Xixax Film Forum

Spielberg & Cruise Teaming on War of the Worlds!
Source: Variety

Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise will bring The War of the Worlds to the big screen, with Cruise expected to star, reports Variety. David Koepp (Secret Window) will rewrite a Josh Friedman first-draft script based on the classic H.G. Wells alien-invasion novel.

Depending on how quickly a script is approved, the sci-fi epic could start filming in late 2005. Cruise and his C/W Productions partner Paula Wagner set up the film at Paramount in May 2002. DreamWorks will come aboard as a partner, now that Spielberg is involved, adds the trade.

Cruise and Wagner will produce, and it is likely Spielberg and DreamWorks Pictures co-heads Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald will be involved in that capacity as well.

"War" became permanently etched in American culture when Orson Welles' Mercury Theater performed the story on radio in 1938 and ignited a nationwide panic when listeners didn't realize it was fiction. H.G. Wells wrote the book in 1898.

Also, while Spielberg's plans for Indiana Jones 4 have stalled, he's now interested in The Rivals, the Robin Swicord-scripted drama centered on 19th-century legit stars Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. That film seems likely for a winter start at DreamWorks. And C/W is preparing Mission: Impossible 3 for Paramount, to be helmed by Narc director Joe Carnahan. The third film is expected to go into production this summer, with Cruise to star.

no effin' way!!!

but they could've adapted this play instead:

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.amazon.com%2Fimages%2FP%2FB0000025CO.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg&hash=3a9f78df40e03cea0365a82dfe3ec6925859133a)

...or maybe it doesn't make any difference.

Good news, but it doesn't clearly state that Spielberg is directing. Anything could happen. I'm betting on producer.

He'll direct it. He and Cruise have been circling this since the Minority Report days.

Quote from: mogwaino effin' way!!!

:!:

yes?

Quote from: mogwaiyes?

he's supporting ur reaction with an exclamation.

similar to the dramatic NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO in this thread (http://xixax.com/viewtopic.php?t=1195&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=75).

i'll say this will be very pretty awesome

This movie could be so great... and just hope they dont fuck it up like in Minority Report

Quote from: andykThis movie could be so great... and just hope they dont fuck it up like in Minority Report

But they didn't fuck up Minority Report.....  :(

nope, if this is going to be only half as good as minority report...

*satysfied*

Quote from: phil marlowenope, if this is going to be only half as good as minority report...

*satysfied*

exactly.  if its even HALF as good ill love it.

Should be interesting. Spielberg has been doing more offbeat projects lately. It's like he's been doing more personal/art films, while everything from TLOTR to Harry Potter took epic film fantasy to another level -- both technically and in profit. This'll give Spielberg a reputable entrance back into that domain after this hiatus.

this movie sounds great, i cant wait

but i thought spielberg aliens were nice?

in Minority Report... the concept of predicting the future to solve crimes wasnt really well used in my opinion... its something really cool but it doesnt have to do with technology of the future but the visios of those 3

I enjoyed the movie, but I think that they could have done better

Quote from: andykin Minority Report... the concept of predicting the future to solve crimes wasnt really well used in my opinion... its something really cool but it doesnt have to do with technology of the future but the visios of those 3

I enjoyed the movie, but I think that they could have done better

I totally agree with you there

Quote from: andykbut it doesnt have to do with technology of the future but the visions of those 3

Whose visions are you referring to?

Quote from: Cinephile

Quote from: andykbut it doesnt have to do with technology of the future but the visions of those 3

Whose visions are you referring to?

i think he means Spielberg, Cruise and Kaminski

Quote from: themodernage02

Quote from: Cinephile

Quote from: andykbut it doesnt have to do with technology of the future but the visions of those 3

Whose visions are you referring to?

i think he means Spielberg, Cruise and Kaminski

no.. Moe, Larry and Curly.

Quote from: ewardbut i thought spielberg aliens were nice?

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..nah,  thats one satanic alien...look at his eye.....

Err... no... I meant the "Pre-Cogs". They were the ones predicting the crimes, and they were human, so maybe they could still find a way of doing that today and not in 2054. Yes, maybe they dont have now the technology so that Tom Cruise could move the images with his hands and all that crap, but whatever special gift that Agatha and the others had is a matter of nature and not technology...

It would have been nicer if they would have made it dependent on some new technology and not humans...

that would've taken away what was so freakin intriguing about the premise IMO

i mean, i havent read it but isnt that part of the phillip k. dick story?  so you take issue with the source material and not the translation onto film then?

didnt know about the story... that is what im saying that is well done and i liked the movie overall... but i think that the concept of predicting the future to solve crimes should have been done better, especially by spielberg

Quote from: themodernage02

Quote from: Cinephile

Quote from: andykbut it doesnt have to do with technology of the future but the visions of those 3

Whose visions are you referring to?

i think he means Spielberg, Cruise and Kaminski

So is andyk disregarding all the people Spielberg interviewed on what the future would look like in 2054?

yeah u can't make a movie about the future and just hav robots, or hav it be about robots, he already did that with AI anyway. Minority Report presents a way ekzellent future, and that's one where humans are evolving, not technology.

Cruise, Spielberg march into 'War'
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Paramount Pictures is switching its tentpole pictures for next year. "Mission: Impossible 3," which has been plagued by director problems, is out, and "War of the Worlds," directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise, is in.

The studio said Wednesday that instead of beginning production on "M:I-3" this summer, as had been originally planned, Cruise will instead go directly into Spielberg's modern-day adaptation of the H.G. Wells classic about a Martian invasion of Earth. "War," which has been in development for some time, will begin filming in November for a release next year -- the exact date has not yet been decided.

Cruise hasn't abandoned "M:I-3," though. It will now shoot next summer, with J.J. Abrams, creator of the TV series "Felicity" and "Alias," set to make his feature directorial debut.

Paramount had been facing an increasingly difficult situation with "M:I-3." The third "M:I" feature, with Cruise both producing and starring, had originally been penciled in as a release this year, with David Fincher directing. When Fincher bowed out in favor of another project, Joe Carnahan came aboard as director. Carnahan, in turn, exited the project last month, with the studio citing creative differences (HR 7/19).

With the clock ticking, Paramount already had shifted "M:I-3's" release from May 6, 2005, to June 29, 2005; preproduction had begun for filming in Europe later this month; and a cast that includes Scarlett Johansson, Carrie-Anne Moss, Kenneth Branagh and Ving Rhames was in place.

Cruise and his C/W Prods. partner, Paula Wagner, wanted Abrams to take the reins, but Abrams' contractual obligations with ABC/Touchstone Television, for whom he is launching a new drama series, "Lost," as well as readying the fourth season of "Alias," prevented him from taking on the "M:I-3" assignment until next year.

At the same time, Spielberg hit a roadblock with a drama he was readying to shoot about the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics. With that project delayed while it undergoes a rewrite by Tony Kushner, Spielberg's schedule opened up.

Taking advantage of Spielberg's availability, Paramount shifted course, and Cruise will first star in "War" and then move into "M:I-3."

"War," which will reteam Spielberg and Cruise, who worked together on "Minority Report," has a script by David Koepp ("Spider-Man," "Panic Room"). It will be a Paramount/DreamWorks production. Kathleen Kennedy and Wagner will serve as producers for Amblin Entertainment and C/W Prods.

"These things don't usually happen with a happy ending," Paramount Motion Picture Group chairman Sherry Lansing said. "I feel overjoyed. The script for 'War' is nothing short of brilliant, and this way Tom will finish 'War' first and get his No. 1 choice for 'M:I-3.' I quite honestly feel blessed. Spielberg has committed to a movie, a Tom Cruise movie, and Cruise is going to follow that up with a second project. We have two major tentpole projects. It all came out better than anyone could have imagined."

