War Of The Worlds

Chance White said:
vertigo, I like your first question.

You'd think if they wanted our planet, it'd be much easier to take it over 5,000 years ago before an 'intelligent' life form had evolved. Of course germs would still take em out... Silly aliens!
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Yeah...it's like us going to Mars and burying tanks incase any life ever showed up there. Then we would wait until they formed a working society and had small firearms so we could come up from the ground and have target practice.

I dont know, perhaps it was a fallback, persay, to the aliens. Maybe they did it incase the resources on their planet were ever exhausted. I still don't understand, however, why they didn't just claim a dominion when they planted the tripods.
 
The more I think about this movie the more I liked it. It's just a story about a guy trying to keep him and his kids alive in almost certain doom. What hope would you do?? Think about it. All this takes place in about 2 days and the aliens die from cells in our blood. Trying to figure out why on car runs and not another is a minor point. I would think even in a atomic blast the EMP would not stop everything.

I like the part in the basement of the house with the alien playing cat and mouse with them. I think I will see if my oldest kid wants to see it!!
 
I think they planted the pods for harvesting us later in time. Just waiting till there was enough fertilizer to feed that red vein thing. Even there spaceships seem organic enough to use us as a fuel / food source. Remember that red zit like thing Tom was sucked into.
That is also why I think the force fields went down, because the ship itself was organic and getting sick.
 
Nice little animation Jlucan. :grin:

Have you been watching Pixar's first CG film by any chance?

I would try a character animation next. Doesn't have to be human, in some ways it is better not to be, because a human will look fake however long even the world's best artists spend on it. It is a real skill to be able to give an object life and character. You made the lamp move, and you clearly have good technical skills, but try and get an object to express feelings and character.

The Pixar lamp animation is a very good example. It makes you think the lamp is alive. I also watched a good animation at a festival recently about a crab. All the expression was through the eyes and "eyebrows" on its shell.

Only a suggestion though :thumbsup:

(sorry about the thread hi-jack here!)
 
vertigo said:
Yeah...it's like us going to Mars and burying tanks incase any life ever showed up there. Then we would wait until they formed a working society and had small firearms so we could come up from the ground and have target practice.

I dont know, perhaps it was a fallback, persay, to the aliens. Maybe they did it incase the resources on their planet were ever exhausted. I still don't understand, however, why they didn't just claim a dominion when they planted the tripods.
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They needed our blood to harvest. You know that red stuff that was growing everywhere, yeah thats why they waited until their were humans.
 
While "That's the way it ended in the book" absolves them of some responsibility, it doesn't, completely.

I think that when a filmmaker (or any artist) takes the time to adapt something for a different medium (or just a newer one) then they shouldn't adhere slavishly to the original text, and they should also at least take the chance to embellish the original conceit, add to it, or in this instance, make the DEUS EX MACHINA feel slightly lower-cased.

I would also argue that this movie doesn't just end abruptly. It ends pseudo-abruptly.

Tacked onto the abrupt end is that family-reunion scene, which feels like the ending to a fully-fleshed out, well, ending. As if the third act had been 25 minutes and not two. Does that make sense? It's like, trying to yell something with a whispering tonality. Or a color the shade of "bright gray". I think a truly abrupt ending would've been slick, but this one straddled two cinematic types and didn't fit either.

Also, while the Maureen Dowd comparison is sort of funny, it's not entirely applicable to this situation for a few reasons that spring to mind.

A. The points she was taking issue with were related to the story and character development/motivation. It'd be one thing if we were saying "Ray Ferrier was too psycho!" and somewhere in the original book Chapter 1 starts "Ray Ferrier was the definition of psycho."

B. She was also critiquing a work that was meant to directly connect with a pre-existing and forthcoming work (volumes I and III), by the same 'creators'. She wasn't critiquing a work that was essentially a fan-film of previous works. So while expecting someone who is watching LOTRII to actually have seen LOTRI makes sense, expecting someone who is watching WOTW to have read the original WOTW and seen the original movie isn't entirely senseless, but it makes a lot -less- sense.

C. Part of the absurdity of Dowd's critique was her desire to assert her own contemporary value system (manliness,evil orcs, live and let live, et al) on the world of
Tolkien. The issue of disliking the ending is not one of cultural disconnect, it is one of structural narrative dissatisfaction. Given that the culture of WotW was supposed to be ours, I'm not even sure if a Dowdian mistake (dowdian, lol) could even be made.

Mach

speedbump said:
I'm a little annoyed at people who are complaining about the ending of this movie (which I have not yet seen). The story ends abruptly in the same way.

Look, folks, think about the context of the story. This is brilliance brought to us by H.G. Wells, who, in the context of his time, is writing about stuff that other people couldn't even imagine. It is akin to Arthur Clark understanding enough about physics to describe communications satellites (before anyone else thought of them) in a work of fiction. Wells totally captures the upcoming character of the age.

If you haven't read the story, you owe it to yourself to actually pick up a copy and take the time to absorb it. Even though Wells writes in a post-Victorian style, he gets under your skin, even today.

If you haven't read the story, or seen the original movie, and are complaining about the ending, you remind me of Maureen Dowd when she reviewed the second Lord of the Rings movie. She hadn't seen the first one, and hadn't read any of the books, so had no reference to relate to. She was repulsed by Aragorn's 'manliness', and thought that it was unfair that the characters just assumed that all orcs were evil. Why couldn't they have given the orcs a chance to live and let live? Oh god. What a maroon!
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speedbump,

no offense, but I went back and read the last couple chapters of WotW just so I wasn't being a complete ass (or maroon) by responding to your post without a fairly complete frame of reference, and I'm pretty sure you're -almost- entirely wrong.

