WAR OF THE WORLDS SUCKS

War of The Worlds was almost good. I am a big fan of the classic 2000s disaster film aesthetic and it did have that going for it at least. Tom Cruise, who starred as Ray, the generic underdog-turned-daring-hero, breathed some life into the movie with his high-energy performance. Additionally, I’m a huge fan of Dakota Fanning and I thought she did a fabulous job starring alongside Cruise as his adorable daughter. She was definitely on the annoying side, constantly complaining and screeching and suchlike, but she gets away with it as she is playing a ten-year-old. Her character also suffered from some sort of established anxiety and Fanning expertly portrayed this. The scenes of her panicking were among the movie’s scariest moments. Plot-wise, I loved the concept of the alien’s flesh roots covering the planet. They could have really milked that idea and taken it further, giving us some truly horrific and phantasmagoric visuals. I also thought the idea of giant alien-robot killer suits buried underground for millions of years had a lot of potential. It’s a creative concept I don’t think I’ve seen before. However, that’s about where War of The Worlds’ merits end. The entire movie was missing a soul. I love survival/alien apocalypse movies and I know you can make running and hide from certain gory death intriguing. Unlike other films in the genre, such as Cloverfield, this movie didn’t give us a group of characters slowly dying off, desperately looking to escape. It didn’t even give us any real gore, injury, or character death. This could have been fine if it was more about relationships and character development than horror. But alas, the most interesting relationship between hero-dad Cruise and his misunderstood teenage son, was randomly cut off halfway through, not giving it a chance to play out under stress. I can think of no explanation for this. It also might have worked if we learned more about the aliens and why they were there, ala Arrival. But nope. No explanations, nor characters to attach ourselves to, not even horror. Looking back, the plot was so thin that it wouldn’t have stood up at all without the distraction of exploding buildings and disappointingly gore-less human disintegrations. I have no idea what Spielberg was thinking.