Re: War of the Worlds (SPOILERS)
*bump*
Got to seeing it at last. Probably the most scary movie I've ever seen in a movie theatre - definitely was more scary on a small screen, at 20, than Indepence Day was for me on a big, big screen, when I was 12.
The directing was definitely stunning. I was quite sitting on the edge of my seat from the beginning of the storm brewing up towards pretty far towards the end. The directing was definitely stunning - one shot in particular impressed me, I've no idea if anyone else would have noticed. When they're fleeing from New York in the car, the camera is aimed at the right window of the car while the car is driving full speed. The camera then zooms out, moves away to the car speeding alond the highway, and then zooms in on the left side of the car and shows the inside of the car again from then - without a single cut. I do wonder how they did that - didn't see any space where they could have had a cart-thingy rolling
As for everyone important surviving - I went into the movie with the following assumption: In any such catastrophy, killing a whole lot of people but also leaving a whole lot of survivors, statistically speaking, there will be families in which everyone survives, also if not many of them. So I assumed that Spielberg was just being nice enough to show us one of those few families from the beginning - made the whole thing seem a lot less implausible
.. though Robbie being alive did seem a bit of a cheat, I wasn't really shocked about it.
I was a bit dissatisfied by the ending though - not because of the principle, that I found quite realistical - especially considering that similar things have happened with colonialism, doesn't seem like a far stretch that it would happen on an interplanitary basis - so no complaints to HG Wells for that from me
.. what bothered me about the ending was the abruptness. Yes, I know, wouldn't make any sense at all for Tom Cruise to have any clue as of what was going on .. it just did somehow seem a bit strange that one one moment sees the aliens showing signs of weakness .. and the next moment the movie is over, with an end note explaining what happened without much of a prior warning aside from the microbes being shown in the beginning of the movie (when I was unfortunately distracted by a bunch of LOUD kids coming into the movie and trying to find seats, yelling against the rows to eachother while getting seated - ignoring that they were late and the movie had already bloody started
) .. it did seem a bit anticlimatic. Not that I would have any clue how it could have been done better
All in all though, definitely the best "scary" alien invade earth movie I've seen yet. Not that I saw too many of those
.. but it definitely managed to converge the feeling of hopelessnesss that Independence Day just .. didn't. In that, I was always sure that we would be saved by our all american heroes soon enough. The way this one just stayed on the ground really made one feel a lot like an ant trying to avoide being stepped on. I did like how they left real "successful" heroics out of it - that humans just survived since they were bloody lucky.
As for boycotting it for Cruise .. well, I wouldn't say it was Cruise's movie - if it was anyone's movie, it was Spielberg, who is not anywhere close to Cruise on any of the matters discussed. If Spielberg can manage to still survive with Cruise around, so can I.
Hmpf. Now I'm at the point where there is truely absolutely *nothing* left in the theatres or coming anytime soon that I in any way am interested. Gwaa!! (Serenity, the only exception, is not coming at all to Austria it seems - and not to the Czech Republic till late November)
