to the source material this movie will be.

[RyougaSaotome]

A lot of the reviews I've read have said the movie is surprisingly close to the novel in it's story progression, and that events are very close and sort of parallel each other, not to mention the Tripods etc are very close to the original sketches and stuff.

[Zigra]

Ah, then there may be hope yet. Too bad I'm not going to get to see this until at least Thursday.

[SandwormPhish]

Originally Posted by Zigra

My sentiments exactly. My biggest concern was never the setting of this WotW movie, but rather how the aliens are portrayed and how the story progresses. The fact that the aliens are no longer Martians (some reports claim that they are from a "parallel Earth"; I don't know if that's true or not) leaves me very concerned about just how faithful to the source material this movie will be.

All the reviews I've read that mention it say that the film is neutral. It doesn't say they are martians but it doesn't say that they aren't.

I've also seen it mentioned that it keeps it very close in with Cruise's character and his family.. we don't learn anything that they wouldn't.

[Gorjirus]

Today's the day that it comes out! I was hoping to see it today, but it doesn't look like I will. Perhaps sometime this weekend...

And I will be able to see the King Kong trailer that I missed Monday.

[Spiral Fire]

I'm seeing it today opening night, and I am officially the happiest person alive at this very moment. Im hoping that it's as good as it looks, but as they say, never judge a movie by it's trailer (The Village <_<).

From what I've seen of the cast, the only movie-book characters are Oglivy, many running, screaming people, and I think the man you so commonly see with a shotgun is perhaps the Curate in a less-crazed manor, or perhaps the Man on Putney Hill (the lost artilleryman).

[Solar_Behemoth]

Anyone see it yet? Anyone?

Was it good? Was it good? Was it good?

[Gorjirus]

Here is one review I found on Trek Web:

The Great 'War'
Steven Spielberg Re-Creates Classic For Our Times

By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 29, 2005; C01

Excerpts:

Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" is a close encounter of the blurred kind, an orchestration of chaos and panic and destruction as visceral as it can get.

Despite occasional flaws and misjudgments, it's a brilliantly told tale. It really rips along; it seizes you in its first seconds, holds you spellbound for two short hours and expels you, breathless and spent. It's your best summertime movie rush in many years.

What one notices instantly is the absence of that '50s voice of military or scientific authority. In all the previous iterations of this story and its many derivatives, the hero was either a scientist (Gene Barry in Pal's variant) or a professional soldier (Ken Tobey in Howard Hawks's "The Thing," the same story told on a smaller scale in 1951).

Perhaps now it doesn't, when terrorists can take out a big chunk of the Manhattan skyline and detonate IEDs on Baghdad roadways seemingly at will. Our general apprehension might be summed up in the phrase "out of control," and Spielberg capitalizes on that fear, giving us an out-of-control world as viewed from the ground. He's not much interested here in larger entities like The Government or Science; he focuses instead on working man Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) and his two kids, Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and Rachel (the great Dakota Fanning), and dramatizes how the Ferrier family just barely copes with the coming of the things from another world.

We only glimpse soldiers, and one (brilliant) sequence shows them using Arabian desert tactics against the three-legged Martian fighting machines and perishing in a wall of fire for their impertinence. The government, the message runs, is powerless.

That makes the movie far more intense, by the way.

Spielberg, working from a script by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, establishes Ray as one of those child-men in whom adult responsibility never quite took root.

Spielberg has a special feel for family dynamics, as viewers of his more benign alien-contact films "E.T." and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" will remember. But this is a more hostile family. Cruise hasn't the warmth as an actor that Richard Dreyfuss brought to "Third Kind," being a tenser, vainer, more frightened personality; and the overall tone of the movie is far, far edgier than that exercise in basic goodness. "War" is an exercise in basic badness.

New wrinkle No. 2: How they get here. Hmmm, seems they were already here. If I understand it correctly, the machines have been buried for a million years.

What arrives to Earth aren't ships but energy storms -- Spielberg has always loved clouds, and now he fills them with jagged lightning strikes, like saber strokes -- whose bolts charge what lies beneath.

As storytelling, this is ingenious.

Instead, with brilliant (but understated) special effects, Spielberg breaks the mold by having his foes arrive from beneath, rising from the surface like breaching whales (indeed, the control node of the Martian fighting machines resembles Moby Dick's eye more than anything, a kind of cold malevolent glare at the soon-to-be destroyed).

The subtext to all this, neatly enough, is what might be called warriorhood. The movie is really about fighting -- not getting along. It pushes the idea, subtly, that Spielberg also pushed in "Private Ryan," one that he might not express publicly: the value, the necessity, of warriors. Ray is growing up under the pressure, going from feckless to furious.

The movie follows that line through to the end, though it falters when it momentarily diverts into a one-act play. Ray and Rachel take refuge in a farmhouse basement, where they encounter Tim Robbins, the film's only other recognizable actor. This seems like a weird bid to get Robbins an Oscar; he takes over the film, filling it with paranoia, irrationality and overacting. The sequence left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, and could have been left on the cutting-room floor.

Still, "War of the Worlds" will pretty much rise or fall on its spectacle, which means it should rise. Spielberg has always been a glib stager of action, finding ways to represent old sequences in completely fresh ways, as witness the extraordinary agility he brought to routine combat action in "Private Ryan."