Added Wagner: "It is exciting and fortuitous that this all worked out so beautifully, and to reunite these two incredible men (Spielberg and Cruise) is thrilling. I am very excited about J.J. Abrams. It was just an opportunity that arose when we delayed, and it just presented the perfect moment. We have known J.J. for a while, and it's great that it all works out."

zang!

That IS pretty cool. I love it when things work out for rich people in Hollywood. It's just so great! Seriously, though, this seems pretty swell.

sky news (http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30500-13195040,00.html)

MOST EXPENSIVE FILM EVER

A remake of The War of the Worlds is reportedly set to become Hollywood's most expensive blockbuster.

The budget for the new movie will exceed the £110m it took to make Titanic, according to The Sun.

Steven Spielberg will direct the film version of the classic HG Wells story about alien invaders and Tom Cruise will play the lead role.

However, neither will be paid any money up front.

Both have chosen to take a 20% share of box office takings instead.

"No expense will be spared," an insider told the newspaper. "Spielberg wants to make it the film of the decade."

A radio version of the story caused panic in America in 1938 when listeners became convinced that Earth was being invaded by Martians.

I'd think that a film like this would require a lot of preproduction, and if the starting date of filming is set in november that is less than three months, of course this film has been in talks for some time now, but it was supposedly to be after MI3 and the Olimpics project, anyway, hope they pull it off.

What do you guys think?

i'm getting very excited

Me too. I have faith in Speilberg...

Quote from: FernandoI'd think that a film like this would require a lot of preproduction, and if the starting date of filming is set in november that is less than three months, of course this film has been in talks for some time now, but it was supposedly to be after MI3 and the Olimpics project, anyway, hope they pull it off.

What do you guys think?

the talent is there. the story, i'm not so sure of.

i was never paying attention to interviews/news when spielberg planned to make his other "Movies of the Decade", so i don't know if he has always approached them like this. if he hasn't, then i wonder if he is just pushing himself to a big failure, he's obviously trying to go for 4-decade run with Jaws, ET, and Jurassic Park, what's next.. the same in 2015? the man's a factory.

if it's gonna succeed he's gotta put sumthing more human into it than his rips from current edgy talent (cruise notwithstanding).

I hope the story is something more imaginative than Independence Day. I hope Cruise doesn't play some military hero who hops in his jet and shoots down UFOs.

Top Gun 2: The War of the Worlds

Quote from: DerekI hope the story is something more imaginative than Independence Day.

Read the H.G. Wells book, listen to the Orson Welles reading that scared the country or watch the 1953 classic film and you'll see the story is not thin as "ID4".

Is it set the same as the book, that is early 20th century? In England?

Quote from: MacGuffinthe Orson Welles reading that scared the country

it's funny that everyone keeps mentioning that. i've always thought the story of everyone freaking out was meant as a reference at how paranoid everyone was at the time that they were all behaving like children, but the way it is mentioned such as mac did just now it seems that it's meant as like a testament of how scary it is?

its an embarrassing thing, like u don't hear the germans going "heh heh, remember when we were duped by those nazis? that was really impressive."

Heil Welles...

Fanning adds 'Worlds' to her resume

Dakota Fanning has closed a deal to join Tom Cruise in Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds," a DreamWorks-Paramount Pictures co-production. The deal continues a streak of projects for the actress. She is prepping for her role opposite Kurt Russell in DreamWorks' "Dreamer" for helmer John Gatins, and she is attached to play Alice in live action adaptations of "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass," which Les Bohem is scripting for DreamWorks. Even though the young actress has already worked with Robert De Niro, Denzel Washington and Sean Penn, "War" marks Fanning's highest-profile gig, since it will team her with both Spielberg and Cruise. She acted in the Spielberg-created Sci-Fi Channel series "Taken" but did not meet the Oscar-winning helmer during that shoot.

Quote from: rustinglassIs it set the same as the book, that is early 20th century? In England?

From Entertainment Weekly:

EW: You said that the film will be a modern-day version of the book, but what other changes will you be making? The Martians in Wells' book are evil and ugly, not Spielberg's usual gentle, bug-eyed ETs.

Tom Cruise: When you see Steven's movies, there's always humanity. But it's going to be exciting, it's going to be really scary, and it's going to be exciting to maintain the tone of H.G. Wells' [1898 book]. There guys are coming to dominate Earth. But I can't get too much into it because [screenwriter] David Koepp has already done a rewrite and Steven has been working on it and things are going to change. We're just in the dream stage. We haven't even cast it yet.

EW: Are you scouting locations?

Tom Cruise: It will be set in the U.S., but we're not sure of exact locations yet.

Cruise Could Make $360 Million from 'War of the Worlds'

Movie superstar Tom Cruise has become the highest earning actor in Hollywood history after signing a deal that could earn him a staggering $360 million for his role in War Of The Worlds. Rather than agree a set fee for his part in the Steven Spielberg-directed epic, Cruise will earn 10 per cent of the film's box office takings plus a share of profits from DVDs, video games and toys. Experts predict the film - based on HG Wells' classic novel about a Martian attack - could make $1.8 billion at the cinema alone, of which Cruise's share would be an incredible $180 million. And, if he stars in the two planned sequels, Cruise's earnings will double at least. A Hollywood source says, "No expense will be spared. Spielberg wants to make it the film of the decade - the one that everyone talks about and rushes to see."

uh, the amount of attention they have focused just on dollar signs - i hope they have at least twice that on the actual movie itself..

Robbins, Otto Invade Par's 'War'
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Tim Robbins and Miranda Otto are headed for "War of the Worlds."

Robbins is in negotiations to play astronomer Ogilvy in the Steven Spielberg-directed big-screen adaptation of H.G. Wells' classic novel, while Otto would play the wife of the main character, to be played by Tom Cruise . Dakota Fanning is set to appear as their daughter.

Paramount Pictures put the project on the fast track in August -- with just 10 weeks of preproduction in order to meet a mid-November start date -- and the cast has been coming together quickly.

DreamWorks and Paramount are co-financing "War of the Worlds," a contemporary adaptation of the 1898 novel, which is one of the best-known alien-invasion stories.

Chatwin eyes Par/D'Works 'War' remake

Newcomer Justin Chatwin is in negotiations for a coveted role opposite Tom Cruise in Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds," an adaptation of H.G. Wells' classic novel for Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks. Chatwin beat out several young actors for the part, which casts him as the son of Tom Cruise's character. Their strained relationship is a significant plot point in the film, sources said, though the script has been closely guarded. Dakota Fanning is on board to play the daughter in the family, and Tim Robbins and Miranda Otto recently signed on for parts. DreamWorks and Paramount are co-financing "War," a contemporary adaptation of the 1898 novel. C/W Prods.' Paula Wagner and Kathleen Kennedy are producing from a script by David Koepp.

Who?

Justin Chatwin

Oh, I don't care what anyone says, hes been a good actor in everything ive seen him in.

Spielberg to Film in Shenandoah Valley

Scenes for the Martian-invasion film "War of the Worlds," directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise, will be filmed in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, according to an area tourism official.

Jean Clark, tourism director for the Rockbridge County area, said she does not know exactly when or where the movie will be shot in the valley. But, "I know they're shooting something," she said.

Clark expects filming in the area will wrap up before the year's end.

Movie publicist Deborah Wuliger said filming is now taking place in New Jersey, and industry publication Variety reported that Spielberg is also shooting scenes in upstate New York.

Wuliger said she did not know whether any commitments have been made for Virginia. But Clark said many production support people have been in the area preparing for filming.

