Despite my better judgment, I went to see "War of the Worlds". I didn’t want to see it because, honestly, I think Tom Cruise has lost his mind, and is totally brainwashed by the cult of Scientology. I have no desire to give them any more money. However, my old friend Seth Shostak asked if I’d watch it and comment on it on his Are We Alone? radio show, so I went to see it.
I actually enjoyed it, for the most part. I won’t go into details here on the BABlog since I have a lengthy review of it on the main site. The bottom line: not a bad flick, could use some serious improvements, but it was very tense and exciting.
I still miss Clayton Forrester, though. He’s top man in nuclear and astrophysics! He knows all about meteors!
July 10th, 2005 at 5:58 pm
good review, agree with you. I’m also a fan of 1953 movie, enjoyed the last scene with the arm of the martian as well.
July 10th, 2005 at 6:58 pm
I’ve often said that if you could pick up any sci-fi movie from the fifties or sixties and drop it into theaters today as is and have it compete favorably against the junk Hollywood is putting out, pick “War of the Worlds”.
I love the fact that in the 53′ version, the humans never get to the point where they can effectively combat the aliens. We actually start on a plan but it gets destroyed by a mob of people. At the end, we’re totally defenseless. Excellent object lesson.
Oh and I concur. Tom Cruise is a &%#$%$ nutjob.
John
July 10th, 2005 at 10:00 pm
I’m such a geek. I was thinking “Dr. Clayton Forrester? From Deep 13? I miss him, too!” until my brain kicked in.
Neb
July 11th, 2005 at 5:45 am
Scientology is creepy. What is creepy is that people can be made to believe anything. That the mechanics of belief can be defined and exploited provided that a person is ready to give their beliefs precedence over actual experience.
This in turn happens because people are unable to distinquish between their cognitive space and the felt experience of reality.
I liked the movie though. Massive effects. And cruise was good despite being insane.
July 11th, 2005 at 8:50 am
While I did not see a reference to Dr. Forrester, at least Gene Barry and Ann Robinson (aka Sylvia Van Buren) had cameo appearances. I also noticed that the initial scenes with the tripod machines begin on or about Van Buren St.
July 11th, 2005 at 8:57 am
Chip I missed that! Nuts. I love references like that in movies, too.
July 11th, 2005 at 11:49 am
I thought it was nice that they did not destroy Boston or Grandma’s house.
Also, how did we not bumb into one of these things while building a subway or excavating for a skyscraper? If they buried them long ago, why didn’t they just take over the world back then?
Why did they kill everyone in sight at the beginning and later harvest them?
July 11th, 2005 at 12:31 pm
Maybe Cruise did such a good job in this movie because it fits in with his beliefs?
July 11th, 2005 at 12:33 pm
Also, why did that guy’s camcorder work in the beginning? (I mean the guy taping the 1st pod to come up out of the street by Tom’s house). The EMP wiped out all electonics and Tom’s watch, but not a complicated camcorder? Man, I am definitely buying that brand. Did anyone happen to catch what brand it was?
Why would the pods’ shields be affected by disease at the end? I think I know: the alien whose job it was to stand there and hold the shield switch in the “on” position got too sick to hold it up, so it fell the the “off” position.
July 11th, 2005 at 12:37 pm
Enjoyed the review. I saw WOW on opening night with much the same feeling. I did enjoy it, but found several parts to be unbelievable. Did anybody catch the video camera working to catch the first robot climbing up from the ground. This was only seconds after all other electronics (including watches) stopped working. I guess it had some new kind of battery that was not affected : ) Also, if the aliens planted the killing machines 1,000s of years ago, it would have been a good idea to come back and conquer Earth about 100 years earlier. Poor planning to wait until after we had nuclear weapons. Fun movie though. Any chance you will review Fantastic 4? - some interesting astronomy in that one!
July 11th, 2005 at 12:58 pm
I seem to recal reading in some carl sagan book that L ron Hubbard started scientology on a bet.
