Seeing it at midnight tonight (special staff showing of it), and I hope I can stay awake. [img]tongue.gif[/img] I'm hoping it's good, anyways. It certainly looks promising. I'll tell you what I think of it as soon as I wake up tommorrow. ;)

<font color="cyan">Please do, as I want to see it.

The trailers don't give away much, of what causes the destruction, but Spielberg doesn't usually put his name to shite!</font>

Er... well it wasn't what I was expecting, that's for sure. The first half was very good, but through the last half, it just got wierd/bad. The ending was waay to sudden IMO, and was just stupid. (I would say what was so stupid about it, but I'm trying to keep this spoiler free. [img]smile.gif[/img] ) It ended in the middle of action, pretty much, and almost left you wondering if they got killed off or not. And, there were all these little red 'veins' all over the ground that noone in the theater knew what the heck they were. It was ok, but nothing special. Sort of a dissapointment for me, really... I was expecting a lot more fighting of the aliens than running. I would give it 2-2.5/5 stars if I were rating it.

Have you heard the original music Sir G? That is where the "red weed" comes from (and the whole movie for that matter) so I guess all us "Hardcore fans" of war of the worlds would understand it.....

I went to the movies last night to see this, but I ended up seeing Batman begins so I can't say much about it yet...

Yeah, never seen/heard/read anything to do with War of the Worlds before this movie. But they should have at least explained it a little for us non-'hardcore' moviegoers.

At first I just assumed the red weed was the aliens starting to terraform (marsaform?) Earth.


Spoiler -- highlight the text to read it.
<font color="#463300">Or else it was their form of a "sensor array". In the basement, Tom broke off a piece, and soon after they got the elastic eyeball...</font>
end spoiler

[ 06-29-2005, 06:23 PM: Message edited by: VulcanRider ]

Well, I thought...
SPOILER
.
.
.
.
.
.... that the eyeball came just to check out the house, see if it was empty.
It looked almost like veins to me... blood vessels or something.

SPOILER

Was it not human blood? Blood is their food and drink and spread it around so it would grow or something.Like crops and then reap it when it is ripe.

Is the ending somewhat like the original movie? * cough *

Might be spoiler


certain something in the atmospehere that help humanity? ;)

I heard this movie really, really sucks.

Wonder if the soundtrack is any good, if it uses any of the original music? I want to re-buy the original War of the Worlds album....it's out of this world!

Forever Autumn by Justin Hayward is a fantastic track.

Is the ending somewhat like the original movie? * cough *

Might be spoiler


certain something in the atmospehere that help humanity? ;) </font>[/QUOTE]SPOILIA!!!
.
.
.
.
I doubt it was the atmosphere it was in the blood. They consumed it as drink (as it was shown when one of those tripods stuck that needle thing through that guy and drew the lifeblood from him. And those aliens tripods are filled with it.) Simply what killed them were germs. I came to this conclusion when the narrator speaks about the end about "immunties blah blah blah"

Go see it for yourself. IMHO it is a fantastic movie.

Is the ending somewhat like the original movie? * cough *

Might be spoiler


certain something in the atmospehere that help humanity? ;) </font>[/QUOTE]Well, whatever, I still think the ending was way to sudden. Other than that, it was a really good movie. They could have kept the same bacteria-kills-them ending, and not had it just bang! in the middle of action. It would have made it better, IMO.

Yeah, I have been looking for the CD-Version of War of the Worlds for ages, but can't seem to find it anywhere locally yet :(

<font color="cyan">Me and my girlfriend went to see it tonight.

Well, I thought it was excellent.

The whole film was good, and right at the end, when I thought it was over, I said to myself, that ending is so shite.

Then came the twist, and I really enjoyed it. Go see it!

To answer some questions:


CRITICAL SPOILERS BELOW:


The aliens planet is very similar to ours, and before humanity exists they source it out, bury the tripods for when they need to move planets.

The time comes at the start of the film. They start destroying it.

Think of the Tripods as the scouts and villagers.

They are not there to destroy human life, they are there to prepare the planet for the relocation. The tripods capture the humans, and disperse the blood around the planet in the veins, for nutrients/harvest or whatever. They do kill some people, but nvm.

At the end, the planet is ready to take over.It is fully covered in veins, and would be able to support the alien life.

But what an ending!

I loved it:

It took billions of deaths for man to develop his immunity to the bacteria. It was mans biggest ally. The aliens could survive in our atmosphere, drink our blood, but, they had never come into contact with the bacteria before, so they die.

It was very similar to the start of life in the sea, millions of years back. All life were single celled forms, and they thrived in the sea. Then coral starting forming, producing oxygen. Out of the single celled forms in the sea, scientists estimate only 0.1% of cells adapted to the oxygen,and survived. The other 99.9% of cells couldn't handle the oxygen, and were poisoned.

Luckily the cells humans developed from were in this 0.1%.

Maybe H.G Wells didn't base the book on this principle, aliens and all, but it's definately the same kind of thing.

Excellent if you ask me!</font>

Exactly the same as the original then...how novel. I bet that took some thinking about, new ideas and all that.

[ 07-01-2005, 07:07 PM: Message edited by: Charlie ]

This film sucked so much.

I just saw it yesterday. I knew I should've seen Sin City instead.

SPOILER

How is the kid still alive after that explosion?! And what the hell, they all just suddenly die? Okay, I got the bacteria thing, but that's sooooo lame. In a novel, fine, in a Tom Cruise action thriller, nobody wants bacteria to be the hero! The tripods got boring after like the third one, the aliens were cute, and what the hell was with spraying people around everywhere? Dead bodies floating on the river? I thought they evaporated everyone? And if they were planning it before humans even existed, why not just take the damn planet there and then?! Worst film ever!

