War of the Worlds

I have great respect for Spielberg, and for Tom Cruise. Spielberg movies usually go underrated. AI is an excellent movie but didn’t get good reviews. Similarly, I didn’t get good reviews for War of the Worlds as well, but I thought it would be a good movie; common people just don’t have the vision to understand such movies. Hence I decided to watch the movie. Well, for the first time, I was kind of disappointed.

The movie had excellent special effects. It’s one of the best Spielberg movies in the fields of cinematography and sound effects. But it lacked a plot. It lacked a theme. It lacked logic. And it lacked an ending. Lesson learnt, you cannot make a great movie just by overloading it with special effects and sounds, and ignoring the story. Sure, it was adapted from HG Wells novel, but Spielberg left too many questions unanswered. I am sure the novel would be much better.

One of the biggest goofs of the movie was that when the aliens started killing people, a man was recording the scene with his video camera. Now, how did the camera survive the electromagnetic pulse that rendered all the electronic items unusable, including cell phones, watches, even vehicles. There were other many minor mistakes in the movie that I wasn’t expecting to be so obvious.

The ending was abrupt. Five minutes ago aliens were invading the planet and all of a sudden they are dead. How did all the machines die all of a sudden? Was it the bacteria? If aliens had been observing the earth and its atmosphere for thousands of years weren’t they aware of the bacteria and other diseases that were common on earth? I thought aliens were more intelligent and technologically advanced than humans.