Books, Movies and Random Thoughts

I enjoyed War of the Worlds more than I expected. The visuals were (unsurprisingly) stunning, and the plot (more surprisingly) could have been an awful lot worse.

I found all three main characters basically unpleasant – Tom Cruise and the son particularly so. This is not necessarily a criticism – it would have been much worse if they had been nice and wonderful. However, occasionally it seemed to go a bit too far.

I really, really liked the fact that for most of the film, Tom Cruise didn’t actually play the “hero” – he basically just ran away and hid. This also had the benefit that for most of the movie you didn’t really have much of an idea of what was going on at a global level. I liked this limited view of what is happening. It’s not a new idea (off the top of my head, I can think of two episodes of Babylon 5 that took this approach, plus one of Buffy, and I’m sure there have been other feature length films as well – quite possibly, for all I know, including the original War of the Worlds) but I think it made it a much more interesting film than, say, Independence Day.

However, I did feel rather let down when, right near the end, Tom Cruise did suddenly do something heroic and managed to blow up a Tripod. I would have actually preferred it if this had been done by the soldier who was caught along with him. I liked the final defeat of the aliens (I gather this was straight out of the original H. G. Wells story), but I found the very end of the film much too sentimental.

I’m not sure what it says about my reaction to this film that I can’t actually remember the names of any of the characters – I’m just thinking of them as “Tom Cruise”, “Dakota Fanning”, “Miranda Otto”, “Tim Robbins” and “the son”.