I dont know if its true, but it makes me laugh anyway.
July 11th, 2005 at 1:23 pm
I too have heard that Hubbard constructed Dianetics and Scientology on a bet, but I can’t remember my source on that.
As for the movie, why was it that the “Martian’s” technology seemed to get sick when the aliens were beginning to succumb to our terrestrial germs?
In the scene where Cruise notices the downed shields on the stumbling tripod, for instance, did our germs get their computers too? Or did Jeff Goldblum have a scene that was cut: “I’ll give them a cold!!”
July 11th, 2005 at 1:47 pm
What am I, invisible here??
July 11th, 2005 at 2:53 pm
In the scene where Cruise notices the downed shields on the stumbling tripod, for instance, did our germs get their computers too? Or did Jeff Goldblum have a scene that was cut: “I’ll give them a cold!!�
—
It some some computer g33k that found the signal they where sending, cracked it and made a virus to turn of the shield.
and hellow invisible dude
July 11th, 2005 at 4:23 pm
I didn’t go see it, and I won’t see it, for the exact same reasons as yours. I’m not quite willing to give Tom Cruise more cash. Out of all the actors that got hooked in scientology, I think he’s the one that blew it the most…
But hey, great review!
July 11th, 2005 at 5:18 pm
Well, there’s always John Travolta, Kelly Preston, Kirstie Alley, Jenna Elfman, Nancy Cartwright (Bart Simpson!), etc. etc.
July 11th, 2005 at 5:22 pm
John Travolta? .. what a Psychlo!
July 12th, 2005 at 3:06 am
[quote]
Well, there’s always John Travolta, Kelly Preston, Kirstie Alley, Jenna Elfman, Nancy Cartwright (Bart Simpson!), etc. etc.
[/quote]
Yes, I know. But is it just me or they seem to have kept their cool more than Cruise?
Nice move from the scientologists to have brainwashed so many actors though. People often get hooked because of fame.
July 12th, 2005 at 6:54 am
I understand Katie Holmes has converted/been assimilated as well.
July 12th, 2005 at 12:17 pm
“Well, there’s always John Travolta, Kelly Preston, Kirstie Alley, Jenna Elfman, Nancy Cartwright (Bart Simpson!), etc. etc.”"
John Travolta is a scientologist??????
July 12th, 2005 at 1:55 pm
First off - I agree with you about Mr Cruise. It is distressing to see someone who seems reasonably intelligent suspend all trace of rational judgement.
Second - I agree with GeneralZod about the shields. How come they went off ‘cos the poor liddle martian got poorly?
A few other things too…
I’ve never seen the 1953 film, but I have read the book and I know the rock opera well (marketed in the UK as Jeff Wayne’s Musical Adaptation of The War of the Worlds). Richard Burton and Phil Lynott performing together (inter alia) - cool.
Incidentally, although it never explicitly states the aliens come from Mars, the opening sequence has the camera’s POV passing by a very Martian-looking planet before viewing Earth. And this shot is concurrent with the voiceover “… regarded our world with envious eyes and, slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.” So there is a very strong implication that the aliens are Martians.
Isn’t it odd how they removed the phrase “intellects immeasurably superior to our own” from the introduction? Did they think that it was too long-winded? Or would make audiences feel insecure? Or did Spielberg simply feel that “immeasurably” was too long a word for the cinema-going public?
I noticed a lot of debate about terrestrial micro-organisms infecting the martians. Would Earthly microbes be able to? Wouldn’t the martians - sorry, aliens - know about microbes? etc. Well, this is one thing that they did take directly from the book. The martians - sorry, aliens - had no immune system (they had long ago wiped out disease on Mars, or there were no microbes on Mars, I can’t remember which applied in the book) that could cope with Earthly bacteria. This is what would happen. You are right, Phil, to suppose that anywhere suitably temperate, moist and rich in nutrients would be colonised by bacteria. If the invaders eat and breathe (and maybe suffer tiny little scratches) in our environment, they will be colonised by bacteria. Even bugs that seem relatively harmless can become deadly if the balance between organism and host is upset. Take the “hospital super-bug”, MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), as an example. If you have an operation, and the incision becomes infected with MRSA, you are in serious trouble. Yet, in the normal course of events, S. aureus is harmless- it lives in our mouths and noses, on our skin and in our ears. everyone on the planet has some Staph’ culture growing on them somewhere.
