Nov 24 2005
Movie Review: The War of Worlds
In my movie review world, there are only two types of movies: the watch-able and the non-watchable. “The War of the Worlds” definitely belongs to the former.
It is watchable because it was stimulating, for lack of better words. Of course, the first thing one notices is the special effects. They are so smoothly embedded within movie as a whole, it is the matter-of-fact-ness that is really impressive: there are more normal lighting shots and more continuous close-ups. Unlike in Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter where the crudeness of the effects were tolerated to imply fantasy environ, WoW is meant to be viewed as a movie of reality.
Of course, there are many shades of “watch-able”. The movie could have been better if:
1. Tom Cruise wasn’t it in. He doesn’t know how to act (vicariously) but only how to perform (repetitively/mechanically)
2. There wasn’t too much Hollywood “fast-food” in the movie. In that I mean those over-recycled skits (suspense, horror, tension) that sparkled all over the movie.
3. There was a more sensible ending: the virus alibi seems to me more like a justification for the other half of Morgan Freeman’s fee than a real conclusion of a war of the worlds.
Anyway, whatever flaw the movie has depicting the celestial conflicts, it shines in portraying human relationships. I thought the beginning was really bodacious in that the script didn’t even bother to hint beforehand that Ray Ferrier was divorced. It just assumed the audience would relate to it when they saw a couple leaving their kids to a single guy.
Now that is something the New Jersey Martians would NOT have recognized had they visited the Earth today.