America sizzles, then fizzles.

Special effects, great, but storyline and characters? Let’s just say there’s no one here to like. Tom Cruise plays a surprisingly nimble shirker-slob of a divorcee dad. Unfortunately, the script allows him little to do except reprimand his backwards-baseball-cap-wearing lunk of a son and make futile attempts to reassure his almost permanently screaming daughter, the most irritating character in the film, a cross between Little Orphan Annie and Annie Hall with a full set of neuroses. Forced to sleep in the cellar when the aliens are wrecking planet Earth overhead, she whinges about her ‘bad back’. There was a time, in unreconstructed disaster films, when females just screamed; this one requires in-car mantra-therapy when the monsters are right behind and gaining fast. Another time you feel dad’s exasperation tested to the limit is when as he is trying to dissuade his idiot son from joining a suicide tank corps pitted against 100-foot vapourising tripods. Daughter, instructed to stay right there by a tree, goes off with the first couple of passing hicks that ask her. Other people are just as hostile as the nasties, whether as panicking mob trying to overturn the car in which the family are fleeing or as mad paedophile offering shelter in a superbly minging but ineffective cellar. The odd scene of futile heroics, designed to counterbalance all the mayhem, such as when the lunk ‘saves’ people by dragging them onto a departing ferry, just before it gets overturned by a sub-aqua monster, seems as much an afterthought as the mawkish family-bonding dialogue scenes, compulsory with any Spielberg film. The failure of the humans to defeat the monsters makes for a fizzle ending - it seems they just can't stand the climate, although the annoying voiceover explains it more portentously,simultaneously offering an excuse for the Iraq war. Nice one, Steven. The sequence where father and daughter get sucked up into the space ship to be used as crop-spray is perhaps the nastiest, because we’ve just witnessed the process by which they get reduced to spray. Shortly after, dad is somewhat too literally rebirthed, but it’s too late for him to be reinstated. That’s where, if you’ll excuse the pun, he gets to play second fizzle!

Very amusing review - it's certainly put me off seeing the film!

Frances

Nice one Sheila.

Z

Everything I've read about this film puts me off it - from the whole chest -beating Americanisation of it, the not-so-subliminal justifications for an illegal war (hey, we're the victims here, man) to the tacky hype and self importance of the cast and director.

The original is a work of British genius. Why oh why do we have to continually see our best and most integral stories mutated by the yanks? There should be a law or something.

JB