I didn't think Stephen Spielberg could make a movie this bad

[solarbird]

spazzkat put the Spielberg War of the Worlds on his Netflix queue a couple of months ago; it showed up today, and he and annathepiper started watching it while I was out. Picoreview: "My god - it's full of crap."

Damn, this is a seriously, seriously bad movie. I'm not just talking ordinary bad - I'm talking Mission Impossible: 2^* bad. It isn't even edited coherently; it's like Spielberg thought, "okay, this one has just turned out to be poo," slapped a bunch of scenes together, and kicked it ass-first out the door.

If not for some reasonably good disaster pr0n, I'd absolutely nominate this as a suck-off candidate. Every character is incredibly annoying. Every character is incredibly stupid, including the aliens, who apparently are actually parakeets, as is demonstrated by their being confused by mirrors. The aliens have global shields around them except when they don't, so that you can run up to them and go BOO!, but do again so that when you throw the grenade, it bounces back off. The metapolitics are grotesque enough that I don't even actually want to think about them, and what, exactly, does Spielberg hate about 10 year old girls, anyway - other than, apparently, everything?

There's not one surprise in this film - other than, maybe, how much it sucked; in fact, I would have to say that any surprise count would have to be negative, as I actually did a four-beat countdown to the "click" moment in one particularly tedious, but intended to be suspenseful, scene. Also, I don't think I was supposed to laugh uncontrollably at the car ferry incident, but I did, particularly when the sedan o' family plunged straight into the river at Tom^**. Man, that part was a fucking laugh riot.

Sadly, that was the last fun this pile had to offer. You don't even get to watch any of the characters you hate - which is to say, all of them - die. Even the obviously most dead jackass magically reappears hale and whole at the end, hundreds of miles away. Damn you, Stephen Speilberg, for crushing my dreams of Robby on fire!

Bah. I've wasted too many perfectly good words on this shitfest. I think I'll go floss out my brain.

^* I didn't think John Woo could make a movie that bad either. I'm 0 for 2 on these things. And no, it's not an irrational hatred of Tom Cruise. It's a purely rational hatred of Tom Cruise. No, wait, I'm just being glib. That has nothing to do with these films sucking harder than a five dollar wharf whore on swing-shift; it's merely the icing on the top.

^** If this and Battlefield Earth are what Scientology does to filmmaking, I want to know where the hell the MPAA is. Fucking useless bastards! Why the hell aren't they protecting me from copies of this?

Comments

[rmd.livejournal.com]

also, it immediately won the "most annoyingly blatant product placement" award for this past summer's movies. (customer, of course, was tivo)

[sir-quirky-k.livejournal.com]

You haven't seen blatant product placement until you've seen the Indian version of Deal or No Deal, which apparently (though I haven't seen it, mostly through fear) decided to do a freezeframe to plug a brand of toothpaste.

Oh, and flashing up Nokia's logo and 'Connecting People' slogan at every bank offer.