When scouts came to the area in September, they looked at parts of Augusta County, Staunton and Waynesboro, said Sergei Troubetzkoy, Staunton's tourism director.

Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks are financing the movie, a modern version of the H.G. Wells novel. It is scheduled for release next summer.

Quote from: MacGuffinand industry publication Variety reported that Spielberg is also shooting scenes in upstate New York.

my cousin just got cast as an extra...lucky bitch...

http://www.waroftheworlds.com/

That image is simultaneously cool and cheesy. Cool, in that it looks like they'll be sticking to the original description of the monsters, and cheesy in that it looks like the cover of a bad sci-fi novel. Looking forward to the trailer on Dec. 17th....

Spielberg Loses 'Extras' While Filming

A crew that was filming scenes for Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds," based on H.G. Wells' novel about an invasion from outer space, lost a few extras in the Connecticut River last weekend.

Two adult-size mannequins got free and drifted south down the river during filming on the riverbank in Windsor, said Windsor police Lt. Shannon Haynes.

Despite a search by the movie production's water safety crew, the mannequins weren't recovered, and other police departments along the riverfront were alerted.

"We just wanted them to know that if they got any calls about bodies floating in the river," Haynes said Monday. "But we never heard anything about them being found."

Spielberg and star Tom Cruise shot sequences across the state last week, including several scenes at an old chemical plant in Naugatuck.

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Tom Cruise pauses in a leaf-strewn street while filming one of the final scenes of Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds," Nov. 30, 2004, in New York.

1. give it a week and we'll see those mannequins on ebay.

2. how will this movie be ready by the summer of 2005  :?:  :!:

Quote from: ©bradhow will this movie be ready by the summer of 2005  :?:  :!:

stay tuned for the delay announcement.

Quote from: ©brad2. how will this movie be ready by the summer of 2005  :?:  :!:

I know he shoots fast, and he edits while he shoots (as he told on The Terminal DVD). I dunno how much CGI is involved, but that would be the only hold-up.

i'm going down to athens on friday to look in on some of the shooting and hopefully get an autograph or two.

Quote from: MacGuffin

Quote from: ©brad2. how will this movie be ready by the summer of 2005  :?:  :!:

I know he shoots fast, and he edits while he shoots (as he told on The Terminal DVD). I dunno how much CGI is involved, but that would be the only hold-up.

I also read an interview with him somewhere, from the set of WOTW, in which he said they were getting all the big FX sequences out of the way first so that ILM could begin work immediately, while they finished the rest of the film.

more on-set photos

http://www.girlonfire.net/Movies/War%20of%20the%20Worlds/Production/Nov%2030/index.html

This (http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/waroftheworlds/) is a pretty nifty little teaser trailer.

That's exciting...I read the book when I was a kid, or I read most of it. The community aspect was so important, I hope Spielberg sticks to that.

Great teaser... I hope he doesn't over cheeze it because this one looks like it could be really good... it also looks kinda eightiesish in a cool way.

what an awesome teaser, i'm so excited to see this

Quote from: RegularKarateGreat teaser... I hope he doesn't over cheeze it because this one looks like it could be really good... it also looks kinda eightiesish in a cool way.

Yeah!  It totally does.  Felt like there were some Poltergeist vibes here.

Quote from: Sal

Quote from: RegularKarateGreat teaser... I hope he doesn't over cheeze it because this one looks like it could be really good... it also looks kinda eightiesish in a cool way.

Yeah!  It totally does.  Felt like there were some Poltergeist vibes here.

With a dash of Close Encounters too.

He's so fucking shrewd!

Aside from Poltergeist & Close Encounters... looks like he's taking the global apocalyptic terror initiated by 28 Days Later and mixing it with the epic scale that only modern CGI offers (TLOTR). He's once again co-opting what's out there and staying a step ahead.

dude that rocked!

Am I the only one sensing its political subtext...

Fun Stuff Here (http://www.dreamworksfansite.com/waroftheworlds/downloads.php)

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that looks like a monty python poster.

the teaser is really cool. The pics i've been seeing reminds me of Independce Day.

Quote from: Dtm115300The pics i've been seeing reminds me of Independce Day.

That can't be a good thing, can it?

I mean, it would be a bit of directorial misstep if, say, Spielberg ends War of the Worlds with Randy Quaid crashing his plane into the alien ship, while Tom Cruise cheers him from the ground.

alot of people consider his endings directorial missteps.  sadly, alot of people consider every one of his films directorial missteps.

Quote from: Find Your Magali

Quote from: Dtm115300The pics i've been seeing reminds me of Independce Day.

That can't be a good thing, can it?

I mean, it would be a bit of directorial misstep if, say, Spielberg ends War of the Worlds with Randy Quaid crashing his plane into the alien ship, while Tom Cruise cheers him from the ground.

Well i was thinking that the photo of Tom and the extras looking stright ahead most likely at an alien ship. Kinda looks like the same scene from Indep-d.

Quote from: Dtm115300Well i was thinking that the photo of Tom and the extras looking stright ahead most likely at an alien ship. Kinda looks like the same scene from Indep-d.

Or it could be from:

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damn, that still just convinced me to go buy the dvd of close encounters

Super Bowl TV spot here. (http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/waroftheworlds/large_sb.html)

I like the fact that Cruise seems to be playing an everyday man as oppose to some badass super agent or something. It makes it seem more real. Especially the act that hes driving a minivan. This has potential.

This will kick ass... they are still not showing much which its fantastic

I wonder if Manny gets in or dies. Decisions, decisions....

that is EXCITING. THAT IS WHAT I WANT TO SEE[/color]

I actually feel as though I'm a little boy right now.

If I had been a little boy when I saw that, I would've physically died. My body wouldn't've been able to absorb the excitement. Holy SHIT.

Quote from: ewardthat looks like a monty python poster.

which is itself a reference to the Ben Hur poster.

Quote from: picolasthat is EXCITING. THAT IS WHAT I WANT TO SEE[/color]

I actually feel as though I'm a little boy right now.

If I had been a little boy when I saw that, I would've physically died. My body wouldn't've been able to absorb the excitement. Holy SHIT.

hah, yeah i felt it too. spielberg will own this decade, as he owns the last three.

yeah less is more is cool.  cool that people who dont know what war of the worlds is wont even know there are aliens or anything in the film.

yeah, that was a damn arousing teaser...those shots with dakota fanning are fucking creepy

FINALLY. A good Dakota Fanning movie! What sort of psychological problems does she have that she can look so utterly terrified so perfectly, as she does in that masterful shot in this trailer?

I'm just repeating what's already been said, but that is a DAMN good commercial.

So simple, yet so provocative.  And Fanning handles scared real well.  She got me a little freaked.

And yeah, even from just the few lines Cruise utters in this (before he even got into the mini-van), I felt he was a normal, everyday Joe.

This tv spot is really brilliant.  It shows so much without showing much at all.

I hope the aliens don't look all cheesy though. That could ruin everything.

Quote from: StefenI hope the aliens don't look all cheesy though. That could ruin everything.

(https://xixax.com/files/warofthezaphods.jpg)

Quote from: RegularKarate

Quote from: StefenI hope the aliens don't look all cheesy though. That could ruin everything.

(https://xixax.com/files/warofthezaphods.jpg)

ruined!

Here's (http://www.darkhorizons.com/news05/warworlds.php) the link of the chat in which Cruise and Spielberg talk about WotW, Indy 4, their western project and more.

