Well im just happy that the ending seems to follow the book.

Well if I'm comparing to Tim Burton's BATMAN of 1989, then I'd say Burton's is infinitely better and he gave the Villains more flair and pizzaz than Nolan did with a 2nd rate Villain like The Scarecrow, but if I'm comparing it to Schumacher's last 2 pieces of ####, then BEGINS is a Masterpiece with the 9.5 it deserved.. What's so damn hard in grasping this?? Christ almighty kid..

Man...the ending must have been outrageously horrible from all I read in this thread. I did not read the poilers, but the way it seems, it must be one of the worst ever conceived.

So 20 Boo'd and the other 480 people liked it or even loved it.. Not bad..

Its already got a tomatometer.Its at 100%
6 fresh and 0 rotten so far.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/war_of_ ... /?show=all

Ok, I don't think a review from me is needed. Bleh, maybe I can put something together for tomorrow, but honestly, I think someone more fairhanded should do it. I'm clearly not happy with the film.


Two redeeming factors:

1) Some of the effects. The tipping over of the boat is the second best boat/ferry/ship-related action sequence I have ever seen (after Titanic, of course). Many of the effects are excellent, especially that superb moving hand/eye which searches the basement for any humans. It is simply brilliant in its simplicity, but don't let it fool you: it's as good an effect as any in Spielberg's films.

2) The most effective scenes are those where you see what the invasion makes people do, specifically, what people do to other people. The scene involving the car and the ferry are very difficult to get through, I felt, because of the truth that they contain: In desperate times, people will hurt each other to save themselves.

Be gone

It's not.. It's just that the 2 posters who saw it in advanced sound like they read far too much into movies when they view them then the average moviegoer and this ending is being read into wayy too much for it's own good.. It's no more or less plausible then the ALIEN and PREDATOR surviving on our planet Earth for over 200 Years in a Rite of Passage in an underground pyramid..

The book takes place in the late 1800's. Wasn't a whole lot of ways to defeat an alien invasion, so what else could he come up with. With the whole timeline being moved to the present, it definitely was open to change.

spoilers...

It makes these aliens look like a bunch of dimwitted boobs.

Guys, the original novel this is all based on had a lame as hell ending, there wasn't a lot they could change from that.

Well, nobody clapped, which generally happens at these screenings (even Exorcist 4 received clapping). And I didn't boo, but certainly didn't "like it or even love it" much. But I guess it's the silence debate. Stunned silence because they loved what they saw, or silence because they hated it?

And considering the fairly negative comments on the way out, I don't think they were happily impressed.

Book readers and all, do you guys suggest seeing the spoiler before the movie? It seems like you two never read the book (like me), and both of you hated the ending since you didn't know what to expect, while everyone else is fine with it...

Whatever happened to filming alternate endings so that they can screen test it to audience to see what ending they would loved the best. Perhaps they should of done that even if it means changing the ending from the book

Didn't they do that with AVP? :razz:

In response to BKB's AVP comparisons...



BKB, imagine the Alien Queen and the final Predator fighting on the Antarctic surface, tearing the shit out of each other. All of a sudden, they drop dead for no apparent reason, and a narrator says it's because of the atmosphere. That's comparable to this.

I think spielberg respects the author and decided to have the ending in the theme of the author's original.

Guys, the ending revolving around the aliens is bad, ok, but so was Signs'.

The more awful aspect of it is the ending to the emotional aspect of the film. I can't properly articulate it without using spoiler, so be warned:


Cruise plays a dad who has not been good with his kids. In fact, their relationship is very strained. They do not trust him, he does not know how to win back their trust. The entire thing is rather shabbily done. It's hard sometimes to believe that these are unique, genuine characters. The two kids give the annoying brats from Jurassic Park a run for their money. Anyways, so Cruise spends most of his time throughout the film protecting them (even though he lets his son go in a scene that is a stunningly ill-timed display of the parent/teenage ritual wherein the teen needs to go his own way). In fact, he kills a man (Robbins' character) just so that the aliens won't hear them and thus threaten Rachel (Dakota, Cruise's daughter).

Anyways, so he goes through hell, sacrifices his life multiple times, etc. all to save his kids. The result? At the end, Rachel runs into the arms of her mom (Cruise's ex-wife), while the door opens to reveal Cruise's ex-s parents ( who are not fond of Cruise's character), and her new husband as well as Cruise's son, who mysteriously survived. What does Cruise get for going through hell? Quite literally, he only gets a frickin hug from his son. Oh great! He won't get back with his wife cause the new husband is still alive.


What a horrible, horrible way to end. He gets nothing for giving everything. His daughter, whom he has saved multiple times and for whom he risks everything, barely looks at him once her mom is back in the picture.

Well thats a sad ending................I like it!
\:D/

Even without the ending, it would still not work completely. The script has serious flaws from beginning to end.

The worst aspect of the film (worse than the ending): the characters. They are not drawn out well at all. It amazed me how little I cared about whether Cruise and his annoying, screaming daughter survived or not. I just kept my attention on them because that's what the camera did. Had the camera shifted to someone else, I'd have no problem following someone else.

I don't mind the sad part about Cruise's character getting shit on. That's ok with me, as people, even kids, are not very loving and appreciative sometimes.

The dynamics in film work differently than they do in real life.

When you have two or three people, you automatically differentiate between them. One is good, the other is not, etc. Look at the film Downfall, and see whether some character don't come off more sympathetically than others. Now, if you had victims of the Nazi regime, and you compared those characters from Downfall with them, those characters whom you had sympathy for all of a sudden seem much less sympathetic because your sympathy has shifted towards the victims. It's all relative. Whatever the set of characters we are given, we assign each a role in relation to all others. Some are good, some are not so good, etc.

When you have a scene where aliens are threatening you, and one of the characters is trying to make sure everyone is ok, and the other two characters are screaming their heads off, the sympathy level for those two decreases markedly.

The problem, I felt, at the beginning, was that Cruise's character would joke at the inappropriate moments, or that the two kids would be unusually unresponsive or extremely curious, all things that eventually come to be frustrating.

Well,reading the ending that you guys posted made me at ease,i like the sound of it and if that is one of the major complaints then i feel good.A lot of people hated the ending of A.I but i didnt,maybe the same effect will happen here.

Btw, I loved Minority Report (great film), I liked AI very much, and appreciated what Spielberg (and Kubrick) were trying to do, I think highly of Signs, and had great affection for The Village.


So I don't have a problem with either Spielberg or Cruise, or with twist endings. I just have a problem with this film.


I know most here will like it much more than I will. What a surprise.

I don't see much discussion by Box and Dark Shape of the effects. Were they better than expected? Worse? Different? Same old?

edit, I see box's post on that now. But surprised how little they are discussed in this kind of movie that uses them as a lynchpin

Excellent. Superb craftsmanship by people who are at the top of their game. The money shots are great, from beginning to end. No complaints on that front at all.