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.
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....
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 ]