Japanese Teaser Trailer here. (http://216.40.230.10/~movie-list.net/exclusive/war-of-the-worlds-jap-teaser.mov)

earlier last year I had a dream about how Mars was getting really close and we could observe Mars.  In that dream I went down the little street in my then apartment in Cambridge, where all these people were watching, a big clear Mars in the sky, and we could see the purple clouds and the lightning bolts on Mars, and the sky was purple.  I even remember seeing this little 6-year old girl who goes to my church who was there with here family.
It's kinda freaky how similar it looked to that one shot in the teaser trailer.  There was no mars in the shot in the trailer, but the colors were really similar!

Teaser Trailer #2 here. (http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/waroftheworlds/large_2.html)

That dialogue is just a little embarassing.

And why does it have to have a divorce story? (which will probably be resolved later)

It would be nice if a movie like this would let us learn about the characters during the disaster instead of conveniently building sympathy beforehand.

And the blue-collar Tom Cruise really doesn't work for me.

And why does David Koepp write everything?

Quote from: Jeremy Blackman
It would be nice if a movie like this would let us learn about the characters during the disaster instead of conveniently building sympathy beforehand.

Amen to that. Why these kinds of movies are so predictable. You know exactly what will happen to each and every character before the disaster or what ever it is begins. We're at a moment in cinema history where storytellers tell us the ending before the second act.

Quote from: Jeremy Blackman
And why does David Koepp write everything?

I KNOOOOOOWWW!!!!!


He must be a pretty good writer.


Whats his best Work?

I don't know - I think it looks good. However, I agree with JB about the dialogue. And that shot of Dakota Fanning looking out the back of the car was bit too much.

There's a lot in the teaser that's not good, but there's a lot that is good.  Mostly the dialogue, yeah, is not so good.  Especially from the minor characters like the cops and bystanders.  It just rings very false.  Many of the shots are excellent, though.  The backseat shot with Fanning that has been mentioned before, and I like the last shot in the teaser quite a bit.

This is one of the few movies, however, that I know I'm watching no matter what.  For some reason I can't just walk around NOT having seen War of the Worlds when everyone else has.  Even if the reviews are horrible (but I don't think they will be), I'd see it.  I've been liking a lot of what Spielberg and Cruise have been doing in the past few years.  I guess David Koepp is my main worry here, but I do trust Spielberg to deliver something fairly spectacular nonetheless.

Quote from: Borjabah

Quote from: Jeremy Blackman
And why does David Koepp write everything?

I KNOOOOOOWWW!!!!!


He must be a pretty good writer.

how do you know, then?

Quote from: Jeremy BlackmanAnd why does it have to have a divorce story? (which will probably be resolved later)

Wasn't there a divorce story in Independence Day?

There's a seperation story in Mars Attacks!

Then there's the death of the mother in Signs...

The music at the end of the teaser made me laugh a lot.  especially with that title card of A STEVEN SPIELBERG FILM.

this is gonna this decades jurassic park.  terrific action set pieces, great special effects, some corny dialogue (let's hope this doesn't cross over into lost world territories), great john williams score and sappy sentiment involving adults and children, koepp, spielberg, ilm.  i'll probably love it.

seriously tho, this does look like it's gonna be a lot of fun.  worries about the script and acting aside, spielberg even at his very worst (lost world) can do a hell of a good ol' fashioned action/suspense scene (julianne moore on the nearly broken glass, really the only reason to watch that otherwise stupid piece of shit).

Quote from: Jeremy Blackman
And why does David Koepp write everything?

Does anyone else picture (https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.variety.com%2Fgraphics%2F10towatch2001%2Fkoechner_david.jpg&hash=d42671896c6e64044e199f90e6001a00849b470e) when you hear/read "David Koepp"?

Quote from: Ravi

Quote from: Jeremy Blackman
And why does David Koepp write everything?

Does anyone else picture (https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.variety.com%2Fgraphics%2F10towatch2001%2Fkoechner_david.jpg&hash=d42671896c6e64044e199f90e6001a00849b470e) when you hear/read "David Koepp"?

I smell a biopic.

Spielberg Says Aliens Likely Our Friends

When the aliens finally arrive, Steven Spielberg expects them to be galactic good Samaritans like E.T. rather than the malevolent marauders of "War of the Worlds."

"I have to certainly believe what my heart tells me. That the first time there is a meeting of the minds between extraterrestrials and human beings, it's going to be friendly," Spielberg told The Associated Press in an interview looking ahead to his "War of the Worlds" saga, starring Tom Cruise.

Spielberg has covered the spectrum on alien behavior, from the mysterious yet ultimately benevolent explorers of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" to the cuddly munchkin of "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" to the manipulative abductors in his miniseries "Taken."

With "War of the Worlds," based on H.G. Wells' science-fiction classic, Spielberg presents monsters from above intending to snuff out humankind. The film, due out June 29, substitutes space invaders of unknown origin for the Martians of Wells' book.

While Spielberg's latest aliens are bad guys, that does not mean he has turned pessimistic on the prospects of buddying up with off-worlders. Given the level of technology required for interstellar travel and the long star trek required to reach Earth, Spielberg figures aliens inevitably would come in peace.

"I can't believe anybody would travel such vast distances bent on destruction. I believe anybody who would travel such vast distances are curious explorers, not conquerors," Spielberg said. "Carrying weapons a hundred-thousand light-years is quite a schlepp. I believe it's easier to travel 100,000 light-years with their versions of the Bible."

So why does Hollywood tend toward first-contact stories of war and mayhem? First, it's more fun to show aliens blowing away puny earthlings rather than shaking hands and sitting down to a nice meal.

Second, it's more a reflection on human nature than extra-terrestrial nature.

"We tend to project our own human aggression into outer space," Spielberg said. "It doesn't necessarily mean there is aggression out there."

if Spielberg says it, it must be true.

He's usually trustworthy, e.g.

"I don't drink coffee. I've never had a cup of coffee in my entire life; that's something you probably don't know about me. I've hated the taste since I was a kid."

"I'd rather direct than produce. Any day. And twice on Sunday."

he's talking shit here tho

Quote from: MacGuffin"I can't believe anybody would travel such vast distances bent on destruction. I believe anybody who would travel such vast distances are curious explorers, not conquerors," Spielberg said. "Carrying weapons a hundred-thousand light-years is quite a schlepp. I believe it's easier to travel 100,000 light-years with their versions of the Bible."

Stanley Kubrick essentially had the same position on aliens.

James Cameron had a fundamentally different view of Aliens.

Quote from: Pubrickhe's talking shit here tho

Quote from: MacGuffin"I can't believe anybody would travel such vast distances bent on destruction. I believe anybody who would travel such vast distances are curious explorers, not conquerors," Spielberg said. "Carrying weapons a hundred-thousand light-years is quite a schlepp. I believe it's easier to travel 100,000 light-years with their versions of the Bible."

Someone teach this man about the colonization of North America...

Scared silly
Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise want to invade your comfort zone with "War of the Worlds," and they're having a grand time doing it. Source: Los Angeles Times

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.calendarlive.com%2Fmedia%2Fphoto%2F2005-05%2F17447703.jpg&hash=2b2375991c5ea6bb3553f387e6d67ebb1c0a0db3)

On a bright spring day at the Universal back lot, the world is coming to an end. Aliens have landed on the Eastern Seaboard; fear and destruction have been sown. Somewhere on the road from New Jersey to Massachusetts, a wet and surly mob has beset a father who's managed to hotwire a van — one of the last working vehicles on the road — and dragged his teenage son onto the pavement. There are a hundred extras in soggy flannel, and lots of rain, and a giant crane that snakes about like a long-necked dinosaur.

Steven Spielberg, director of the newest version of H.G. Wells' classic "War of the Worlds," is ensconced at a video monitor, ignoring the tumult. His attention is focused solely on the frame in the eye of the camera. It's a tight close-up of a hand rising out of the fray — a hand bearing a gun.