But there's also an intellectual coherence to the film. What seems to hold it together is the concentration on blood. This extends from the initial idea of Mars as the "Red Planet" to the blood ties between Ray and his kids that turn out to be what gives them strength.

Spielberg is only marginally interested in what eventually overcomes the invaders. He cares more about human adhesion, the stuff that binds us together and that, it seems, makes us human to begin with, unlike the cold, distant intellects of Mars.

The idea seems to be: That was something they couldn't relate to, and in the end, that, as much as anything, dooms them. Our blood was thicker than theirs.

And here's a link to one on IGN:

http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/629/629821p1.html



I can't wait to see it. I think I will like it.

[PyrasTerran]

The fact that the aliens are no longer Martians (some reports claim that they are from a "parallel Earth"; I don't know if that's true or not)

You're taking that out of context. Haven't you ever heard of the sci-fi mythos that Mars was once almost exactly like Earth in terms of habitat, etc.? I believe the movie Mission to Mars capitalized on this. They could very easily be martians and from a parallel earth at the same time because mars is often seen AS a parallel earth, or at least was one..

[Zigra]

Originally Posted by PyrasTerran

You're taking that out of context. Haven't you ever heard of the sci-fi mythos that Mars was once almost exactly like Earth in terms of habitat, etc.? I believe the movie Mission to Mars capitalized on this. They could very easily be martians and from a parallel earth at the same time because mars is often seen AS a parallel earth, or at least was one..

No, the report I remember seeing claimed that they came from Earth of a parallel universe. Thankfully, it looks like this was either untrue, or that Spielburg abandoned the idea.

[Spiral Fire]

So far the movie's getting good reviews, even those crazies in a certain newspaper which I shall not be naming, who have never given an action movie four stars since ColdPlay, just broke out of the mold and gave it four starts. It's currently in the high 70%s at RottenTomatoes.com.

Only Three-and-a-half more hours 'till I see it! I'll be sure to add my review afterwards A.S.A.P!

[Saruman]

I just got back from seeing it and I must say that I really enjoyed the movie.

I won't give anything away but the movie doesn't say where the aliens are actually from and they don't make any assumptions about it.

The biggest complaint that people are going to have about the film is that it follows Tom Cruise's character and his family and tells their story as the "War" is happening. I have seen some reviews complain that they stayed to much on that aspect instead of showing more of the war itself, but I think it worked pretty well. I think you will see a bunch of added footage of the war when this comes out on DVD.

As for how this film shows the impact and terror of the aliens, well lets just say this film is A LOT more graphic than I was actually expecting it to be.

Well I'll discuss it some more once more people have seen it, I did enjoy it though.

[Megabyte]

^ I would have to agree that the film was much better than I ever expected it to be. Furthermore I was shocked at how close it was to the original novel while making references/nods to Orsen Welles' radio adaption and the 1953 film. Many of the reviews I read complained mostly about the ending and the "origin" about the tripods. But I found many of the "updates" to work with the film. Furthermore, maybe its just me but I found Williams' score to be superb and the "foghorn" to be haunting and pretty dramatic.

I'd would probably give this film a... ah hell, it was pretty damn awesome. And not to mention seeing the Kong preview on the big screen was an added bonus

[RyougaSaotome]

Yeah, WOTW was pretty hot. Acting, storytelling, visuals. A return to form for good ole Speilberg. Excellent flick.

[PyrasTerran]

It's movies like this that make me wanna tell some people out there to pull the sticks out of their asses and realize that just because something is mainstream doesn't mean it sucks.

WotW delivers.. so.. $%&#ing.. much..

My favorite invasion movie ever.

[Zigra]

Originally Posted by PyrasTerran

It's movies like this that make me wanna tell some people out there to pull the sticks out of their asses and realize that just because something is mainstream doesn't mean it sucks.

That's true. It's just that most of the mainstream stuff happens to stink, especially nowadays. I'm having higher hopes for this movie, though.

[Tomzilla]

Curses...right now, I'd be addressing my opinions along with the rest of you, but I was unable to see the movie. My friends and I were on our way, but when we got to an intersection, the car in front of me slammed on its brakes - I likewise did so as well, and succeeded in stopping...the cars behind me did not. The one behind me barely hit me. But this van came in and crashed into the person behind me, pushing them into my car's rear even harder.

Luckily, everyone was alright. I guess I'll see War of the Worlds another day, you know before Earth is invaded.

[Saruman]

Originally Posted by Tomzilla

Curses...right now, I'd be addressing my opinions along with the rest of you, but I was unable to see the movie. My friends and I were on our way, but when we got to an intersection, the car in front of me slammed on its brakes - I likewise did so as well, and succeeded in stopping...the cars behind me did not. The one behind me barely hit me. But this van came in and crashed into the person behind me, pushing them into my car's rear even harder.

Luckily, everyone was alright. I guess I'll see War of the Worlds another day, you know before Earth is invaded.

Damn that sucks Tom, glad everyone was ok though. That's a bit more important than seeing any movie. Hope you can get your car fixed, it sucks not having wheels.