“War of the Worlds” Reviewed

Yes­ter­day, I went to watch Tom Cruise’s War of the Worlds. I was­n’t quite sure what I was expect­ing in terms of qual­i­ty. One review­er said that the movie was dis­ap­point­ing and that he could­n’t come to care for the main char­ac­ters because in a time of cri­sis such as was being depict­ed, why should we as the view­ers care about one man and his chil­dren when entire cities were being destroyed? Anoth­er review­er said that the movie was a “must see” and was great­ly entertaining.

I’m going to have to agree with the sec­ond review­er. War of the Worlds was every bit an action movie, but I found myself much more enjoy­ing the emo­tion­al aspect of it: Ray (Tom Cruise) doing every­thing he could to keep his chil­dren alive. I’m not a par­ent, but I have no doubt that those of you who are that watch the movie will be able to relate to this aspect of the movie.

In addi­tion to the emo­tion­al aspect, the movie was bal­anced by a healthy dose of action and spe­cial effects eye can­dy. While the Tripods were out­landish (should we have expect­ed any­thing else?), they were believ­able as every part of their design seemed to serve a func­tion as part of the aliens’ ulti­mate goal: the destruc­tion of mankind.

For the aliens them­selves, though, I could­n’t help but recall the aliens from anoth­er sum­mer­time extrater­res­tri­al war­fare movie: Will Smith’s Inde­pen­dence Day.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I’m not pre­pared to com­pare the movie to the book or the orig­i­nal War of the Worlds movie. It has been far too long since I’ve read the book, and I’ve only seen a par­tial bit of the orig­i­nal movie prob­a­bly an equal­ly long time ago.

From the Christian Perspective

• Sev­er­al exple­tives and vulgarities.
• Quite a few instances of vio­lence, most of which was “sci-fi vio­lence” between the aliens and humans. There was, how­ev­er, no graph­ic dis­plays of the violence.
• A big one for me that irri­tates me to no end whether it appears in enter­tain­ment or lit­er­a­ture is that the movie assumed a lifes­pan of Earth that has been at least mil­lions of years old. The aliens are described as hav­ing buried the Tripods on Earth before we showed up mil­lions of years ago. This of course destroys the foun­da­tion of all bib­li­cal truth. In an odd bal­anc­ing act, though, the movie ends in an affir­ma­tion that it was God which cre­at­ed. I can’t go into more detail about that, how­ev­er, with­out giv­ing away the ending.

All in all, I found the movie enter­tain­ing, sus­pense­ful, excit­ing, and worth­while. The end­ing was a bit too abrupt for my tastes, but it was at least plausible.