Wednesday, July 22, 2009

War of the Worlds

I'm on a Roll

Last night I had the good fortune of viewing The War of the Worlds.
Maybe it's that I'm going in thinking these movies are going to suck, but damn – this was another winner.
Last week I spent indoors, taking a VB class and doing crap around the house. I was a total shut-in and felt that this week I needed to get out and do something.
So, I made a date for every day of the week. When I ran out of bars that sounded like fun (all 2), I decided it was time to watch a movie. So, I suggested this to my sister, who suggested TWOTW.
I figured it was that or Bewitched – either way I'd be eating popcorn and thinking about what I'm going to do the next day, because let's face it – movies suck ass.
But, good golly Ms. Molly, this was a good movie.
Even Tom Cruise couldn't ruin this one.
NOTE ABOUT CRUISE: He is the Keanu Reeves V 1.0. Seriously. Some movies need a Keanu Reeves to place in huge, spiraling stories where character development will only complicate the CG and special effects. They started with Cruise, but he wasn't quite shitty enough to fall into the background of interplanetary and intercomputer robot/alien forces killing motherfuckers scheme of events. No, they needed someone shittier, a V 2.0 and they got it in Reeves. But, there was another, a V 0.1, another Reeves, but he's dead and there's no reason to go into it here.
Point is: Cruise did a great job of falling into the overall mesh of destruction and chaos that I like to see in a movie.
Here's a synopsis:
K, so we meet Ray (Cruise) who's working on the docks as a crane operator. Now, this kinda pissed me off, cuz when you get to his house he lives kinda poor and I know those bastards who operate the cranes start at 80K. But, anyway...So, Ray's a kinda shitty dad and he's got his kids for the weekend, or whatever. Like my dad, only he doesn't beat his kids (just joking). So, he's all eating hummus that his shit kid (this girl is exactly like Drew Barrymore's character in E.T.) ordered to spite him, when he finds out that his son has stolen his car. So, he goes outside to find his son (possibly to beat him with a tire iron) and all these neighborhood people are looking up into the sky. There's this ominous cyclone-looking thing in the air and everyone is staring at it like moths on floodlights. Pretty soon the cyclone gets tired of their ugly mugs and starts firing shots of lightning down on the Earth. This is awesome. So, then Ray goes to check out the impact of the lightning and all of a sudden the Earth starts moving. Long story short: a huge fucking robot machine comes out of the ground, blows a horn and starts vaporizing dirty New Yorkers. The New Yorkers are all like "Boston or New Jersey?" But decide to run upstate to avoid two shittier cities (well, that's what I figure is going on). But, it doesn't matter; the alien ships, walking around on three legs like surrealistic vacuum cleaners, start taking out people one by one. Which is odd, cuz you'd think they'd just nail the entire city with one fell swoop. But, who cares, the New Yorkers are dead and you're not. Pretty soon, Ray decides that anarchy is afoot and steals some schmuck's mini van (it's that old school blue and wood job everyone had in 1984). In the mini van his daughter goes batshit and I start to wonder if beating your children shouldn't be a right provided by the constitution. Soon, we're at the kid's mom's house. She's off whoring at the opera with her new rich husband and the Ray family finds shelter in the basement. But, pretty soon the aliens are upon him and waste a plane that crashes into the neighborhood. He meets these reporters that are worthless, like in real life, and rapes the woman reporter to get a few stones out for all the trauma he's been through. This really didn't happen, but would have made sense in terms of the stress a motherfucker being chased by walking skyscrapers would be under. Next, they travel upstate and find a city of lost souls who carjack Ray. Ray pulls a gun, someone else pulls a bigger gun, etc. The point is, when the end of times comes; don't think a gun is going to save you. After being broken by the bigger gun dude, Ray decides to jump on a ferry to get the fuck out of dodge. Why anyone would think a water-bound ferry would provide any protection from diabolical mile-high robots is beyond me, but it makes sense to Ray. Then we get into this side story about how Ray's son wants to help people out and hunt alien scum, whereas Ray just wants to save his own ass. This is like when you're young, like Ray's son, and you want to help the homeless and fight crime and then you get old and just want to set homeless people on fire and shoplift to get an erection. In a better movie, Ray would do both. So, the ferry obviously doesn't work out, not because the huge alien robots can easily nail it from nine yards away with 200 ton lasers, but because there just so happens to be a robot underwater that tips the ferry and starts snatching human meat from the water. That's right: the robots or aliens or something in the walking jabberwockies eats flesh. Dope. Ray and family make it to shore, Ray's son gets a hard on to fight with the marines, and gets killed – or does he? Next, we meet Tim Robbin's character, a survivalist with a knack for somehow not getting his basement destroyed when the giant robots are hand searching the planet for human meat. We have some discussions about how to kill the aliens and loss of hope and soon there's alien intruders in the flesh. Really gay-looking alien intruders. They're supposed to be this race of monsters that is bent on ending a civilization, but tool around the basement like Laurel and Hardy looking for hooch. Ray whacks the survivalist and is soon caught by an alien robot. He stuffs it full of hand grenades and kills it – which is badass, cuz the fuckers can't be killed by missiles or anything cuz they have shields, like when you'd play GI Joe in your backyard. Anyway, two minutes before the end of the movie we find out that amoebas somehow destroyed all the aliens that had been studying our planet for millennia and somehow missed the fact that our microorganisms would kill them. Let me be more blunt: they buried their ships under our ground before humans existed, just waiting for the planet to evolve from microorganisms, that were on the planet when they buried the ships, into humans that they could eat. Then, they sat and studied our every move and every piece of nature around us. Then, they conquered Einstein's theory of E=MC2 and traveled space through electro magnetic waves and came down to our planet in the form of pure energy, only to reanimate into their alien selves. Then, they activated their old ships, blew away most of the world and then died from the amoebas that were on the planet in the first place and continued to live on throughout history. Coincidental mistake?
No, what they don't tell you in the movie is that Scientologists have been planning for this invasion for years. They knew about the interstellar aliens and knew that they were coming to destroy us. L. Ron Hubbard, with the help of Ramtha and Shirley McClaine, set up a mental block around the Earth that would make the aliens forget that amoebas are lethal. Once again, Scientologists save humanity and we can't even applaud the love between a psychotic gay actor and a 12-year-old brainwashed actress? All to the applause of the Oprah?
Forshame America.
Anyway, the bottom line, all jokes aside: this was an entertaining movie. I give it 4 stars. Sure, there was a bunch of shit that lacked explanation or made no sense; but, at least Will Smith didn't punch out an alien in the end while yelling "Welcome to Earth!"
Do yourself a favor and see this movie.
Pleace, Matt

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