War of the Worlds DVD review


War of the WorldsA couple of days ago I saw War of the Worlds, the 2005 version directed by Steven Spielberg.

The main character in this movie is Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), he’s divorced with two kids and isn’t really the perfect father, although he does a lot of effort in the movie to keep his children safe. At the beginning of the movie we can see that Ray’s young daughter and teenage son are staying with him for a couple of days as his ex-wife and her new husband are heading to Boston for the weekend.

But then the unthinkable happens; an advanced alien species comes en masse to wipe out humanity. The movie doesn’t really go into detail about who these aliens are, besides that they are very intelligent and have no sense of compassion. In the book War of the Worlds from H.G. Wells, which was published in 1898, the aliens came from Mars but in this 2005 adaption it’s not really specified where they are coming from. Perhaps they decided to drop the Martian part because by now we already know that there’s no intelligent life on Mars.

War of the Worlds has very nice special effects and the acting isn’t too bad but it’s not really a movie I would watch more than once. One of the things I really didn’t like was the ending. Spielberg used the same ending as in the book and while I do think that this ending is pretty plausible it was just rushed way too hard in this movie. The movie ended very abruptly and I had a “Was that it?” feeling. I rate the movie 7/10.

The DVD also includes a bunch of extras, including interviews with Steven Spielberg, some behind the scenes material, details on the designing of the aliens, info about the War of the Worlds movie from the 1950s and lots of other things. I watched some of the extras, especially the clips which showed how various scenes were shot were pretty interesting.


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