War of the Expectations

[Spoilers ahead]

The biggest hurdle Spielberg’s War of the Worlds had is our audience’s insatiable urge for everything to make sense.

When Superman was created, it was enough to say that he was an alien and in Earth’s environment he had powers. Today’s Superman? Well, he’s a huge solar collector, absorbing power from the radioactive waves of yellow stars blah blah blah…I don’t care. Why do people need so much realism in their escapism?

I don’t know why, but the fact is they do nowadays, and that’s why they’re fine with Jeff Goldblum hacking into the alien mothership computer and inserting a virus to stop an invasion, because aliens must use computers in starships so they’d be like our computers, right?

NO!

Why are the lightning bolts cold? Why were they underground? What are the red vines? They are alien — The technology is alien. Their motives are alien. One of the core focuses of the story is what humanity goes through when faced with something it can’t comprehend.

Fenton is mostly right: this movie is a sci-fi corollary of genocide — one society invades another in an attempt to extinguish it. But what’s compelling about these stories in history is man’s desire to struggle against it and survive it, even when there does not seem to be any escape.

Ray’s never a entirely bad dad, just a selfish and misguided one, and it takes a crisis larger that himself to do right by his children, and in the end he’s not wholly redeemed, but he does become their father in the best way he could have.

I think people need to give this movie some time and see it as the movie it is, and not the movie they wanted it to be… which sadly, judging by most reviews, was “Independence Day.”

[Edited and reposted from Cinematical.com]