War of the Worlds

So we all went to see this movie yesterday (with a whole three other people in the theater), and it was actually way better than I thought it would be. All the reviews that I read said it pretty much sucked, and while there were huge plot holes (why the hell was that little neighborhood in Boston perfectly clean when the rest of the world was like ending???) and it actually got so intense it was kind of funny towards the end, I thought it was really good. But most importantly, it let me spend two hours loving Tom Cruise like I did before the whole TomKat thing and forget that he's really become a crazy, insensitive bastard.

The plot was mainly Tom Cruise going for Father of the Year. His ex, who is happily pregnant and presumably married to a rather anonymous-looking good guy named Tim, dumps the kids at Tom's to go to his parents. Here, the first plot holes begin to appear. First, I wouldn't leave my children with Tom Cruise- even if half their genetic makeup did come from him. And I certainly wouldn't leave them with him in the slums. And why aren't they going to their grandparents, anyway???

Anyhoo, Tim is also loaded and has a better relationship with the kids than Ray (Tom Cruise). This sticks in Ray's craw (what is that?) and he goes about rectifying the situation by not feeding the kids dinner and calling Robbie, the son, a very nasty name that I can't repeat here for fear of being kicked off Blogspot.com. Oh, and then he goes to bed and leaves little Rachel alone while Robbie steals the car. And then the aliens come (oddly, not as disurbing as leaving your ten-year-old alone and hungry).

So for the next two hours Ray runs around with the kids, stealing cars, feeding Rachel peanut butter (with one of the funniest lines in the film), shooting, and hooking up with a really scary looking Tim Robbins in some basement (my dad said the first thing he thought of when he saw him was "You live with Susan Sarandon long enough...") and just generally tries to find his way to Boston, where, for some inexplicable reason, Mom will be waiting with perfectly coiffed hair. Yeah, it got kind of longwinded and boring after a while...

I still love the 1953 movie better, but the two leads were actually in this one, as the grandparents at the end. It just seemed more smooth and flawless, probably because they weren't focusing on Tom Cruise's seriously lacking parenting skills and the like, but this was pretty good. Dakota Fanning, for being an eleven year old, is a seriously good actress. Even next to Tom Cruise her's was probably the best performance in the movie. And that Robbie looked amazingly like Tom Cruise, although with an attitude. So pretty good- go see it. Steven Speilberg has definately moved on from cute and cuddly aliens ala ET...