Post by Klingon Fanatic on Jul 1, 2005 21:34:14 GMT -5
;D SPOILER ALERT....
DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO SEE THE MOVIE
I just saw WOTW with the Mrs. tonight. She was NOT impressed and admitted to being afraid actually.... We went home in a thunderstorm with lightening to boot and naturally my kids are/were upset about the T-storm.
LMAO! Funny in a sick dark way really.
NEGATIVE COMMENTS:
At any rate there were plot holes the size of a mack truck in the movie.
1. If the Tripod Machines were here 1 million years ago. Why didn't the Martians invade then? Surely Earth's micro-organisms would have been accounted for at that time when there were no sizable human populations then. A failed prior invasion surely would have been taken into account before this one. Its like sending a lunar module to the moon today and then sending the TRAINED astronauts 100 years later.... Similarly, if you want to wipe out the Earth's population in short notice shoot a few (KEY WORD "Small" as in less than the Cretaceous-Tertiary sized one) asteroids at the Earth and target key population and control centers a la the Bugs in the book and movie Starship Troopers. The aliens get the planet with a majority of the biosphere intact to do their follow up operations.
2. Obscure death rule: No body usually means no death for a main character/villain. Where the heck was Tom Cruises character's son going to hide on that battlefield? There didn't look like an awful lot of cover to hide from those mason beam rays to me. To have the son show up at Boston ahead of his dad in the end was, silly to me.
3. The mason beams (best explained in the 1950s WOTW movie the beams break apart the "glue" that holds atoms together = disintegration) If the rays can disintegrate human flesh there was no way all those clothes could have remained intact. I wonder if the clothes and ash was a cinematic allusion to the concentration camps of WWII.
4. The US military was clearly shown in a negative light the exact opposite of the 1950s US military. Yes, in HG Wells's original novel WOTW the world power was The British Empire and the world powers were defeated also and that is not what I'm talking about. Tom Cruise struggles with his son twice over this issue of him essentially wanting to join the fight. As a former US Army Captain, I wonder about the way Spielberg did those scenes was a way to negatively comment about the US led war on terror. Clearly HG Wells and now Spielberg's message was superior technological power can not make an invasion successful.
5. Martian vs Man vs Man. What purpose did it serve to have a young girls father kill another man one room away? I did not go there to watch a premeditated homicide; a mass extermination of imaginary people yes a homicide, no. True, Tim Robbins character was in a post Traumatic stress (PTS) situation and his mind snapped but man, IMHO that scene should have given this movie an R-17 movie rating! A young girl sits blindfolded and sings to herself while Tom Cruise closes a door and kills Tim Robbins' character. Again, I could have watched the News or a reality/court drama show if I wanted to see that kind of a scene.
6. In the 1950s version you had scientists to help explain what was going on. Man nothing beats the 1950s WOTW scene where Dr. Forrester takes the Martian eye back to his team of scientists at Pacific Tech. Just having some scientist even in the background would have kept a lot of people in the theater from asking inane questions about the technical whys about what was going on e.g., electromagnetic pulse.
7. The Martians themselves... Blatant Independence Day Alien rip offs only smaller, with blinking eyes and a total of three main limbs.
8. The whole Martians use human bodies and blood to grow/[Mars]terraform their vegetation/cellular STARCRAFT PC GAME "Creep" smacked of homage to the WOTW TV series of the early 1990s. I don't recall HG Wells writing about this in his original story. True, there are plenty of sci-fi aliens that suck out your brains and do weird things to human bodies BUT even in the worst B alien movie there is some purpose to it.
9. The ending was almost like a scene from Half-Life 2. The part where the soldier touches the dying Martian was a BIG "Would NEVER happen in the REAL US Army." Certainly not while I was in command of an infantry unit. At the minimum, nobody without MOPP gear (chemical weapons protection suit) and a radiac meter would be allowed near them dead or alive. Most likely some special unit wearing astronaut style bio-hazard gear would have been the only personnel allowed to touch them. Spielberg obviously paid little attention to this in contrast to his earlier blockbuster movie "ET" where the whole house was quarantined and bio-hazard gear equipped scientists went into the house.
POSITIVE COMMENTS:
1. I'm sure HG Wells would have approved of the CGI tripod designs shown on the big screen and I'd bet this movie would have scared the heck out of him.
2. This movie, even though I knew how it would end was fast paced enough to keep me from yawning. It avoided the "we have to use the [atomic] bomb" scene of most Earth gets invaded movies and kept the man characters not scientists or military people.
3. This movie scared the heck out of the Mrs. and that is not an easy thing to do. In contrast she described Independence Day with Will Smith and Jeff Goldbloom a "COMEDY". I thought ID was more disturbing in many more ways; e.g. a synchronized global attack, the size of the mothership and invasion forces inside it.
