My head may have sploded anyway.
I liked it because it was close enough to what I remember the story being about: trying to survive in almost impossible circumstances, behaviours of people in panicked crowd situations and one on one in survival mode.
It was updated well and very close in nature to Signs which is one of my favourite alien invasion movies ever. The characters were very similar; the main character being a father trying to protect his children at all costs and keep it together despite his feelings of helplessness, fear and despair. These are interesting things to me and I like to see them explored in a Blockbuster setting. The characters are helpless and just barely manage to survive, they aren't heroes and they can fight back in only small ways.
To me the essence of War of the Worlds was there and the movie was suitably freaky and spooky and scarey and it followed me home a bit. I really enjoyed it, I liked the tripods and the noise they made prior to firing weapons. I thought the aliens themselves were a bit lacking in original design.
I thought they looked too much like the Independence Day aliens and not humanoid enough to be truly scary. That's just me though.
Dakota Fanning and Tom Cruise were really good in this movie. I really admire Tom as an actor and he can do anti-hero quite well. I haven't seen everything he's done obviously but I liked him in Magnolia ;p
Posted by jenni at July 2, 2005 01:02 PM