Daddy, You’re Scaring Me

July 2, 2005

War of the Worlds is a really peculiar Hollywood movie. The typical layout of this movie would have Tom Cruise be the world’s greatest dock worker, and only his unique skills at uh… moving boxes could save the earth. Thankfully, that never really happens.

Cruise is actually terrible at pretty much everything except running with his mouth open. There’s some plot about him redeeming himself in the eyes of his family, but it never really connects. The movie concentrates more on aliens vaporizing people, and how humanity is completely, hopelessly fucked. It never strays from that vision, as man turns on itself in riots and the pile of bodies grow. The movie actually works perfectly as a horror movie, as it’s completely terrifiying.

The more the aliens rampage, the cooler the movie is. By the time they’re harvesting humans left and right and covering the earth in red licorice, it was wicked awesome. On our side of the ball, we run, we die. We shoot, it deflects off forcefields and yet we keep shooting. I would have pulled for the humans more, but really, we’re crap. As a result, Spielberg has made bizarro-Schindler, a genocide where we root for Nazis. It’s all strangely satisfying despite being somewhat mediocre.

Posted in Moving Pictures