Film review - War of the Worlds

Before I headed off on my travels I re-watched Steven Spielberg’s epic War of the Worlds and I reckon that it’s worse second time around you know. Sure there are elements in it that I think worked brilliantly but on the whole I was massively disappointed.
To begin with I’m a big fan of the novel, it was groundbreaking when it was written all those years ago and, having read it again just before the big-screen version was released, it’s still an absolute corker of a book now. Its’ relevance is in it’s own genius. Not everything has to speak to the people Mr. Spielberg, you do know that don’t you? A bloody good story is always a bloody good story whether it involves ‘modern’ issues or not.
However Mr. S felt the need to make it ‘more relevant’ to the World today. More relevant huh Mr. S. Don’t you just mean more ‘obviously-aimed-at-the-idiot-notions-of-a-certain-type-of-person’ out there. “Let’s play on their fears”, he said. Terrorist sleeper-cells become his alien invasion. I’m not decrying peoples’ fear of terrorism in any way but this was not the story to try to carry this message and certainly not the book you should fuck about with.
Some elements I like. The alien walking machines are back and they’re damn near perfect, just as I’d imagined them whilst reading. The ray gun is great and I loved the whole destroying the flesh but not the clothes thing. Nice touch. But the aliens themselves looked way too cute. Like a kid had designed them. (Actually a kid would probably have had more imagination and created a true monster from the story.) I know they too ‘looked’ like Wells’ description but they just didn’t work for me.
I loved the whole ‘screwing’ effect in the road when the machine first emerged, that was a truly imaginative re-working of the cylinder-cap unscrewing scene. But everything else… In Spielberg’s version the machines have been buried beneath our feet for eternity and only ‘awaken’ when the Martian pilots are transported into them. Why exactly? It seems Mr. S. was so desperate to get in the sleeper-cell bit that story took a bit of a back burner. Why were the aliens invading now? Is Mars dead or dying as in the original and they just happened to remember parking some death machines on Earth? Or maybe they’re very forward thinking chaps and they left some of the tripods on all the Solar System’s planets on the off chance they’d need them one day.
I haven’t even got into the fact that there was no tension, sense of desolation and loneliness, that there was no hopelessness at all or that the characters were so poorly fleshed out that I genuinely didn’t care if they lived or died. In fact, I wanted them all dead.
Nice one Mr. S. You really made a mess of that.