War of the Worlds
Jul. 27th, 2005 09:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
orangerfulWe saw 'War of the Worlds' today with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zaubervz. He had seen it before and told us to go check it out. Figured I'd post this in a seperate entry so anyone avoiding HBP spoilers could read this one hehe.
Having never read the H.G. Wells book, nor heard the radio show (though I have very vague memories of a late 80s/early 90s miniseries?), I didn't really have anything to compare this movie too. I want to applaud Speilberg for not letting images of the aliens out in the trailers, and also for keeping all the same scenes in the trailers. It's been so long since I saw a movie that I didn't know a lot about. You don't realize how spoiler-ific movie trailers are nowadays until you see something like WotW, which was kept pretty well under wraps. THe only thing I knew about it was that Tom Cruise would probably get wet at some point.
Anyway, this movie is MEANT for the theater. Big screen special effects and sound design that makes your teeth rattle. I was genuinely frightened during this film. I could feel my chest tightening and my heart pounding.
It made me think of '28 Days Later'. There's a big bad (Zombies/Aliens) chasing our heroes and putting them in peril. But where they get into the most danger for the majority of the film, is from other human beings. The scenes where they are jumping on the van and they drove through a mass of people, and then the scenes as they were trying to board the Ferry...far scarier than the alein attacks because the human reactions were something that COULD happen. The aliens were scary too, but their scenes were more about tension. Something about the masses of people just made me want to hide under my seat.
The only problem that I had was the end. I know that in the story, the aliens all die of a cold or some other common virus that their immune systems weren't ready for. And that's how they die in the film too, Ray (Tom Cruise) makes it to Boston and some of the ships are crashed. and then he sees that one of the ships has no shields cuz the birds are landing on it, so he tells the soldiers, they blow it up, it falls down and the alien falls out, all death-ET colored. Then Morgan Freeman does a voiceover and tellls us that they caught a cold. I think this was just hard to do since the story was focused more on Ray and his kids survival. The aliens activities outside of Ray's realm of knowledge were not part of the movie, so them catching the virus and suffering from it wasn't really seen. It wasn't a huge deal, but it sorta takes away from the ending and leave you with a sorta "eh" feeling.
But I liked it. Thumbs up, as alien summer blockbusters go. The story was there, the acting was actually pretty good (I was scared of Dakota Fanning), and it was action packed but not ridiculously so *coughIslandcough*. I'm really happy I saw it on the big screen.
zaubervz. He had seen it before and told us to go check it out. Figured I'd post this in a seperate entry so anyone avoiding HBP spoilers could read this one hehe. Having never read the H.G. Wells book, nor heard the radio show (though I have very vague memories of a late 80s/early 90s miniseries?), I didn't really have anything to compare this movie too. I want to applaud Speilberg for not letting images of the aliens out in the trailers, and also for keeping all the same scenes in the trailers. It's been so long since I saw a movie that I didn't know a lot about. You don't realize how spoiler-ific movie trailers are nowadays until you see something like WotW, which was kept pretty well under wraps. THe only thing I knew about it was that Tom Cruise would probably get wet at some point.
Anyway, this movie is MEANT for the theater. Big screen special effects and sound design that makes your teeth rattle. I was genuinely frightened during this film. I could feel my chest tightening and my heart pounding.
It made me think of '28 Days Later'. There's a big bad (Zombies/Aliens) chasing our heroes and putting them in peril. But where they get into the most danger for the majority of the film, is from other human beings. The scenes where they are jumping on the van and they drove through a mass of people, and then the scenes as they were trying to board the Ferry...far scarier than the alein attacks because the human reactions were something that COULD happen. The aliens were scary too, but their scenes were more about tension. Something about the masses of people just made me want to hide under my seat.
The only problem that I had was the end. I know that in the story, the aliens all die of a cold or some other common virus that their immune systems weren't ready for. And that's how they die in the film too, Ray (Tom Cruise) makes it to Boston and some of the ships are crashed. and then he sees that one of the ships has no shields cuz the birds are landing on it, so he tells the soldiers, they blow it up, it falls down and the alien falls out, all death-ET colored. Then Morgan Freeman does a voiceover and tellls us that they caught a cold. I think this was just hard to do since the story was focused more on Ray and his kids survival. The aliens activities outside of Ray's realm of knowledge were not part of the movie, so them catching the virus and suffering from it wasn't really seen. It wasn't a huge deal, but it sorta takes away from the ending and leave you with a sorta "eh" feeling.
But I liked it. Thumbs up, as alien summer blockbusters go. The story was there, the acting was actually pretty good (I was scared of Dakota Fanning), and it was action packed but not ridiculously so *coughIslandcough*. I'm really happy I saw it on the big screen.