There are hands, and then there are hands that can act. These five fingers happen to belong to Tom Cruise, who plays a onetime deadbeat dad, a dockworker now trying to save his 18-year-old son (Justin Chatwin) and 10-year-old daughter (Dakota Fanning).

On a blistering 72-day shoot that incorporates at least 10 major action sequences featuring everything from an overloaded river ferry to alien spaceships, the hand gets a lot of attention and a dozen takes. It must rise out of the chaos and shoot the gun, temporarily stunning the rampaging mob. It's the endpoint of a camera swoop through the riot, a reminder of both the gun's metaphoric power and its relative powerlessness in the face of more dominant alien intelligence and weapons.

Paranoia has always been the cultural oxygen feeding "War of the Worlds." When Wells' tale of alien invasion debuted in 1898, British-German hostilities were soaring, and German troops were massing just across the English Channel.

When Orson Welles' famous radio play of the story filled the airwaves in 1938, Britain and France had just signed the Munich Pact, ceding Czechoslovakia to Hitler. Upon hearing Welles' broadcast, more than a million naive Americans panicked, believing that Martians had actually attacked America. George Pal's 1953 movie version arrived during the Cold War and won a special-effects Academy Award for its tinny evocation of aliens, with their flying saucers and their self-generated force field that could withstand an atom bomb.

Pal's film foreshadowed the transformation of the alien-attack genre from realism to kitsch, movie versions of comic books, in which humans vanquish the marauders with superhuman feats of derring-do — à la "Independence Day" or Tim Burton's parody "Mars Attacks!," in which yodeling causes the Martians' heads to explode into gobs of green goo.

Spielberg's version, which opens June 29 all across the globe, is one of the most hotly anticipated films of the summer, with audience awareness already running at blockbuster levels, according to Paramount. Like all the preceding versions of "War of the Worlds," this one too will be a product of its time. Influenced by the fear that has infused the country since Sept. 11, Spielberg is bringing the story back to its dark Wells roots. He is returning to the author's original stylistic impulse of hyperrealism, relaying only what an ordinary terrified man could discern from his own firsthand observations of the alien invaders. There's a tendency among critics to divide the Spielberg oeuvre into serious fare and summer fare, but the man has experience with both kinds of films and wants to make the ultimate cathartic summer flick — by infusing mass entertainment with the chill of reality.

IT'S ALL IN THE HAND

Throughout the rehearsal, the hand seems possessed by the Tom Cruise of the "Top Gun" era, certain, assured, as the superstar lifts it over and over again so it rises precisely into the middle of the frame. As the waiting camera crew prepares to start shooting, Cruise comes to confer with his director. For someone commanding a blitzkrieg $133-million production — with the goal of scaring Americans out of their seats this summer — Spielberg appears absolutely relaxed, even jolly, with a trademark baseball cap on his head and a cigar, apparently unlighted, in one hand. The actor is wet, like a baby seal in a battered leather jacket and sweats, but chipper. He and Spielberg take turns holding up the gun, practicing the shot.

"This is going to be so perfect you're not going to know what to do," says Cruise.

"What if you tilted it down like you were going into something?" asks Spielberg.

Cruise repositions it again, making his digits suddenly more prominent, and Spielberg seems pleased but wants more. He asks the actor to make his hands shake as he tries to lift the gun, and Cruise complies, testing out varying speeds of vibration. "I need someone to be struggling with Tom, fighting with him, holding onto him, but he has to be in position for the gun."

When the filming finally starts, rain gushes down and mayhem breaks out on cue: The crowd attacks the van, with Fanning inside. A tense Cruise — who's standing outside the vehicle — wrestles with an extra and fires the gun into the air to get the mob to stop.

After one take, Cruise jauntily returns to Spielberg, his hair now plastered onto his skull, a drenched cowlick streaked across the middle of his forehead.

"It looks like John Travolta in 'Welcome Back, Kotter,' " says Spielberg, giggling. "I used to do that with my hair. Now I can just do illusions like that with my hair."

The director's still not happy with the gun. He takes it back in his hand, raising it again and again, trying to figure out what to do. "Why don't you raise the gun a little slower?"

They begin to shoot rapid-fire takes of the hand, but Cruise no longer seems the stalwart icon of American manhood. His hand has been transformed into something primitive and raw, furious and grimly resolute, but only because there's no other option than to be resolute. The hand quivers, desperate, afraid, and the black gun blasts.

A CRISIS FOR FOLKS LIKE US

It's only during a brief lunch break outside his trailer that Spielberg seems ever so faintly tired, like an athlete catching his breath before running back into the fray. He barely eats. At 58, he's as thin as he was in his wunderkind days, and he likes to shed weight when he directs because it increases his energy. He explains that when he first contemplated making "War of the Worlds" in the 1980s, he was thinking about doing it as a theme park ride. He even tried — unsuccessfully — to persuade Paramount to sell him the rights so he could make it part of the Universal Studios theme parks.

Yet as he wrote the scenario for the ride, "I got more and more invested in the possibility of a hyperrealistic version of an invasion of another world. The more I approached it from a realistic point of view and not a pop-culture point of view, the more excited I became.

"What if this really happened? What if it happened to people like you and me? Not to governments, not to presidents, not to generals, not to military personnel — what if this really happened to the average American family? What would life be like in the six days it would take the ultra-superpower to realize their conquest of Earth?

"When I made 'Private Ryan,' I didn't just want to make a war movie," Spielberg says, drawing an analogy. "They've made a lot of war movies, and we all know what they look like and sound like. I wanted to get deeper into the point of view of what combat is really like from all the things I had been hearing and reading about for veterans of World War II, so I kind of put myself into that mind-set. Could I bring some of the tools I used to make 'Private Ryan' to tell a real story about an intergalactic invasion of the planet Earth?"

Wells' book has often been seen as an attack on British colonialism, then spreading across Africa and Asia, where the white man's might was as implacable and solipsistic as that of Wells' devouring Martians. This version of the story is a far cry from the cuddly intergalactic utopianism that underlies Spielberg's seminal hits from the '70s and '80s, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "E.T." He's made a 180-degree switch from the uplifting vision of mankind connecting with species from another planet. "Even though it goes against the grain of how I see the world, I'm more cynical in the new century than I was in the 1980s and '70s. It's time for me to show the dark side of space.

"I think 9/11 reinformed everything I'm putting into 'War of the Worlds 2005,' " he says. "Just how we come together, how this nation unites in every known way to survive a foreign invader and a frontal assault. We now know what it feels like to be terrorized…. And suddenly, for the first time since the Revolutionary War, certainly the first time since the Civil War, we know what it's like to have our two front teeth knocked out, which is what happened when they took down both towers of the World Trade Center. And I think a lot of films, whether they intend to or not, are a reflection of our own paranoia and fear from what happened in 2001."

Fear, he admits, has always been part of the wellspring of his own creativity.

Serial pursuit by an implacable force is a motif that runs through many Spielberg movies, from the shark in "Jaws" to the T. rex in "Jurassic Park" to the aliens in "War of the Worlds." "It interests me how we deal with the forces bent on our destruction," he says. "All the primitive nightmares that all of us share through the collective subconscious is the force that has created our imagination. I think fear is what creates people's imagination. The imagination is fed by the worst-case scenario. Primitive man — terrified of the moon, terrified of shooting meteors, frightened of the dark — painted pictures of their world inside caves.

"If I wasn't such a scaredy-cat I'd never have made 'Duel' or 'Jaws' or 'Jurassic Park' or 'War of the Worlds' or all of these movies I've made. People blame me for scaring them out of the water. I apologize for that. I'm only sharing what scares me."

