The best thing about War of the Worlds

was coming out of the theater to see a storm that looked EXACTLY like the storm at the beginning of the film. Weird flash strobe lightening that kept going and going, with just a constant low thrum of thunder going on behind it.

It was really weird, and just a little freaky…and thank god we weren’t altered in any way, otherwise I think we might have spent the night huddled in Bneuensc and Kneidzw’s basement, or our crawlspace, waiting for the tripods to go away.

So, whew.

Dakota Fanning was incredibly irritating, and hereby wins my “Child I’m hoping will most likely die” award. I’d suggest a drinking game for every time she screams, except that you’d really need to take aspirin, and you shouldn’t mix drugs and alcohol. Somebody suggested her for an npc casting the other day. I can now unequivocably say “over my dead, alien-speared and sprayed-over-the-landscape corpse”.

Other than that, I enjoyed the movie. Spielberg is amazing at constructing a level of tension and maintaining it throughout a film. Good visual design, GREAT sound design, and the Williams score was a wonderful pairing (in that right wine for the meal way). Despite the fact that I think he’s a jerk in real life, Cruise was good in the film, and even if I thought that him wanting to keep his daughter alive was a character flaw, I rather liked his character. As ancientwisdom remarked, Spielberg is great at drawing out of people characters that you can get invested in. He’s also good at getting at the feel of a story and doing it well. And hey, who can resist Tom Cruise being sucked up into alien sphincters?

Ideologically? Well, I didn’t expect it to shine in this regard, so I wasn’t disappointed.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled storm-that-is-really-an-alien-invasion