Nonsensical, offensive, inane, boring claptrap! - War of the Worlds Reviews

I thought War of the Worlds would be a cool, trippy movie to go see last night. Boy, was I ever wrong. I will say this about the movie: it's very pretty. There is barely a shot in the movie that isn't an explosion of cool shapes and colors. The aliens are very stylish, if incredibly stupid. Their spider tanks are cooler than they are. And that, unfortunately, is the only positive thing that can be said about this movie. When I read Stephanie Zacharek's review at Salon, I thought that she needed to get out more, and stop being so bitter about a bit of summer fluff--but she was right. This movie is offensive. It tries to pull those ol' 9/11 heart strings in the most blatant, cheesy, downright insulting manner possible. Nothing anybody in the movie, human or alien, does makes any sense at all. Not a single one of the characters is anything but a stupid, grating, asinine moron. The acting is horrible. There might, possibly, somewhere on this earth, be somebody who could read these lines believably, but Spielberg didn't hire any of them. The only exceptions are Tim Robbins as a creepy crazy guy and Morgan Freeman's two minutes of voiceover that frames the movie. Dakota Fanning should perhaps not be blamed too much for her performance, as the few deliverable lines she has she delivers well; the rest, unfortunately, is just a bunch of screaming. The only thing worse than the characters and the dialogue is the plot, a nonsensical story about aliens who have spent a million years planning an invasion of earth only to forget their inoculations on the way, who come here to Kill All Humans but do a spectacularly bad job of it. Or, perhaps, they came here to farm humans and for some reason decide to kill a lot of the produce instead. They have tanks with shields that don't work if they operator gets sick, and prefer to individually investigate each house in the country rather than, say, just smashing all of them, which they evince plenty of ability to do. If the aliens are dumb, the humans are not only moronic, but also mean-spirited and even more self-destructive than they seem to be in real life. NOTHING ANYONE DOES IN THIS MOVIE MAKES SENSE. Not even in an immediate sense. Run unarmed into instant and certain death to see something you can see from where you are? Sounds like a plan. Attempt to blow up a tripod tank that has previously shown itself invulnerable, and is also the only thing keeping you from a nasty 200 foot fall onto hard earth and trees? Brilliant! The offensive part, though, is the theme. If I thought that this movie was a sly comment or satire on America's reaction to 9/11, I wouldn't be offended, but it isn't. It can't be satirizing America's response because it doesn't in the least resemble it. It depicts plenty of meanness in human nature, but it's way too exaggerated and cartooney to make any point other than, perhaps, if you were to consider only the worst possible side of human nature and extract all the rationality, compassion, and, in fact, drive for self-preservation, then you can paint a pretty bleak picture. But goodness will win in the end after all, for no apparent reason. So, this movie plays off 9/11 quite a bit, but doesn't bother to make a point with any of it. It's just a bunch of cheap theatrics designed to put butts in the seats, and that's just wrong. The fact of the matter is that all of these things are the way they are because Spielberg has zero respect for the intelligence of his audience. He's never been one to make movies that tax the brain too heavily, but this is a new nadir of stupidity. Why make it make sense when it'll only be watched by people who wouldn't understand the sense it makes? Why go for a subtle Tivo plug when you can just insert a 15-second commercial right in the middle of an establishing scene? Why try to say something about anything when you can just steal images from horrible things that happened and get the same emotional impact, because people are dumb? Well, people are dumb. Really dumb. But, even then, they're not as stupid as Spielberg seems to think . I don't think I'll watch another Spielberg flick again. Which is a shame, because it really was a very pretty movie.