This said, fear, at least in Spielberg's summer movie universe, can also be fun.

"When I make something scary, I get giddy. I can't help myself, " he says with a laugh. "I used to scare my sisters when I was a little kid growing up with them. I know how to do that."

THROUGH FAMILIES' EYES

In reconceiving Wells' classic, ground zero for Spielberg was the image of a family, "which is the only image I can really, really, really talk about firsthand as a moviemaker. Start about what would a family be like as they react to something like that happening. To what they hear on television, what they hear on the radio, what they hear from their friends and eventually see with their own eyes. That's when I got really excited. That's what I brought to [screenwriter] David Koepp."

He also had one other big piece of the puzzle — Tom Cruise. Cruise had come to visit him on the set of "Catch Me if You Can" to discuss the marketing for their last film, "Minority Report." They wanted to work together again, and in the back of a car, Spielberg pitched him three ideas: a love story, a western and "War of the Worlds." "I just said the title, and he said, 'That's the one, that's it. That's our next project together. Go no further. Describe no more. Where do I sign?' "

"We did the pound," attests Cruise, explaining that that's when "You have the fists go together…. We were giggling and laughing. I called the studio. He called the studio." In January 2004 they holed up for several days with writer-director Koepp, who'd written "Jurassic Park" and "The Lost World" for Spielberg, in a marathon brainstorming session.

"They're highly enthusiastic. I tend to be more phlegmatic," says the writer wryly. "They're very energetic and have lots of ideas. There's a lot of high-fiving." Koepp ultimately had to say "enough" and go home and absorb it all.

The filmmaking team was also determined to stay away from clichés of aliens and to avoid anything that any director — from George Lucas to Ridley Scott to Spielberg himself — had done before.

On the airplane to meet Spielberg for their first tête-à-tête on the film, Koepp had even drawn up a list of alien attack tropes that were never going to appear in this version of "War of the Worlds."

"I'm sick and tired of watching New York get pummeled in movies and reality," he says. "No scenes of beating up on New York. No destruction of famous landmarks. No shots of world capitals. No TV reporters saying what's going on. No shots of generals with big sticks pushing battleships around the map. Let's not see the war of the world. Let's see this guy's survival story."

Jacking up the stakes for the characters, Koepp also wanted to "put the modern era out of business. Take away electricity, radio, television, automobiles (unless you mess with them), most modern weaponry. Every scene had to be about something very elemental, about shelter, or heat, seeking warmth, food. It's the very simple things. That's what a survival movie should be."

Koepp, the father of two young sons, had been talking to Cruise about parenting. "Tom takes being a dad very seriously. So do I. So does Steven. That's boring. Let's talk about the times we failed hopelessly as a parent. I wanted to write a movie that's about a bad father, who's bitter, whose life had not gone where he wanted. What if the guy from 'Top Gun' had developed an alcohol problem and got thrown out of the military and spent the last 25 years feeling sorry for himself and ruining his personal relations? Let's do that."

Cruise laughs when he hears this characterization, one of those big Cruisian chuckles that fills a room. "I never thought of it that way. I just thought it would be a great character, and I've never played that. Here's this mother. She drops [her kids] off for the weekend, and what happens? The world goes to pieces on his watch. He's just not the guy you would want watching your kids when the world's going to end. It's not that he's an evil bad guy, it's just his level of awareness of responsibility. This guy's a deadbeat dad. He's a bigger kid than his kids are."

Koepp turned in his first 80 pages in July, and Spielberg sent them at once to Cruise, who read them on his 42nd birthday and immediately called the director.

"He was actually screaming in the phone. I had to actually take the phone away from my ear, he was so excited," says Spielberg. The director was in the middle of preparing his next film, about the 1972 Munich Olympics, and Cruise was supposed to begin the long-awaited "Mission: Impossible 3," but director Joe Carnahan had quit. After the next 50 pages arrived in August, Cruise called up again. "He said, 'If you move your Munich project, I'll move "Mission 3." ' So we both decided to move our pictures back one movie, to do this immediately together." It was to be the quickest start-up of Spielberg's 33-year movie directing career.

Spielberg called producer Kathleen Kennedy, who was on vacation. Kennedy had produced a slew of pictures for Spielberg, among them "Jurassic Park," but never this fast. "He said, 'I'd like to shoot in November. Kath, don't get freaked,' " Kennedy says. "Just think of it as a tight little drama, with three people in a family and thousands of people running around them. That totally put my mind at ease." She laughs.

GEARING UP FOR THE BLITZ

SPIELBERG did try to prevent any producer, crew or studio heart attacks by previsualizing the film on the computer, a process in which he'd previously only dabbled. On smaller films, the director just arrives at the set in the morning and decides how to shoot. For "War of the Worlds," he planned meticulously. He drew thumbnail sketches, which were rendered into storyboards. He then sat with electronic storyboard artists, who animated the sequences on the computer, using scanned-in shots of the real location and the actual camera lens that Spielberg planned to use.

Perhaps the toughest challenge in pre-production was figuring out what those aliens and their spaceships would actually look like. This is a subject that everyone involved in the production has been specifically banned from addressing, though Spielberg explains his thinking: No spaceships. No flying saucers. Nothing remotely resembling any machine or creature from the George Lucas universe.

"I wanted to go back to what Wells described in his book as tripods," says the director. "What attacks us are huge 200-foot tripods. That, to me, is scarier than boomerangs with lights on the wingtips … because they lord over us. They lord over our cities. They lord over our farms. They lord over our suburbs and shopping malls and schools and churches and synagogues, and they cast these giant shadows."

He also sat with the designers from Industrial Light and Magic, who offered up a "rogue's gallery of realistic life-forms that the audience would believe would really be coming down to do their dirty work."

Yet what makes the aliens really scary comes right from Spielberg's psyche, says "War of the Worlds" production designer Rick Carter. "He has a way of making them come alive by putting them through his own subconscious filter. He feels he has some inner understanding of what it is to be alien, just to be 'other,' like a dinosaur. [The aliens are] not just scary randomly or because they're all-powerful. It's because they take an interest in us. The shark in 'Jaws' or the T. rex in 'Jurassic Park' meets the aliens from 'Close Encounters,' and somewhere between the mixing they turn nasty."

Many of Wells' original ideas appear in the new "War of the Worlds," albeit refracted and reinterpreted for modern times. Some of the book's seemingly minor details now loom large, elements such as "the red weed," says Spielberg. "The idea — when we're invaded, we're not only invaded but the alien race is also sowing the seeds to terraform this planet to resemble the environment they're accustomed to. When I read the book in college, I always was very interested in 'What is all this red weed about?'

"Because Wells didn't give us the alien point of view, I didn't feel like I had to give the alien point of view either. In fact, it's scarier to see them but not to know them. There's lots of mystery to what they're doing to our world."

Screenwriter Koepp adds that much of Wells' anticolonial fervor remains — if you just look beneath the summer-movie facade.

"The local insurgency always kills you," Koepp says. "That's why global adventures never work, and it has obvious parallels to the way we conduct our foreign policy. I view it as an antiwar film, especially an anti-Iraq War film. You don't foreground it because it ruins the movie. If someone wants to see it, great. If they don't, they can just watch the movie and be happy."

Koepp stresses that he's speaking for himself, not the whole filmmaking team.

Demurs Spielberg with a chuckle, "I'm just trying to scare a lot of people all on the same weekend."

INSTINCTS IN SYNC

"Riot, riot," yells the assistant director, and the crowd begins to surge toward Cruise and the car.

"Don't make me get Charlton Heston to do this," jokes Spielberg to his lead actor.