All it would take to make the invaders very ill would be uncontrolled replication of bacteria - the bacerial waste products would build up too rapidly for their systems to handle, and their blood sugar, fats and so on would be depleted too fast for them to keep up.
You are partly right about viruses, too, Phil. It is unlikely that a virus would be able to jump from humans or pigs or ducks to infect an alien life form. But viruses do hop from one species to another quite easily. The bird flu currently infecting swathes of wild and domestic fowl across SE Asia is extremely virulent. It has been transmitted to humans but these cases are isolated because it cannot transmit from human to human - yet. If it were to infect a human that already had flu, the two viruses could recombine to make new genetic combinations and we’d have a global flu pandemic in no time. It does not pay to get complacent about viral transmission.
Also, only about half of all viruses are based on RNA - there are DNA viruses. For example, HSV1 (Herpes Simplex Virus type 1), which is the aetiologic agent of herpes keratitis (cold sores), is a DNA virus. Furthermore, viral genomes can be double-stranded or single-stranded and a retrovirus could use either DNA or RNA for its genome. (A retrovirus is one that copies its own genome into the host’s DNA and can therefore lie dormant for years without causing any symptoms. These can start from RNA, which is used as a template to insert a new piece of DNA into the host’s genome, or from DNA, in which case an intermediate RNA copy is made before the viral genome is integrated into the host’s. The enzyme that copies the RNA into DNA is called reverse transcriptase, and is the target of many anti-retroviral drug therapies). But I digress.
Having said all that, though, I agree with your conclusion. I enjoyed the film. I think Spielberg maded a very tight, tense drama, and made good use of the cinema sound systems available. I even think Cruise turned in a good performance.
Just a couple more nit-picks…
Shields. What? Apart from ID4, where did those come from? Oh, yeah, they had to be there to explain why our tanks couldn’t kick martian butt, because the film had been updated to the 21st century. In the original, the tripods have no shields, they are vulnerable to cannon-fire, but they very quickly turn their heat-rays on the cannoneers. Hence the line uttered by the artilleryman “Bows and arrows against the lightning,” (which I thought was a very poetic expression of the hopelessness of the situation).
Which brings me on to the heat ray. Or lack thereof. Yes, OK, the death ray was very cool and very scary, but … where was the heat ray? Or did they want to cover up the fact that HG Wells predicted the existence of the infra-red laser? I guess it is possible that they didn’t want to show people being turned into human torches on screen (well, not before Fantastic 4, anyhow). Was it any less disturbing to see people being disintegrated? I think not.
Right, that’s my rant finished. Thanks to anyone who had the patience to read this far.
July 12th, 2005 at 2:04 pm
Regarding “Why the equipment buried on earth?”, that’s not so far-fetched. The US military has equipment pre-positioned around the world, just waiting for operators to show up and use it. As to “How did they escape detection”, well, ahdunno…
Hubbard was nuts, but his novel “Battlefield Earth” ranks in my top 10 sci-fi novels. Great surprise-twist ending. But it certainly isn’t the literary gem that HGWell WotW is…
July 12th, 2005 at 10:50 pm
I have never seen the 1953 movie, but the book is one of my favorites. You really need to read it, Dr. Plait. I also highly recommend the Orson Welles radio version.
