Hey, not looking for an argument but I am really curious as to why this movie got quite a bit of hate?
I have not read the novel and would like to know what was changed or how they differ? Regardless, I stand by that the acting was top, whether the story was up to scratch or not. Thanks :)
I guess it doesn't really matter why people in this forum hated the movie for three reasons: 1) big financial hit (around $600 worldwide 8 years ago), 2) well reviewed by most critics (74% on Rottentomatoes), 3) many of the complaints about the plot and story points are from the revered novel itself so that should say volumes about the people complaining. You can ask the question but like so many things sometimes people just don't like things whether they can articulate it or not. I for one loathe the 2 Twilight movies I saw. Just not my thing. I didn't begrudge people who liked Harry Potter, it just wasn't my thing. On the other hand I like stuff most people don't like or don't bother to see. Arrested Development and 30 Rock for example. What I can tell you are the reasons why I did like War of the Worlds. The characters seemed real. Both the ugly and noble side of humanity or realistically shown. There were images and scenes that stuck with me (the aliens coming up out of the ground which while cool I also acknowledge as kind of a plot point contention for me, the terraformed red growth was striking, the epic scenes of mass hysteria and hundreds of people on the run was haunting). Ideas from the book were realized and modernized like the concept that we (instead of the oversized British Empire in the novel) are the natives plowed over by a stronger invader and further explored by referencing desperate measures by the overpowered inhabitants (suicide bomber scene). The concept of occupation will be your undoing despite your military strength is once again remembered here too. The quiet run through the forest as empty clothes fall like giant snowflakes was beautiful and creepy. I also liked how much of the book and specific moments were carried over into the film this time too. I thought it was harrowing and intense. These type of posts are well meaning and legitimately asked but usually leads to nastiness. And yeah, I was a little nasty in my post too. So there you go.
shareNicely stated. This movie blows me away with its intensity, it's realness (I thought the kids acted very much like kids do), and it's stunningly beautiful imagery. I want to like a lot of movies like the Harry Potter films and even Lord of the Rings, but I just don't. So I guess I can understand why people don't like this one. But you're not going to talk me out of it. If it was on right now, I probably wouldn't be writing this!
shareI understand the change though. Difficult to simply have a lone character with only his inner monologue for "conversation". It also amped up the danger when it wasn't just his own skin he's trying to save. Besides, I doubt that many people who saw the movie read the book so the change doesn't really has a basis for argument by comparison for them. I like your post but I do think that it's the opposite reason why people "hate" the movie. They wanted something more straight forward and got something more complicated. Mars Attacks was a quirky parody and dark comedy. It was probably too inside and acquired to appeal to a mass audience (despite it's budget). War of the Worlds had very flawed characters and ugly sides of humanity. It showed, like the novel and radio show, the paranoia and confusion over having only a vague idea of what's going on in the big picture. It was natural to reference terrorism as that is the effect it has on the populace in the wake. The extreme of turning a regular guy desperate enough to become a human bomb was also an interesting commentary about flipping the idea of a powerful nation and turning it into a third world under dog and put it into a more recent and topical context. Successful alien invasion movies are usually pretty straight forward. Transformers, ID4, etc.
shareNah, people complain just for the sake of it. Look at almost any movie board and you'll see that people just keep whining about every single thing. "It's not like the book", "It's just like the book", "Ending was poor", "Beginning was lame", "Kids were lame", "I had to walk out", etc..
It's so much that one day they'll drive moviemakers to stick with low-budget, tried-and-true storylines like romantic comedies and stuff.