Cruise, gun in tow, spins around in the center of the teeming mass, centrifugally creating a space for himself.

"Tell Dakota to stick her head out [of the van]," says the director, examining the monitor, then proceeding to pick out extras he wants moved out of the frame because their clothing is too bright.

As the camera crew sets the lighting, Fanning returns to wait by the director. She's a moppet in a pink flowered shirt, miniskirt and boots, and a crazy, striped-sleeved sweater. The part was written with her in mind, and Spielberg says (when she's not around), "She's a genius. She is somewhat of a savant, like those kids who know how to play the piano, like Beethoven at 4 years old. I've never worked with anyone like her before at that age, at 10."

On the set, the mood remains jocular and light. Visitors come — Cruise's nephews, and the writer-director J.J. Abrams, who comes every day to confer with the actor about the upcoming "Mission: Impossible 3."

A basket of chocolate bunnies gets passed around, and Spielberg tells people — mostly Fanning — how when he made "Jaws" he recommended to the Universal marketing staff that they sell chocolate sharks full of cherry juice that would squirt out when you bit down. "They stared at me, and someone at the end of the room changed the subject."

"Maybe for the 30th anniversary of 'Jaws,' it could be white chocolate with cherry inside," he muses.

Fanning looks at him weakly, not knowing what to say.

"That's the same reaction I got in 1974," he teases.

Justin Chatwin, playing Cruise's son, arrives to show Spielberg the gash on his neck. "It should be streaming down his neck," Spielberg tells the makeup artist. "More PG-13 than PG, but no R."

As shooting begins on the sequence, Cruise tries variations, from actually spinning around with the gun, to staggering about uncertainly, to frantic whirling. "Where's my son?" he screams to the crowd, and when he spies Chatwin lying on the ground, he drags the teenager toward him. The team is firing off takes fast now, because Fanning, who can work only limited hours, will soon have to go. Spielberg is calling for lens changes, 50 millimeter, 65 millimeter, and meticulously excising extras and anything that might distract the eye from Cruise.

When Cruise finally emerges during a camera break, the director jokes, "I sped it up for you. That was the Steven Spielberg speed take." Spielberg wants to adjust Cruise's lines and asks him to call for his son by name, a slight tweak that nonetheless personalizes his character's torment. As they shift in for Cruise's close-up, it's as if the actor's adrenaline flows to the surface of his face, the weary terror and stress etched just a little more fiercely.

"Great, great," says Spielberg, "great intensity."

Later, Cruise explains that when they're actually shooting, the pair are often past the point of discussion. When Cruise is filming, he often doesn't sleep much, sometimes as little as one or two hours a night, he says. He likes to arrive early on the set. "Sometimes we [he and Spielberg] sit there and we walk the set together. Even us talking about another subject, we're always thinking about the movie. There's a connection and a synchronicity that finds its way into the work. To someone outside, it looks like we're not even thinking about it, but you're always thinking about it. It just lives there."

Spielberg concurs. As the duo — certainly two of the most commercially potent figures in Hollywood history — contemplate an alien takeover of planet Earth, they're not overanalyzing. They're letting their instincts do the talking. "We live by the hairs on our skin," says Spielberg. "When they stand up after hearing an idea … we're going with that idea."

New Trailer here. (http://progressive.stream.aol.com/aol/us/moviefone/movies/2005/waroftheworlds_020116/waroftheworlds_trlr_03_dl.mov)

Quote from: MacGuffinNew Trailer here. (http://progressive.stream.aol.com/aol/us/moviefone/movies/2005/waroftheworlds_020116/waroftheworlds_trlr_03_dl.mov)

i lovitz, so spoilerful.

but it becomes signs at the end.  :yabbse-angry:

Quote from: Pubrickbut it becomes signs at the end.  :yabbse-angry:

yes, i was waiting for someone to bring up that comparison.  from everything i read about spielberg saying its not independence day cause its all from the familys perspective!  you see everything from their POV and its all about a families survival.  i thought, thats cool!  and then i was like, waitaminute..... isnt that what signs was?  no matter, m night is about to get schooled by the master....

David Koepp talks shop.

WOTW screenwriter David Koepp was interviewed for the latest issue of Creative Screenwriting magazine. When asked about how he and Spielberg decided to freshen up the H.G. Wells tale for today's audiences, Koepp replied, "I think that you can't capture the impact of an event when you try to show what it's doing to six billion people. You can only capture it when you try to show what it's doing to one or two or three people. I was going in saying we have to make this the biggest small movie ever mad or the smallest big movie ever made."

"The other thing that I thought made it timely is, with great novels, like great plays, they take on fresh relevance when you move them to a new time and place. When Wells initially wrote his book, he was writing metaphorically about the end of British Imperialism and the foolishness of colonialism. He just made the Brits the invaded instead of the invaders, which allowed the metaphor to skate under the surface. If anybody wanted to interpret it that way they could; if they just wanted to read the story, they could do that, too," Koepp explained, adding that filmgoers could find WOTW to be an allegory for current events.

Damn.  That new trailer makes me feel better about this film. That and Spielbergs comments about keeping the camera as POV as possible. This is a Summer movie! Nice use of the music from the old, old Lord of the Rings trailer.

Hi-Res (http://images.apple.com/movies/paramount/waroftheworlds/waroftheworlds-tlr4_m480.mov)

Steven really knows how to make a great big action flick. God, I'll probably see this at least 2 times. Funny what Tom and Steven can do when they had extra time, tons of money and when both of their previous projects are on hold, they knock out a summer movie that is going to blow us away.

Quote from: SiliasRubyGod, I'll probably see this at least 2 times.

He does not approve.

Spielberg Says Climate Is Right for 'War'

Steven Spielberg says the days when movie audiences sympathize with a lovable alien such as E.T. may be over.

"It seemed like the time was right for me as a filmmaker to let the audience experience an alien that is a little less pleasant than E.T.," Spielberg said Monday at a post-premiere news conference for his new film, "War of the Worlds."

"Today, in the shadow of 9/11, I think the film has found a place in society," said Spielberg, who directed 1982's "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" and 1977's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

He noted the panic-causing radio play of H.G. Wells' alien invasion novel was produced in the late 1930s, when many feared the rise of Naziism in Germany, while the 1953 movie, "The War of the Worlds" was made during the Cold War.

"All occurred at a time of great unease in the world," he said.

In "War of the Worlds," Spielberg substitutes space invaders called "tripods" for the Martians of Wells' book. He said the first tripod is killed in Osaka, Japan's second-largest city.

"Osaka has a lot of experience," he said, referring to the many scenes of urban destruction in "Godzilla" and other Japanese monster flicks. "I'm proud of the film, and I'm proud to bring it to Japan."

Tom Cruise, star of the movie, said "War of the Worlds" is more about family values than interplanetary disturbances.

"The idea was always about family," Cruise said. "What would you do for your family? How far would you go? Can you protect your family?"

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New Trailer here. (http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1365663&sdm=web&qtw=480&qth=300)

Spielberg's Tribute to Orson Welles

Steven Spielberg wants his War Of The Worlds movie to inspire the same reaction from cinemagoers the original play had on radio listeners when it first aired in 1938. Orson Welles terrified America's eastern seaboard when he read HG Wells' novel on air - many listeners were convinced aliens were actually invading. Although Spielberg's movie borrows little from the HG Wells novel, the Oscar-winning director hopes he can scare audiences just a little - something he sees as a tribute to Welles. He tells British magazine Empire, "If my movie is effective on audiences, hopefully they'll be looking all around the theatre for somewhere to hide! That would be my tribute to Welles, if I was ever that lucky."