Well I feel better writing this. Thanks for reading it.
KF
DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO SEE THE MOVIE
I just saw WOTW with the Mrs. tonight. She was NOT impressed and admitted to being afraid actually.... We went home in a thunderstorm with lightening to boot and naturally my kids are/were upset about the T-storm.
LMAO! Funny in a sick dark way really.
NEGATIVE COMMENTS:
At any rate there were plot holes the size of a mack truck in the movie.
1. If the Tripod Machines were here 1 million years ago. Why didn't the Martians invade then? Surely Earth's micro-organisms would have been accounted for at that time when there were no sizable human populations then. A failed prior invasion surely would have been taken into account before this one. Its like sending a lunar module to the moon today and then sending the TRAINED astronauts 100 years later.... Similarly, if you want to wipe out the Earth's population in short notice shoot a few (KEY WORD "Small" as in less than the Cretaceous-Tertiary sized one) asteroids at the Earth and target key population and control centers a la the Bugs in the book and movie Starship Troopers. The aliens get the planet with a majority of the biosphere intact to do their follow up operations.
2. Obscure death rule: No body usually means no death for a main character/villain. Where the heck was Tom Cruises character's son going to hide on that battlefield? There didn't look like an awful lot of cover to hide from those mason beam rays to me. To have the son show up at Boston ahead of his dad in the end was, silly to me.
3. The mason beams (best explained in the 1950s WOTW movie the beams break apart the "glue" that holds atoms together = disintegration) If the rays can disintegrate human flesh there was no way all those clothes could have remained intact. I wonder if the clothes and ash was a cinematic allusion to the concentration camps of WWII.
4. The US military was clearly shown in a negative light the exact opposite of the 1950s US military. Yes, in HG Wells's original novel WOTW the world power was The British Empire and the world powers were defeated also and that is not what I'm talking about. Tom Cruise struggles with his son twice over this issue of him essentially wanting to join the fight. As a former US Army Captain, I wonder about the way Spielberg did those scenes was a way to negatively comment about the US led war on terror. Clearly HG Wells and now Spielberg's message was superior technological power can not make an invasion successful.
5. Martian vs Man vs Man. What purpose did it serve to have a young girls father kill another man one room away? I did not go there to watch a premeditated homicide; a mass extermination of imaginary people yes a homicide, no. True, Tim Robbins character was in a post Traumatic stress (PTS) situation and his mind snapped but man, IMHO that scene should have given this movie an R-17 movie rating! A young girl sits blindfolded and sings to herself while Tom Cruise closes a door and kills Tim Robbins' character. Again, I could have watched the News or a reality/court drama show if I wanted to see that kind of a scene.
6. In the 1950s version you had scientists to help explain what was going on. Man nothing beats the 1950s WOTW scene where Dr. Forrester takes the Martian eye back to his team of scientists at Pacific Tech. Just having some scientist even in the background would have kept a lot of people in the theater from asking inane questions about the technical whys about what was going on e.g., electromagnetic pulse.
7. The Martians themselves... Blatant Independence Day Alien rip offs only smaller, with blinking eyes and a total of three main limbs.
8. The whole Martians use human bodies and blood to grow/[Mars]terraform their vegetation/cellular STARCRAFT PC GAME "Creep" smacked of homage to the WOTW TV series of the early 1990s. I don't recall HG Wells writing about this in his original story. True, there are plenty of sci-fi aliens that suck out your brains and do weird things to human bodies BUT even in the worst B alien movie there is some purpose to it.
9. The ending was almost like a scene from Half-Life 2. The part where the soldier touches the dying Martian was a BIG "Would NEVER happen in the REAL US Army." Certainly not while I was in command of an infantry unit. At the minimum, nobody without MOPP gear (chemical weapons protection suit) and a radiac meter would be allowed near them dead or alive. Most likely some special unit wearing astronaut style bio-hazard gear would have been the only personnel allowed to touch them. Spielberg obviously paid little attention to this in contrast to his earlier blockbuster movie "ET" where the whole house was quarantined and bio-hazard gear equipped scientists went into the house.
POSITIVE COMMENTS:
1. I'm sure HG Wells would have approved of the CGI tripod designs shown on the big screen and I'd bet this movie would have scared the heck out of him.
2. This movie, even though I knew how it would end was fast paced enough to keep me from yawning. It avoided the "we have to use the [atomic] bomb" scene of most Earth gets invaded movies and kept the man characters not scientists or military people.
3. This movie scared the heck out of the Mrs. and that is not an easy thing to do. In contrast she described Independence Day with Will Smith and Jeff Goldbloom a "COMEDY". I thought ID was more disturbing in many more ways; e.g. a synchronized global attack, the size of the mothership and invasion forces inside it.
Well I feel better writing this. Thanks for reading it.
KF
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