I happen to love Hook. [-(

me too!!
well i dont LOVE it, it was pretty good and entertaining!

Same here, loved it as a kid (but haven't seen it since).

http://movies.msn.com/movies/article.aspx?news=195411

MSNBC Critic gives WOTW ****/*****... Looks like the vast majority of critics love this movie and this weekend can't come soon enough..

Technically, no matter how well known and famous of a critic he is, you shouldn't have to go to him period to make up your mind if you want to see a movie or not.. See it for yourself, then form your opinion...

Ebert praised the much-loathed Honeymooners and gave WOTW 2/4. I thought he was a good critic until today, I've generally agreed with him, but this is silly.

Ebert's just a guy, he's very intelligent and knows his shit.

He just didn't like it. There is no problem with that.

Because I'm BKB and that's my trademark, my character, and if I didn't do that, this place much like RT or IGN would be boring as hell.. I love a good flame war Baby!! FLAME ON!!

It's 82 % fresh now and falling...

People were saying that with Sin City and it stabilised just below 80% though :wink:

Here is Ebert's Full Review of it if it hasn't already been posted.. From the looks of his review, he gave it a bad score cause he didn't like the lok of the Alien or Tripod.. I think he tried to hard in this review to put it down..

BY ROGER EBERT / June 29, 2005

Cast & CreditsRay Ferrier: Tom Cruise
Rachel: Dakota Fanning
Mary Ann: Miranda Otto
Robbie: Justin Chatwin
Harlan Ogilvy: Tim Robbins


Paramount Pictures presents a film directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Josh Friedman and David Koepp. Based on the novel by H.G. Wells. Running time: 118 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for frightening sequences of sci-fi violence and disturbing images).


'War of the Worlds" is a big, clunky movie containing some sensational sights but lacking the zest and joyous energy we expect from Steven Spielberg. It proceeds with the lead-footed deliberation of its 1950s predecessors to give us an alien invasion that is malevolent, destructive and, from the alien point of view, pointless. They've "been planning this for a million years" and have gone to a lot of trouble to invade Earth for no apparent reason and with a seriously flawed strategy. What happened to the sense of wonder Spielberg celebrated in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and the dazzling imagination of "Minority Report"?

The movie adopts the prudent formula of viewing a catastrophe through the eyes of a few foreground characters. When you compare it with a movie like "The Day After Tomorrow," which depicted the global consequences of cosmic events, it lacks dimension: Martians have journeyed millions of miles to attack a crane operator and his neighbors (and if they're not Martians, they journeyed a lot farther). The hero, Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), does the sort of running and hiding and desperate defending of his children that goes with the territory, and at one point even dives into what looks like certain death to rescue his daughter.

There's a survivalist named Ogilvy (Tim Robbins) who has quick insights into surviving: "The ones that didn't flatline are the ones who kept their eyes open." And there are the usual crowds of terrified citizens looking up at ominous threats looming above them. But despite the movie's $135 million budget, it seems curiously rudimentary in its action.

The problem may be with the alien invasion itself. It is not very interesting. We learn that countless years ago, invaders presumably but not necessarily from Mars buried huge machines all over the Earth. Now they activate them with lightning bolts, each one containing an alien (in what form, it is hard to say). With the aliens at the controls, these machines crash up out of the Earth, stand on three towering but spindly legs and begin to zap the planet with death rays. Later, their tentacles suck our blood and fill steel baskets with our writhing bodies.

To what purpose? Why zap what you later want to harvest? Why harvest humans? And, for that matter, why balance these towering machines on ill-designed supports? If evolution has taught us anything, it is that limbs of living things, from men to dinosaurs to spiders to centipedes, tend to come in numbers divisible by four. Three legs are inherently not stable, as Ray demonstrates when he damages one leg of a giant tripod, and it falls helplessly to the ground.

The tripods are indeed faithful to the original illustrations for H.G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds, and to the machines described in the historic 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast and the popular 1953 movie. But the book and radio program depended on our imaginations to make them believable, and the movie came at a time of lower expectations in special effects. You look at Spielberg's machines and you don't get much worked up, because you're seeing not alien menace but clumsy retro design. Perhaps it would have been a good idea to set the movie in 1898, at the time of Wells' novel, when the tripods represented a state-of-the-art alien invasion.

There are some wonderful f/x moments, but they mostly don't involve the pods. A scene where Ray wanders through the remains of an airplane crash is somber and impressive, and there is an unforgettable image of a train, every coach on fire, roaring through a station. Such scenes seem to come from a kind of reality different from that of the tripods.

Does it make the aliens scarier that their motives are never spelled out? I don't expect them to issue a press release announcing their plans for world domination, but I wish their presence reflected some kind of intelligent purpose. The alien ship in "Close Encounters" visited for no other reason, apparently, than to demonstrate that life existed elsewhere, could visit us, and was intriguingly unlike us while still sharing such universal qualities as the perception of tone. Those aliens wanted to say hello. The alien machines in "War of the Worlds" seem designed for heavy lifting in an industry that needs to modernize its equipment and techniques. (The actual living alien being we finally glimpse is an anticlimax, a batlike, bug-eyed monster, confirming the wisdom of Kubrick and Clarke in deliberately showing no aliens in "2001").