How many of you believe in telekinesis? Raise my hands.
i don't hate the movie, but don't like it very much either. here are my reasons:
first of all, realism motives.. many things in the plot are either unexplained or plain dumb and illogical, for example:
- the aliens come to get earth from us. it's clear, they want to exterminate us, therefore they want the earth. they don't want to use us as food or enslaves, they don't to use us as batteries, as in the matrix... it's obvious they want the earth, agreed? then why didn't they just take it a million or hundreds of thousands years ago, when we had no technology (therefore we wouldn't have been able to put up any kind of defense) and when we were way fewer (therefore easier to exterminate), when they were here. why bring super advanced killing machines a million years ago (or hundreds of thousands of years ago, whatever, the film isn't very clear on the question: when did they first came), and then let us evolve in intelligence, in numbers and in technology? they could've killed us in the first place without waiting and with no risks basically
- why would such an advanced civilizations, so far ahead of us, not be able to protect itself from earthly viruses? they can travel through space but they haven't discover medicine and biology? don't they know how to create vaccines?
- why did their shields stop working after all? no answers in the movie.. they just stopped working...
- why did they drink human blood? they ran out of supplies or something? one would have thought that after a million years of planning that wouldn't have been a problem. if they had other reasons for doing it, what is it then?
- what are those red plant like things that grow on the walls and why do they grow, what's their purpose? film doesn't say, they just grow..
continuation bloopers or unexplained stuff:
- i would have liked to know what happened to the son, how did he get to boston, what happened to him since they parted... movie doesn't say.. he just got to boston.
- at the beginning, the aliens destroy all electrical devices in the city with those EMPs or whatever you call them.. no cars work, there's no electricity, everything seems burned. yet minutes later we see people on the street filming the tripods.. then they get the car who magically works because the mechanic guy changed one component? what about the wiring, the electrical system of the car, which is burned? the car just works...
my reply already begins to have epic proportions, so i'll stop here.. you got the idea i suppose
1. We were not really a threat to the aliens. Their casualties were at a minimum, and if it weren't for the germs or whatever they'd have had a clean victory.
2. We don't really know about the whole biological insight of the situation. They might have prepared for something like this, but an organism may have behaved much different than foreseen when introduced to the foreign host. Sh!t happens, right?
3. We don't know how their shields or their machines work, and what kind of a symbiotic relationship there is.
4. I don't really remember if they were drinking our blood. They sucked in humans through those ports, and their cockpit was full of some orange goo, and they also sprayed the syringed blood and internals of their victims onto the red weed. Don't know if people sucked in from the cages end up on the ground to be syringed. Anyways, they were exposed to earthly bacteria one way or another.
5. We can assume that the red weed is used for terraforming Earth, but have no explanation as to how that happens.
6. Maybe he was just lucky, maybe he just ran his @ss off until the aliens were sick and could no longer fight.
7. I may be wrong but wiring doesn't burn in case of an EMP. Circuitry shorts and some components can be damaged. However this may not be a conventional EMP as even mechanical stuff like Ray's watch was stopped, so we can only assume that all the damaged components of the van was repaired. And the VCR may be from somewhere that was out of range during the initial attack.
I think you and a lot of other people who didn't like the movie disliked it because the movie reflected everthing strictly from the point of view of Ray Ferrier, and we didn't really witness anything he didn't. And this was the main reason i liked it because if it were real and i was in the middle of an alien invasion, i doubt i would have acquired any more information that what was depicted here. What you see here is what you'd witness, if not more.
How many of you believe in telekinesis? Raise my hands.
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A couple of things:
1. The cinematography bugged me throughout the entire film. The flaring effects like there was something wrong with the camera lens, the washed out colouring (although not as bad as Minority Report - also a Steven Spielberg film), the glaring backgrounds, etc. Steven Spielberg was clearly bored with making thing look natural and instead had artistic aspirations. However for suspense of disbelief to work it is necessary for things to appear naturally (i.e. how people see things), well in my case anyway. (Not so relevant for War of the Worlds but this is why I hate the use of the shaky camera so much. I do not see the world through a wobbly handheld video camera and so I cannot feel like I am really there watching the events unfold.)
2. There was no thunder with the lightning but there were still loud sounds that accompanied the lightning and were in sync with it. Why didn't Ray ask the question of why the thunder was at the same time as the lightning rather than asking why there was no thunder?