[ 07-02-2005, 05:16 AM: Message edited by: Brayf ]

Jesus, I had to go back and edit that about six times 'cause I kept noticing swearing in it (I originally posted it on another board). And they say manners don't cost a thing!

<font color="cyan">As the film stated, they didn't take it as it was a backup planet, for when theres "dies".

I don't think they expected the humans to be produced, as they were there before humans existed.

The bacteria ending was good impo, because it was different. I'd never read the book, and wasn't expecting it. And if every tom cruise movie was the same, they would get a bit boring.

Not sure about the bodies in the water, maybe they were killed by debris or something, not the lasers.

And Charlie, it's the same ending because it's based on the same book. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be called WotW, and it would be a totally different story all the way through!

I liked it anyway!

Only thing I didn't like, was the boy should of died. That's a typical Speilberg cheese ending!</font>

Dead bodies on the river? Maybe they came from another ferry boat, or a downed 747, or they were driving across a bridge when the aliens knocked it down... Lots of reasons could explain them.

Sure it could. It could be the exact same story all the way through, with just an altered ending.

That makes sense. Fair enough, I still didn't like the film. The ending really was poor, I'd have enjoyed it as a novel ending but Spielberg made it far too abrupt and anti-climactic.

<font color = lightgreen>The aliens dying suddenly wasn't anticlimactic. The aliens were only incidental to the main story...or did we see the same movie? [img]graemlins/beigesmilewinkgrin.gif[/img]

Not really great, but better than many I have seen.</font>

<font color="cyan">Elaborate, please.</font>

<font color = lightgreen>The movie was about Tom Cruise and his children. The fact that aliens began attacking is simply bad luck. [img]graemlins/petard.gif[/img] </font>

I saw the original movie, I remember how the aliens died. That was original back then.

I'm going to see it tonight.

I saw it, and I only had time to sleep 3 hours. My head is killing me...

It was as I expected. I went to see it with my brother and father. My father commented that there was not enough action, I told him it wasn't an action movie, and he replied that they made it look like one in the adds.

I guess he's right. Maybe that's why many people are disapointed.

[ 07-04-2005, 01:00 AM: Message edited by: Luvian ]

Well, with all the debris they showed in the ads, I certainly expected more fighting, action I suppose, than there was.

Saw it tonight... not very impressed, it's always fun to watch the earth being destroyed, but having Tom Cruise ruunig through the 96% of the movie and not getting to see him killed in a horrible way is just dissapointment... [img]smile.gif[/img]

Saw it this weekend and loved it. An action movie with an actual story and great effects when called for. And I liked the fact that he ran the whole movie, and really liked that it was so focused on him coming around to only protecting his daughter. Way better than I expected it to be.

Was it the same way this time around?

Incase any of you wanted to read the original War of the Worlds online you can find it here -

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/3/36/36-h/36-h.htm

Project Gutenberg is an awesome source for online reading.

Was it the same way this time around? </font>[/QUOTE]Yes, it was shot differently, but it was the exact same thing.

My partner and I saw it today. It was one of the very few movies we that we nearly walked out from.

Another typical disfunctional family presented ad nauseum, with relief at times via some good special effects.

There was some good acting by a dead sheep in the second half, but not from any human ( or alien ) actors.

I thought it was a valiant effort by Spielberg in terms of human drama. But whilst it conveyed the failure and 'redemption' of the father figure fairly well, on so many other levels where it counts most, it was fatally flawed.

The film feels too much like "War of the US Suburbs" in that there isn't enough shot coverage and information about the suffering in the rest of the world. But this atypical of US navel gazing in film I suppose. However, I could have done without the whole post-911 holocaust subtext. (Is it the terrorists?) I guess it can be perceived as a kind of therapy in a ludicrous kind of way.

We could have done without seeing the aliens themselves. They looked unremarkable and derivative anyway and if you squint, you can almost make out that they're wearing turbans. :D
Ironically, "Ul-lah" (as taken from Jeff Wayne's musical, Aloo in the novel) does sound somewhat reminiscent of Allah. Not that I'm making any conclusions, just offering food for thought.

The majority of the scenes involving Tim Robbins were handled poorly with the weak attempt to combine the original's idealism in the Pastor character. (We'll start all over again!)

Anyone feel a bit of deja-Raptor-vu when the alien tendril starting exploring the basement? Personally, I thought it looked more like an elongated extra from *Battries Not Included and didn't find the scene as frightening as it no doubt should have been.

So a blasphemy to the original, really!
I found it a little ironic that God never seems to have gotten a mention until the outro-sequence, which contrasts the heavy religiousity of HG Welles novel. The modern film misses the point really of mankind banding together against a common foe in favour of too narrow a focus.

Perhaps a saving grace for my misanthropic tendencies, were the sequences where humans were getting torched by the tripod death rays in the streets. If only the rest of the film was like this.... :D

I had to go home and listen to the Jeff Wayne musical, aswell as Orsen Welles original radio broadcast to really flush it out of my system and get back to the central ideas. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Oh yeah, and the narrative resolution was horrible to say the least. Definitely felt tacked on.

[ 07-21-2005, 02:15 PM: Message edited by: CerebroDragon ]

I can't believe it took me this long to see the damn movie [img]tongue.gif[/img]

Well I finally bought it (the day it came out here) and have just finished watching it...

All I can say is... WOW [img]graemlins/wow.gif[/img]

Much better than I expected, I loved the whole thing bar one bit....

The boy should have died :D