The human characters are disappointingly one-dimensional. Cruise's character is given a smidgen of humanity (he's an immature, divorced hotshot who has custody of the kids for the weekend) and then he wanders out with his neighbors to witness strange portents in the sky, and the movie becomes a story about grabbing and running and ducking and hiding and trying to fight back.

There are scenes in which poor Dakota Fanning, as his daughter, has to be lost or menaced, and then scenes in which she is found or saved, all with much desperate shouting. A scene where an alien tentacle explores a ruined basement where they're hiding is a mirror of a better scene in "Jurassic Park" where characters hide from a curious raptor.

The thing is, we never believe the tripods and their invasion are practical. How did these vast metal machines lie undetected for so long beneath the streets of a city honeycombed with subway tunnels, sewers, water and power lines, and foundations? And why didn't a civilization with the physical science to build and deploy the tripods a million years ago not do a little more research about conditions on the planet before sending its invasion force? It's a war of the worlds, all right -- but at a molecular, not a planetary level.

All of this is just a way of leading up to the gut reaction I had all through the film: I do not like the tripods. I do not like the way they look, the way they are employed, the way they attack, the way they are vulnerable or the reasons they are here. A planet that harbors intelligent and subtle ideas for science fiction movies is invaded in this film by an ungainly Erector set.


:-k Hmmm, either way, I'm still there this weekend regardless of what any critic says.. It looks kick ass.. Perhaps as a suggestion, folks should read so much into the movie and dissecting it like Ebert does and enjoy it for what it is.. Ebert states that he has a difficult time believing that such an invasion like this could happen.. No s-h-i-t Roger.. Like what Alien invasion isn't difficult to grasp in whether or not it could happen or not???

Ebert grades each film on its own merit; he has stated many times that he almost wishes he could do away with the rating (4 star) system solely for the fact that such a system brings about complaints like this. Sure, a 3/4 for The Honeymooners vs. 2/4 for War of the Worlds looks silly, but if you actually read his reviews, you'll find that there's more than likely some reasoning behind those stars.

Besides, he called Minority Report the best film of 2002. I'm guessing his expectations were rather high for this one.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/rev ... rlds_x.htm

USA TODAY has given War of the Worlds ***/**** and of an interesting note, the reviewer has stated that while she enjoyed the film, she couldn't help but to be somewhat drawn away from the movie, not because of the FX and the movie itself, but because of Tom Cruise and his latest rantings and Scientology B-u-l-ls-h-i-t which prompts me to wonder if the bad reviews we've sen thus far really are more because of Cruise and his rantings moreso than the movie itself???

Ebert's is the only cream of the crop review that is negative, out of 12. So too early to say any tide is turning or slipping. I do expect a few more negative major ones as time goes on but the ratio is much higher fresh than expected.

79%, 52 for, 14 against.

but

I think the CoC section is still in the 90%.

Yes cream of the crop, also known as the only reviews most real people read, 92%. I expect the CoC to settle at around 85% after a few days.

Percentage is continuing to plummet - this thread needs a name change...

You guys care what Willie Waffle at wafflemovies.com thinks?

I pay little to no attention to small city critics. Take this steaming pile of shit blurb.

It's tiring, stressful and just plain not much fun to watch a 10-year-old scream in total terror for almost two hours."
-- Larry Ratliff, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

Isn't WOTW rated PG-13? That's idiotic.

I think he meant Dakotah Fanning.

But I agree with the first line of your post.

I wasn't talking about the audience members though I know many parents are going to make that mistake this week.

It's a PG-13 film. It's suppposedly a hard PG-13 at it. If he wanted to see Dakota laugh and play, a gloomy movie about the end of the world isn't the right film for him.

Just another flawed review. It kills me sometimes.

Kids are the ones who need to see this movie most! They're the ones who are going to witness the devastation* of our planet first hand - a little education will cut back on panic when the feces hit the blower...

(* Devastaion at our own hands of course, but the aliens make a nice distancing metaphor...)

Most of the negative reviews comes from.. billy jo bob @ I Rule! dot com.

Come on..get seriouslly..what really matters are the heavy hitters..and the heavy hitters are on board.

The negative reviews..come from these reputable review publications:


Flipside Movie Emporium
One guy's opinion?
two negative reviews from EFilmcritic.com (although they we're both 3 out of 5 stars)
JackieCooper.com


Newspaper reviews from these large publications:

Worcester telegram & Gazette
Northwest Herald (crystal lake, IL)
Kalamazoo Gazette

The heavy hitters can lick my balls, Begins had a 64% from Cream of the Crop, while the not so big critics loved the piss out of the movie, now which ones were right?