War Of The Worlds.

I went to see WOTW tonight. When I first heard they were making it and subsequently saw the trailer, I couldn’t wait to see it. However I didn’t see it the weekend it came out and several people’s comments put me off a little bit. So I got around to seeing it tonight, despite the huge queues at Star City….it would seem half of Birmingham was taking advantage of Orange Wednesday and Star City’s machines that they type the 2 for 1 code numbers into weren’t working, so some poor sods were having to write everyone’s number on a voucher in the queue. You then had to give the cashier your voucher. This caused the biggest queue there I’ve ever seen!

When we finally got into the film, having missed the 20:30 showing, and narrowly avoided missing the 21:05 showing we found that our screen was virtually empty! All that queuing and there was no one in there! Nevermind….

I actually really enjoyed the film. I thought it was an interesting angle for an ‘action’ movie…following one main character closely (this isn’t anything new), but you only see and know what Tom Cruise’s character (and his kids) sees and knows in the film. There’s no TV news reports showing the world’s major cities being blown up or lying in ruins….unlike films like Independence Day. There was no information being passed to people by mass media because there was no, or very little electricity anywhere…..and non of the U.S. Government’s emergency warning systems were working….no shots of the president pressing the red button to authorise the nukes, despite potentially killing half the population and so on. It was much more a personal account of the fear, shock and confusion of 2 or 3 people, who had no idea what was going on, what/where they should go, or who was going to help them…or kill them. The early scenes of the invasion were all in a local suburb, not in a big city centre. I liked all of that. I thought it was quite cleverly done in that way.

The cgi stuff looked pretty good too – while aliens in movies will always be a bit tricky I thought they did them well. They were pretty true to the original film (which I must admit I don’t know well – I know the soundtrack better) and the destruction of people and property was really good too. Not too over the top, just right. Again focusing on the personal struggles of the characters and not a more ‘global’ view – where you see a montage of shots from different random people who only appear once. There’s a couple of bits where random people interact with the main characters, but you don’t get shoot off storylines based around this characters watering things down.

I REALLY liked how at times the characters were just in total shock and remained silent, not saying ANYTHING. This made the story far better and more realistic. So much more so than having people running around shouting “Run for your fucking lives, there’s motherfucking aliens coming!” and all that cheesy macho shit. In fact I was surprised how cheese-free it was. Very little comedy and daft ‘jokes’…I thought it was quite dark and despairing a lot of the time. It wasn’t a case of “Don’t worry – the human race will prevail and destroy these aliens!”like a lot of films of that type…..it was more “we can’t do anything about this, we just have to try and survive as long as possible, but eventually we’re going to get wiped out”. Dark, despairing and confusing – which is I guess how you would feel in that situation.

The end was by far the most cheesy part and had the typical Hollywood happy ending, but that can be forgiven in my eyes because I thought the rest of the film was really good.

Definitely worth seeing!