I just saw the new movie and liked it a lot. It was very faithful to the book, despite being moved a hundred years forward in time. The one change that probably shouldn’t have been made was the thing about the tripods having been there underground for a long time. As you said, it just didn’t make much sense, and it made the ending harder to believe. (In the book, the Martians and their tripods come in capsules shot from a giant cannon on Mars.) I’m not sure why they made that change. This is one of those times when less explanation would have been better: just have the aliens crash down out of the sky and spare us the logistical details of their plan. (I feel the same way about “The Matrix” — it would have been better if they had not tried to explain why the robots were doing this to humanity.)
As far as the aliens’ appearance goes, I agree that they were not scary, but I thought it was cool that they physically resembled the tripods. In the book, Wells describes them in vivid detail as giant slugs with huge round eyes, V-shaped mouths, and I think hands coming out of their faces. I’m glad they didn’t make them look like that in the movie, because modern audiences would probably have found them humorous.
Nigel — I think it was that they had long ago wiped out disease on Mars, along with all other organisms except for something they raised as livestock for blood. I’ll have to reread the book now — it’s been a while.
July 12th, 2005 at 10:52 pm
Oh yeah, I forgot to add — Scientology attracts actors for two reasons:
1. They go out of their way to recruit Hollywood types, apparently in the hope that it will raise their profile and improve their image.
2. Actors are crazy.
July 13th, 2005 at 4:05 am
Quick (and probably stupid) question: What the hell is scientology?
July 13th, 2005 at 4:33 am
No question is stupid
Short answer: A money grabbing cult with some very foolish notions.
What they proclaim to be: http://www.scientology.org
and
the other side of the coin: http://www.xenu.net/
July 13th, 2005 at 9:00 am
I have to second W F Tomba - you really must read the book. In my personal opinion, all the the previous attempts to make a movie out of it have truly sucked (I haven’t seen the new one yet, and probably won’t). But then, I do have a strange fondness for early SF…
As for the microbes (in the book anyway), the Martians had long ago eliminated all disease-causing organisms, so they were no longer even aware of the idea of sickness. It just didn’t occur to them. I suspect that this may be a carefully disguised observation on human hubris from Mr Wells.
Anyway, go to Amazon and order the book (it’s only 5 bucks). It’s essential reading for the SF fan - not to have read it is like an Eng. Lit. professor never having read Hamlet.
July 13th, 2005 at 12:31 pm
H.G. Wells is by far my favorite sci-fi author. His conceptions of physics and astronomy are regrettably a bit poor (”In the Days of the Comet” or “The First Men in the Moon” for example) but his forte was depicting how people might react under the stresses. Although he tried to explain how something was supposed to work within the fictional confines of his novels, it always required suspending the conventional rules of physics. He turned people invisible, produced a simplistic time-machine, surgically altered cats to give them human brains and invented “gravity reflecting” panels.
In my opinion his success lies in the way he could invent an emergency or controversy only to see how deeply the characters would be affected by it. His novels were like the human sociology experiments that no one should ever try. What would happen if you gave your children an elixir that would make them 40 foot giants and how would society treat them? Would they be compassionate or violent? What would happen if the gas from a comet caused everyone on earth to be universally kind and positive toward each other?
The initial circumstance could rarely be taken seriously as it was really only an excuse to get the characterts into a tight spot. So I guess that the movie adaptions of his book were destined to appear on the Bad Astronomy page considering how outlandish his mechanisms were. But unlike much modern sci-fi, the human interest driven plot carries substantial weight, in my opinion.
July 13th, 2005 at 1:43 pm
I like how Tom and his daughter were able to fool the tentacle/camera in the basement by using a mirror. What, have these aliens, who travled millions (billions?) of miles (sorry, kilometers) and created these powerful machines, never got around to inventing mirrors? Why didn’t it just push the mirror over and look what was behind it?
Also, when Tom and Tim were (quietly) fighting for the shotgun, why didn’t Tim just yell or make some noise, which would force Tom to let go and let Tim blast a few Marti…aliens? (I know these had nothing to do w/ astronomy. 1000 apologies!)
PS. I hope the DVD has deleted scenes of Dakota Fanning screaming some more!!