3. Just before getting on the ferry Ray and his family lost the van they were driving and yet there were cars on the ferry. Why was the ferry working anyway? Supposedly no working cars around and yet the ferry was working.
4. The music playing over the PA system at the ferry was so out of place. It seemed like the scene out of Schindler's list when the children are taken away.
5. Various cheap effects like the scene with the bodies floating down the river starting with one and then lots of them or like the train that was completely in flames and yet still running. Also when Rachel leaves Ogilvy's basement she runs out into the clearing and just stands there starring up at the sky. This was supposed to convey various emotions such as fear and suspense but was just completely unbelievable for me.
6. Direction of several scenes which just demonstrated how bored Steven Spielberg is with making things look normal. For example the camera movement around and through the van when they first drive it onto the highway and also when Harlan Ogilvy was showing Ray what the aliens were doing outside through the various windows.
7. Then ending that came out of nowhere after the tedious chapter in Ogilvy's basement. The aliens were so intelligent and yet did not know that they'll get sick and die???
8. How EMP takes out absolutely everything, even starter motors in cars. We are not that helpless against these effects. EMP causes a problem with unprotected electronics and with our electricity service providers (due to the very large cable networks) not high power devices like solenoids and electric motors.
For dark is the suede that mows like a harvest
1 = Fine, but you realize that's a personal matter and not of great value to many other people right?
2 = He said "where is the thunder?" because that noise wasn't thunder. Makes sense to me. We can already hear its not thunder but something else, why would he need to spell it out?
3 = We are only told that helicopters, planes and cars are out. We see earlier that a plane was indeed in the air, it crashed on their house. We also see that the Army convoys and the news van were working - the reporter said they were away from the town. Obviously the EMP attack centered around the spots where the machines rose up and were attacking. Not everything was affected, and nobody ever said a boat would be affected, it doesn't have the same kind of motor as those other things anyway.
4 = More personal preference.
5 = The bodies in the river didn't work for me because the aliens dont leave bodies. Everything else was fine, the train was hit by a laser very recently obviously as the fire was still very strong and the train hadn't stopped yet.
6 = I think it was less that Spielberg was bored (directors have a guy for picking shots, Spielberg just had to agree with them) and more that he was trying to make sure WE were weren't bored. Lots of those shots were things i hadn't seen at the time, Good work keeping it fresh i say. The highway cinematography was excellent by all accounts - ending the films best and biggest attack sequence perfectly. The windows complain you make is just nonsense. You are annoyed the characters looked outside through a window? Seriously?
7 = The aliens have not encountered bacteria or viruses before. They have no idea such things exist. It took us thousands of years of getting sick and dying before we even imagined what was causing it, and thousands more before we could dream of treating it. The aliens couldn't know.
8 = EMP doesn't look like that effect we saw, and as you mentioned it doesn't exactly work like an EMP we might use, but then again the aliens have different and much better tech than us, that probably wasn't any EMP we know about, but something even better.
You call that a cameltoe? Put your cheeks into it!
I actually really liked the movie. But there were some plot holes that probably weren't imagined a century ago.
Far and away, the biggest hole in the story is the aliens dying of virus infection. I mean, c'mon. An organism that has mastered space travel has no idea that there might be a flu bug on the planet your are invading? Also, the fact that the machines were buried for who knows how long. You have to think that one of them would have been found through the activity of humans. Especially in a metropolitan area where subways and the like are numerous.
Besides the holes, the sons actions were just downright unbelievable and stupid. Add to the fact that he lives through it all even though you are rooting for him to be eaten slowly by a bunch of aliens. Hey, the world is ending but I still hate you dad and I want to drive you cray cray.
Other than that, the movie had my attention throughout its entirety.
If Robbie would have died a spectaular, gruesome death it would have had potential. How the hell Spielberg allowed such a preformance is beyond words. No wonder the film didn't win any major awards at the Oscars, other than for the CGI...
shareIf Robbie would have died a spectaular, gruesome death it would have had potential.
Don't try to cash in love, that check will always bounce.share
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