Film: Fantastic Four

There are many things wrong with Fantastic Four. These have been related in many places. But it has one thing going for it: it brings the funny. At least some of the in-family bickering is entertaining. It has no pretensions to being a deep and meaningful film, and so I am willing overlook its flaws and gaping stupidities of plot enough to say that I enjoyed it for what it was. 7/10

Film: War of the Worlds

But is it any good? Only intermittently. I might stretch to 6/10.

This is interesting: Spielberg transplants HG Wells' book to contemporary America, but keeps many of the plot points intact. Unfortunately, most of those make little sense. He wants to tell a ground level film, but cannot resist the odd aerial shot of the tripods soon after they appear. Most of all, he wants to tell a film about an everyman rather than a hero, but sabotages this by casting Tom Cruise in the lead role, giving him a big heroic scene at the end, an implausibly happy ending and a hopelessly annoying bickering family.

Spielberg still has an eye for a great shot, and there are some superb images here, such as the river of corpses, the flaming train, or the white birds against a grey sky. These moments are by far the best thing about the film.

By choosing a ground-up view, we are never privy to the aliens' thoughts or plans, and must speculate (or watch the characters do so), which is fine, or would be if they did not behave in apparently illogical ways. The worst aspect is Spielberg's addition to the book's plot, that the aliens' war machines have been buried under the earth for (at least) hundreds of years. Why do that? Wouldn't their technology have moved on since then? Why do they want to conquer the planet now, but not then? The only conceivable reason is that it has to do with life that has evolved since the machines were planted - but if so, they must have studied that life enough to find it desirable (for food?), which makes the ending even less plausible.

The alien's behaviour towards humans is also bizarre. At the end, they appear to be harvesting humans. So why, when they first appear, are they indiscriminately but inefficiently reducing humans to dust? Is it just so that they seem a bit more like - gasp - terrorists? And is their plan really to search every single building in the world, individually, first with a big snake-like camera and then, when that find nothing, with individual troops? Yes, that seems a sensible and realsitic investment of time and resources.

I could live with this. I could live with Cruise's unprecedented cool-headed act of heroism at the end (though I really don't think it's as heroic as Spielberg would like to suggest, sinc ehe is not risking himself). The real problem is that much of the film is spent on the road with Cruice and his kids, and every one of them is pretty annoying individually. Put together, they bicker and become even worse. This is almost a disaster movie more than a standard action film, but without a large central cast to kill off, so the audience has to care about the main characters. And I actively wanted them to die. That's a big problem.