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.

Oscar worthy? is it the best you have seen this year so far?

Okay, well, I took the dive and read the ending.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most alien films end like that?

The FX were excellent, though I don't think they were quite up to the level of Revenge of the Sith. That said, the alien mechs are breathtaking, and I love the look of the creatures themselves.



With the alien force dropping dead with no explanation until the epilogue speech?

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.

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.

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.

That's disappointing to me. Because from what I read, this is Spielberg's response to 9/11, and I was there for it. The media coverage of it, showing people bonding together in the face of tragedy, was accurate, believe it or not. I didn't see people hurting each other to save themselves. It felt like everyone was family, for a brief moment in time. I know that kind of behavior happens at soccer games and night club fires and the like. But when something really catastrophic happens, which is, I thought, the point of the movie, people react differently. At least, in the one catastrophe I've been through they did.

Box, Dark, you talked only briefly about the aliens themselves. Can you describe in detail how they look, how they interact with their surroundings...

That's disappointing to me. Because from what I read, this is Spielberg's response to 9/11, and I was there for it. The media coverage of it, showing people bonding together in the face of tragedy, was accurate, believe it or not. I didn't see people hurting each other to save themselves. It felt like everyone was family, for a brief moment in time. I know that kind of behavior happens at soccer games and night club fires and the like. But when something really catastrophic happens, which is, I thought, the point of the movie, people react differently. At least, in the one catastrophe I've been through they did.

what i don't understand is ... even though both of you don't seem happy about the movie, why are the 2 of you watching the movie again tonight?

Possible Spoilers

Like the tripods, the aliens themselves have three legs, two front, one behind. For the most part, it's pretty difficult to get a close look, because we only see them twice: once in the basement (often from Dakota's veiled perspective) and once at the end, when one of them comes out of the tripod dead. They have large eyes, like E.T.'s, but bigger. I'd say overall, they resemble cats, the ugliest and meanest cats you've ever seen. Sadly, they are more humorous than scary, at least from my perspective. I'm glad (and not surprised) that Spielberg kept their screen time to a minimum.

End Spoilers

Meow.

Someone else said they looked like cats. A cross between a dino and a cat. Is it true during the basement scene, they use a computer? Or was that reviewer just being funny?

I'm not. I have no intention of watching the film again.