July 13th, 2005 at 1:45 pm
By the way, a good friend of mine has just lent me the rock opera version, which I have been listening to in my car. I also read the book a few years ago and enjoyed it quite a bit. Never saw the 1953 movie, but I want to now, based on BA’s comments.
July 13th, 2005 at 9:03 pm
I hear the real reason they had the spaceships underground was that Spielberg saw on the BadAstronomy web-site that Phil’s favourite movies included “5 million years to Earth”.
In my case Phil is wrong - I have certainly heard of that movie. I remember seeing it many years ago on TV. I still recall it as very scary !
Oh, and come on Phil - where is “Forbidden Planet” (introducing Robbie the Robot) ? Even Hollywood pays tribute to it. It keeps appearing in other movies (including Close Encounters, so we know Spielberg likes it).
Cheers
Ian
July 13th, 2005 at 11:10 pm
I saw “Five Million Years to Earth” when I was around 8 or 9 years old (back in the 1970’s), and was very impressed by how intelligently written it was; even though fantastic things occurred throughout, it was internally consistent and held my attention. (Slow? A bit, but that’s what helped make it believable. And trust me, the end is anything but slow!)
I’d almost like to see a faithful remake of this flick, but I doubt that it could match the original. In any event, I MUST get this on dvd… can’t believe it’s not a part of my collection yet!
July 16th, 2005 at 8:46 am
I thought the first half of the movie was a masterpiece of terror, suspense, and drama. I thought I walked into the wrong movie it was so good. I honestly was expecting another disappointing ID4. The latter half lost me a bit but overall a very thrilling movie. Like Jorge, I too was a bit surprised that the aliens were defeated with Jeff Goldblum nowhere to be seen in the picture…puzzling. Too bad the movie wasn’t more macro focused than micro all the time.
Also, I was hoping the aliens would flush them out of the cellar sooner so the movie could get going again. Maybe if Timothy Robbins had offered to do the aliens taxes in exchange for some suds an outright invasion may have been averted and a new intergalactic friendship formed. It’s not like he had to worry about being pushed off a rooftop or anything, he was in a cellar.
Yes, Tom Cruise is nuts for believing in Scientology. I wish he had my grounding in reality.
July 17th, 2005 at 12:09 pm
You state that you do not have the book and you do not want to rrad the book off of the screen. ¿Why do not you try Text-To-Speech. I find I can get twice as much done by letting my computer read to me something while I use my eyes for doing work. That is how I read “War of the Worlds� — Herbert George Wells. As I write this, my computer reads email — I hate those idiots metooing like brain-dead AOLers (one line of stating “¡Me Too!� followed by hundreds of needlessly quoted lines of text taking hours to read). You can get the text at Gutenberg.Net or if that is swamped, WikiSource.Org:
HTTP://Gutenberg.org/etext/36
HTTP://WikiSource.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds
The machines are much closer to those of the book. Those 30-meter tall machines are scary. The book is the earliest example of directed energy-weapons and chemical warfare (the Martians wiped out all of London — over 5 million people — in less than an hour by gassing the city). The book also contains a message about hubris:
The Martians exterminate all disease, so did not even consider it — to their great chagrin. Many felt that antibiotics will eliminate all disease, but all of this Darwinian stress just lead to the Darwinian evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
One can assume something about the evolution of the movie-aliens from their appearance in the movie (assume makes an ASS of yoU and ME). The Their distant ancestors appear to have been trilaterally symmetrical. Their ancestors evolved from trilaterally into bilaterally symmetrical creatures probably for locomotion; although they still have much trilateral symmetry. As a refreshing surprise, they do not appear to fit into any earthy phylum.
The movie was a good movie but could have been better.
