War of the Voles
Posted on | July 3, 2005 at 5:03 pm | 3 Comments
War of the Worlds is a real roller coaster ride. Let’s put this in the “more” section since I’ll probably get into some major spoilers. Note that I have a new rating system!
Despite Tom Cruise’s vole-like appearance, two-note acting (scared & peeved), and the fact that’s he’s portraying a man who’s not particularly nice, I thought he did okay. I was generally frightened/in suspense sometimes, so kudos to Spielberg – he’s still got it in him to provide the jolts. You really have to admire little Dakota Fanning, as it appears she got put through the wringer for this and I’m sure she had some nightmares. Luckily the movie didn’t pause for character moments too often, because those ended up seeming forced and awkward, and they do slow the movie down. Usually I like a lot of character moments, but in a movie like this, they end up being too pat and predictable. Might as well just go along for the ride. The effects were well done and appropriately conveyed the sense of unrelenting menace. Although there was bit too much of the “fuzzy blue” texture to a lot of it (especially in action scenes), something that I also got tired of in Minority Report.
There were the usual gaps in logic and story. The finding of the one vehicle that still works was a little pat and not very well explained. It sure seems like there should’ve been other working cars as well – where were they? The tanks worked. Also, there are scenes of incredible destruction going on at one point, and yet people not too far away (within walking/running distance) are going about their usual business anyway with apparently no hint anything is wrong until *zap* it’s right on top of them. New Jersey isn’t Tokyo, where Godzilla or some other monster comes stomping through every other day and people are used to fleeing for their lives.
A little more explanation about the aliens would’ve been nice. Since the decision was made to tell the whole story from the point of view of one family, scenes of necessary exposition were incredibly awkward (the TV news van scene, for example). Okay, I can understand not wanting to show scenes of the president mobilizing the armed forces or whatever, but sheesh, why didn’t Tom even try to turn on a TV when he was at his ex-wife’s house? I guess that’s not too surprising, since he didn’t even bother to look for food in the refrigerator.
And what were the aliens’ motives? Did they want to wipe humans off the planet with their rayguns, or collect them for later and suck their blood? Did they want the planet for some reason (colonization?), or did they just want to round-up/kill humans? I guess it don’t really matter.
And of course there’s the old same Signs complaint that these aliens are so sophisticated and have this really advanced technology and everything, and yet are felled because they failed to properly research the planet they wanted to invade. What, no one has a tricorder to test the atmosphere and see if it’s teeming with deadly micro-organisms or not? I realize that all comes from the original Wells book, written in the 19th century, but they still could’ve come up with a better way to explain it for today’s audiences. I like that the alien invasion came from below (more or less), but I still wanted to know why those machines were there and why it took them so long to use them. Also, the aliens could’ve done with some better sensing equipment in general – even their probes seemed to react solely to visuals and sound. Oh well, maybe their not-buried-for-a-million-years technology is better, but they weren’t able to mobilize it for some reason. Plus, the buried machines suggest they do this kind of thing a lot, and you’d think they’d have run up against the biological problems in the past on other planets. And if they are so susceptible to our diseases, what about the alien diseases they no doubt brought with them – wouldn’t those be killing all the humans off? Maybe that happens five minutes after the end of the movie.
Speaking of the end of the movie – again, too pat. Hey, the whole family’s okay! How about that! For awhile there, I was liking this new alien-hating, darker Spielberg, but then he had to go ruin it with a typical Hollywood ending. At least it was kind of interesting that the aliens themselves didn’t look all that menacing to me, which may be some kind of E.T./Close Encounters in-joke.
But other than that (it’s always easier to focus on the negatives than the positives), it was an engrossing movie. It’s not like I spent a lot of time focusing on the flaws while watching it. It’s pretty easy to get caught up in it.
For reasons I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m going to ditch the useless Nod-O-Meter rating system and go to something more standard – a five level rating system:
Again! – I want to see it again right away and I will definitely buy the DVD
Entertaining – Worth seeing at a theater; I might buy the DVD
Wait – Wait for rental; recommended, but has major flaws
Freeload – Worth seeing in theater or on DVD only if not paying
Avoid – Never see this movie (or stars Tara Reid* as a scientist)
On that scale, War of the Worlds gets a rating of Entertaining. I probably will buy the DVD because it will make a terrific references disk for the Home Theater system. Really good sound design!
Latre.
* I just recently re-watched The Big Lebowski on DVD – still hilarious, maybe even more so, after all these years. I had no idea that Tara Reid played Bunny Lebowski.
Comments
3 Responses to “War of the Voles”
July 14th, 2005 @ 6:06 pm
Finding the car that started was explained, though still flawed. When he is running by the mechanic, he tells him to try swapping out the solenoid. When he runs back five minutes later, the mechanic has the solenoid changed and the minivan running–the flaw being that even if the parts and tools needed for the job were sitting right there, you still couldn’t change it out in five minutes! (At any rate, that’s the car he took, and that’s why it was running.)
All the cars sitting useless in the road is also silly. We are to assume that during the storm some surge of power knocked out the solenoid in every vehicle in the area. Does that mean that before that surge hit, everyone stopped their car in the middle of the road and turned off the engine? You need a solenoid to start the car, not to keep it running! Cripes!
July 14th, 2005 @ 6:40 pm
Agreed – yeah, I know the solenoid thing was explained, it just didn’t make any sense. It seems like all cars that were off at the time of the EMP would’ve started working. The replacement solenoid didn’t get fried just because it wasn’t in a car?
July 14th, 2005 @ 6:58 pm
Ob. physics interjection – haven’t seen the movie but an EMP can be of a wide range of power levels and frequencies. And by far, un-hardened integrated circuits are the most vulnerable. Modern cars depend on silicon chips as much as they do on spark plugs, and an EMP could very well stop one in its tracks.
An EMP strong and noisy enough to short out a solenoid would probably weld shut the coils used for power brake pedal sensors and for that matter radio tuning knobs, maybe arc across people’s fillings, and generally wreak way more havoc. Your power door locks wouldn’t work, much less your electronic fuel injection.
That said, a really sophisticated (alien) technology could theoretically create a shaped energy pulse that could temporarily stop a vehicle (like the old Knight Rider car could) – but explaining how would take more words than “replace the solenoid”.
Perhaps “War of the Worlds” didn’t make the “I, Robot” mistake of trying to be like “Minority Report” without the pre-production research, it just made the “Star Trek” mistake of being too lazy to think through the technology…