After reading it, I don't think that "The book ends abruptly" can be used to defend "the movie ends appropriately."

The movie ends with the protagonist being reunited with his family, and then a 2 sentence blurb about what killed the martians.

The end of chapter nine, leaves the protagonist with -his- family, but there's more closure and commentary as Wells uses the opportunity to illustrate how meaningless the Prot's original life was (comparitively) and how impossible it is to try to resume it ( but then comes chapter 10, "The Epilogue" (The bit that was cut from our movie, allegedly)

In Chapter 10, Wells discusses the laboratory experiments on the corpses of the aliens, the attempts to reverse engineer their technology, which would've been interesting but not necessary, but also he discusses several ramifications of the invasion, my favorite being

Will the [Martians] invade again?

I think that if they'd shown a quick montage of the people regaining their lives, pulling society back together, and everyone shaky and nervous, and then shown the terrified reaction of a bunch of people (even Ray Farrier's family) at the very next natural lightning storm, and then cut to "THE END", my take on the movie would be -radically- different.

It would've been more tied to the novel, and also would've been a more realistic statement about the current 'state of terror' in our country (or at least the way it was immediately following 9/11).

Admittedly, the very last phrase is about the prot and his family, not the fearful terror, but even if they'd just hinted at it, and then gone on with the familial thing, it would've effectively have made the statement that "Despite the terrors/evils/whatever of the outside world, family first..." etc etc.

The movie would've been stronger, if it'd ended like the book.

M.




speedbump said:
I'm a little annoyed at people who are complaining about the ending of this movie (which I have not yet seen). The story ends abruptly in the same way.

Look, folks, think about the context of the story. This is brilliance brought to us by H.G. Wells, who, in the context of his time, is writing about stuff that other people couldn't even imagine. It is akin to Arthur Clark understanding enough about physics to describe communications satellites (before anyone else thought of them) in a work of fiction. Wells totally captures the upcoming character of the age.

If you haven't read the story, you owe it to yourself to actually pick up a copy and take the time to absorb it. Even though Wells writes in a post-Victorian style, he gets under your skin, even today.

If you haven't read the story, or seen the original movie, and are complaining about the ending, you remind me of Maureen Dowd when she reviewed the second Lord of the Rings movie. She hadn't seen the first one, and hadn't read any of the books, so had no reference to relate to. She was repulsed by Aragorn's 'manliness', and thought that it was unfair that the characters just assumed that all orcs were evil. Why couldn't they have given the orcs a chance to live and let live? Oh god. What a maroon!
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my thoughts

my thoughts

Sorry guys but this isn't going to be in my library.
First off, it is a very good film. Not great, but very good. I surprised myself when I was watching it when I found myself thinking as the aliens were popping up out of the ground, Have none of these people ever seen War of the Worlds. Then I realized, in their reality, there never had been a War of the Worlds film. Still. I thought, If any of them had ever seen any alien movies, they wouldn't be standing around.
I don't understand why the mini-van worked. But I'm not an electrical engineer.
I wanted to see more alien stuff. I loved the original movies ships. They were simple, smooth and beautiful. They moved soundlessly over the ground and blasted away. I didn't like the detailed "tripods." I don't want my invaders to walk, I want them to float.
Tom, Dakota, Tim, all wonderful in there roles. While I didn't really care about the son, my 14 yr old neice did, Lots of good human emotional turmoil. Lots of anguish, terror, dispair. Well done all. But I didn't go to the theatre to see emotional drama and a crappy father turn it around in the face of a little trouble. :grin:
Come on, who wouldn't turn it around in the face of an alien uprising?
I didn't like all the detail on the ships, and the hanging lunchboxes were way too much for me. Give me those sleek emotionless gliding triangles of the past.
On a positive note, There were three sounds I just loved.
1. the fog horn, so loud it frightened me
2. the cacaphony when the plane crashed scared the crap out of me
3. the "thunder", another truly frightening sound
So while I absolutly tripped on Batman Begins, I didn't trip on WOW.
BTW- John, in Jurassic Park, I teared up when they first saw the Bront stand up on it's hind legs to get at the top of the tree. The Rex was cool, but it was the Raptors and their "speech" I loved.
-Will
 
All I can say is Tom Cuise is one funny dude and Steven Spielberg sure went for the gore/bizarre factor with this one.
 
this was a good film, not great.

sort of like a "small" big budget film.

one thing i agree with coltrain on is that i prefer ID4.

but everything else he has said has been borderline ludicrous/unbelievable (clothing!?)

you are really stretching, ain't ya, coltrain?
 
id4 is ludicrous. flying in the heart of an alien species and giving it a virus? give me a break.
 
dude, its popcorn entertainment.

but it is popcorn entertainment on the largest of scales.

it achieved heights that WOTW can only dream about.
 
no it reached lows in which people concider entertainment. no story characters or emotion. its shitainment.
 
no spider-man is. need i say the Godzilla remake? i mean i love the originals and he had to make id4/jurassic park in new york. he like to destroy new york in everyone movie some how. ronald sucks. i like something well rounded in every way. ID4 is garbage of the highest caliber.
im sorry but that one of the worst film I'VE seen.
 
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