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War of the Worlds

Every so often, a movie comes along that doesn’t seem like it’s doing well in the theater, but for the life of you, you can’t figure out why. It’s got a fantastic director, a well-known star, a Hot Bad Guy, and the source material is classic. At first you think, it must be that Crazy Tom Cruise has put everyone off. You don’t bother to see it in the theater, because, frankly, you’d rather go see Batman Begins again, if it came down to it. But you make a note of it and put it on your Netflix queue.

Then you are forced to witness, at least in the comfort of your own home, one of the most painfully awful pieces of tripe ever to grace the Silver Screen. Dear God, this was a wretched film. In case you’ve been under a rock, here’s the short story: aliens invade New Jersey. They eventually lose. People are killed. Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

However, in an effort to Update This Story for the Modern Viewer and to Make the Audience Sympathize with the Characters, the scriptwriters threw in a whole, extended, divorced dad dealing with his annoying children subplot. Dad, played by Crazy Tom Cruise, wants to get them all to Boston, where presumably Mom (played by the Tragically Underutilized and Way Too Talented for This Crap Miranda Otto) will make Crazy Tom Cruise sleep in the gutter. So CTC drags the kids through the wilds of New Jersey (!), dodging attack aliens the whole way. Then, of course, comes the really unbelievable part: he wants to take a ferry from Jersey to Boston. Um, CTC? There’s going to be something in the way of the ferry. And by something, I mean Long Island. And why did you think the ferry would be safe from the aliens anyway? They can fly, dumbass.

Needless to say, the ferry plan falls a bit, er, flat, so CTC takes Annoying Teen and Dakota Fanning haring across the land, I assume taking the actual route to Boston, through Westchester and Connecticut and taking the Pike. (Idiots. Screenwriters should be required to check maps before they submit anything.) Dakota Fanning screamed the whole way and Annoying Teen was, well, annoying until he took off and tried to join the Army, even though I’m almost positive he didn’t go through basic training.

Eventually, they make it to Boston, which is Completely Deserted. Except, of course, for Mom and her parents and (hold on to your seats, kids) Annoying Teen! He made it through a line of creepy alien transports! Unscathed! Yeah. Somehow the aliens die (in the book, they’re killed by the common cold, but who knows what happened here) and I suppose they all live happily ever after. Except for CTC and Mom, who are still divorced. And also, you know, the thousands of dead people around the world. But Dakota Fanning lived, and I suppose that’s all we really needed.