☆☆☆
July 19th, 2005 at 12:36 pm
I heard the radio show, then saw the movie the next night, and recalled Vincent Resh’s comments about the bridge behind Ray’s house, and his way off reference to one of the eastern bridges linking to Queens. They went north and had to cross the Hudson River to get to CT and then up to Boston, Ray had said, so I don’t know what Resh was thinking. Wikipedia mentions they were in Newark, but they used the Bayonne Bridge for that shot, and the first emerging alien craft came out of the streets of Newark. See [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2005_movie)]here[/url]. They also mention errors and gaffs. (BTW, Seth Shostak seems a cool guy).
I agree that it was a “fun” movie, but in no way did it feel anything like the 1953 movie, which was heavy on the religious overtones, and the obvious glaring errors regarding what electronics worked or didn’t work required the same suspension of belief that made you think, “Why are those people stupidly standing on the edge of cracking pavement when they should be running like hell?” Still, the alien tripods were menacing, and the suspense was about right. At least it was enough that afterwards driving in a convertible under the night sky, I was imagining these tripods hovering above, so it worked for me.
Otoh, the basement sequence with Tim Robbins dragged on a bit too long, and the aliens were too “cute” while spinning the bicycle wheel, and rummaging for snacks–it took away from the eeriness of the prior snake-like probe–a useless inclusion. Didn’t they eat some human food? How smart is that? I agree, less seen is better. The ending, too, was incredibly weak, and seemed slapped together, and the father/son/dysfunctional family wrap-up too sappy, and insulting to the viewer.
Two good creepy scenes: the flaming train, and the dead bodies floating down the Hudson River. The sort of “Night of the Living Dead” mob scene with the van was OK, too, in showing that people go stark raving mad in crises. All in all, it was entertaining enough, but Spielberg could have done much better. The FX were good, but I didn’t care about the characters.
As far as the Tom Cruise hoopla–if I based my movie going on actors’ personal opinions or ideologies, I’d see few films. There are too many hands in a movie, especially the FX people and editors, (the most important in this genre) that it would be cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face, and pointless, you’d just be punishing a whole lot of people for one person’s ideas apart from the film, and achieving little, unless your aim is to want Cruise to never get a job again…Cruise already got his cash. Besides, there are many people, scientists included, that we claim as “heroes” that were or are jerks in a variety of ways or supported immoral endeavors. Whatever.
August 26th, 2005 at 5:24 pm
As a work of science fiction, Speilberg’s war of the worlds is hopelessly flawed, but then, let’s face it, so is the original. Why didn’t the good burghers of planet Earth get Mars germs?
As a work of satire, calculated horror and a brilliant evocation of the panic of a society overwhelmed by vastly superior firepower, Well’s classic is unsurpassed.
Spielberg drops the satire and adds in a bit of Lovecraftian cosmological alienation: as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport, and so on. I liked the feeling of being utterly insignificant - prey to ancient intelligences.
This I feel was also true to some of Wells spirit: that side of the author that revelled in the gothic horror of the Martians and the Morlocks and the Island of Dr Moreau, as well as the more popular image of the rationalist writer of extrapolative fiction. Like George Lucas (only much much better) Speilberg has never really been a maker of science fiction movies because he is actually incapable of thinking logically. Rather he is a supreme dreamer, a myth maker.
A very haunting and frightening film.
The family stuff was irritating.
Has anyone visited www.tomcruiseisnuts.com?
August 26th, 2005 at 5:35 pm
NB: it’s been a while since I read the original - the Martians eradicated disease so were prey to human infections, more than we were to theirs. However, species jumping viruses can be deadly in one species and harmless in another. I guess Well’s didn’t know that.
I still don’t think the War of the Worlds is really ‘hard-core science fiction’ in the way that the Time Machine is. A funny position to take, but there you go….
June 12th, 2006 at 7:51 pm
All I can say is a Democrat was in the White House calling all the shots because we only used light arms against the tripods. Maybe he (or she) was afraid of torturing these monsters. Where were the bunker-busters to take the ground right out from under these bastards? Shields? So what?
Good movie. Not enough special effects. Heck, it took another 30 minutes to get to more tripods after the first showing. Too bad there are no deleted scenes.