How appropriate.  NASA is going to blow a hole in a comet.  Maybe we'll find out that an unknown unfathomed species lives, er used to live, there.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/06/22/impact.space/index.html

Has it crossed anyones mind that this movie might actually be really bad? Cause it just crossed mine.

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"Hey Tom, ya see dat boat over der? I built it wit me bare hands...Steven da boat builda' day call me."

steven spielberg is not from jamaica.

That's obviously an IRISH accent.

aye right.

ya tit.

Spielberg's 'War of the Worlds' recalls 9/11 terror

Every generation has its fears, and director Steven Spielberg does not shy away from the source of anxiety that his new science fiction epic, "War of the Worlds," plays on -- the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

"It's certainly about Americans fleeing for their lives, being attacked for no reason, having no idea why they are being attacked and who is attacking them," says Spielberg.

Spielberg's version of the H.G. Wells classic 1898 novel about an alien invasion from Mars, which has inspired other famed treatments over the years, stars Tom Cruise and opens in U.S. theaters on Wednesday.

This summer escape fare is no "E.T." or "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Spielberg's earlier sci-fi tales about feel-good aliens. These space creatures are up to no good.

"E.T. would be pissed, I think," Tim Robbins, who plays a creepy character bent on revenge against the aliens, told a news conference promoting the picture.

Orson Welles caused panic in the streets with his 1938 radio version of "War of the Worlds" which conveyed a Martian invasion as if it were actual news at a time when the nation was jittery over the threat of fascism and Nazi Germany.

A popular 1953 film version traded on U.S. Cold War worries over the spread of communism in the nuclear age.

The modern-day touchstones of fear are clear in Spielberg's film that bristles with vivid special effects and a pervasively percussive soundtrack sure to rattle your popcorn.

Alien war machines buried underground like sleeper cells are awakened in a storm of lightning. They tear up streets, crumble buildings and send cars flying.

Cruise's character shuffles back home covered in chalky dust, the detritus of destruction, just like the dazed survivors lucky enough to walk away from the real-life collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

"The image that stands out most in my mind is everybody in Manhattan fleeing across the George Washington Bridge in the shadow of 9/11, a searing image that I've never been able to get out of my head," said Spielberg.

The director said he did not aim to turn the movie into a political polemic.

"There are politics underneath some of the scares, and some of the adventure and some of the fear," he admitted, "but I really wanted to make it suggestive enough so everybody could have their own opinion."

STORY OF A FAMILY

Fear, however, is just the backdrop for a character study about survival, values and the coming of age -- for both an irresponsible father and his rebellious, adolescent son.

Rather than depict generals in drawing rooms and high-tech battles against the alien force, Spielberg tells an intimate story about love and family set against the chaos and desperation of a world under siege.

"I love how Steven Spielberg deals with families in his movies," said Cruise. "I find them to be very real, unique. When we started talking about the story, about a father and a family, I couldn't wait to play this character."

Cruise, who plays a self-indulgent misfit divorced from his wife and disengaged from his two children, is thrust into the role of protector on a weekend where he is left with the kids. He rises to the occasion, down to a touching lullaby to his young daughter, played by precocious Dakota Fanning, using a Beach Boys ode to drag racing.

There are preposterous moments, cartoonish escapes and heaps of hokey charm, but also a dark edge to the film and a serious treatment of violence that does not descend to gore.

Spielberg said the movie also represents his own coming of age, contrasting the choices of the lead character in "Close Encounters," played by Richard Dreyfus, who left his family to join the aliens, with Cruise's mission.

The Oscar-winning director of "Saving Private Ryan" (1999) and "Schindler's List" (1994) noted that "Close Encounters" was made in 1977, before he had children of his own.

"Today I would never have a guy leave his family to go on the mother ship. I would have him do everything to protect his family. In a sense 'War of The Worlds' reflects my own maturity in my own life, growing up and now having seven children."

Spielberg, whose three other best-directing Oscar nominations included "E.T." and "Close Encounters," said he loves to swing between sci-fi projects and historical movies, which bring constraints of realism and accuracy.

"Science fiction for me is a vacation, a vacation away from all the rules of narrative logic, a vacation away from physics and physical science.

"It just let's you leave all the rules behind and just kind of fly."

This movie is pretty damn intense. And...

NO FOURTH-ACT SYNDROME! When it fades out, it fades out for good.

I predict that, come Wednesday, this will be the new Best Movie in themodernage's signature.

UPDATE: Full Review Here (http://www.road-dog-productions.com/reviews/archives/2005/06/the_war_of_the.html) (spoiler free, unless you aren't familiar with the original story already).

I went to the premier last night. Won red carpet passes on the radio. Saw a grip of stars, the highlight- meeting Anthony Hopkins. He was so cool and that dude Pedro from Napoleon explained to him who he was and asked him to wear a Vote for Pedro button on his jacket for a picture and Hopkins went with it. And then he kept the button on the rest of the night, he was way more anitmated then I imagined he'd be. No Spielberg though =(

Anyways, the movie is damn intense. A strong PG-13 I'd say. Completely exciting from start to end. Such a satisfying big summer popcorn movie. Spielberg does the greatest job with sound in his movies. He really brings the suspense... reminded me of when I first saw Jurassic Park. The Chinese theater was an amazing place to see this at, especially with the big crowd cheering, no kids and everybody shuts their mouths when the movie starts.

Good things.

Quote from: POZERA strong PG-13 I'd say.

If anyone but Spielberg had made this, I'll bet it would have been an R.

What should my frame of mind be when I go see this movie?  As in, what's the mood like, the tone?  Should I turn off my brain, is it a horror movie, a thriller, etc.

you should be scared when you go in and watch it - so when its scary you wont be so frightened.

Quote from: Losing the Horse:What should my frame of mind be when I go see this movie?  As in, what's the mood like, the tone?  Should I turn off my brain, is it a horror movie, a thriller, etc.

how bout with no expectations?

Yeah, otherwise you might end up completely missing the best elements of it, like Ebert - who actually suggests that Spielberg should have paid attention to the global destruction of The Day After Tomorrow. You'd think he didn't see 500 movies a year, writing something like this. (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050628/REVIEWS/50606007) Sheesh.

But with mainstream directors I always go in expecting one thing and get another, then view the film again with privileged information and like it.  Fine fine, pre-conceived notions are bad, that's boring I'm bored.  If someone could just tell me what to expect I'd appreciate it.  Maybe if this was a personal experience I'd think you guys were right, but now I just think you're wasting my time and money.  Let's not pretend there's more to this movie than there is - it's a kind of movie, and I'd appreciate it if the film literate would just tell me and save me the time of saying "I enjoyed this movie more the second time around."

Quote from: Losing the Horse:I always go in expecting one thing and get another

Isn't that exciting, though? Being surprised is a good thing.

I edited more explanation while you made that post.

here's what speilberg wants you to expect

Quote from: MacGuffin
"If my movie is effective on audiences, hopefully they'll be looking all around the theatre for somewhere to hide! "

Yeah but Speilberg has never made a scary movie.

he wrote Poltergeist

Quote from: Losing the Horse:Yeah but Speilberg has never made a scary movie.

Have you ever seen Jaws or Duel?

Fine, I'm not even going to argue about Jaws or Duel.  I asked a simple question and got shat on.  Obviously my bad.

no one is shitting on you or picking an aruguement -  

I have not  seen it but i'd imagine it's the suspense/terror of jaws but replace the shark with aliens.

it seems very clear if you read any reviews and/or watch the trailer that this a popcorn film about a bunch of aliens blowing up a city.

I don't think your opinion got shat on so much as that no one here has actually seen it, except for me and one other guy, and we both posted (or linked to) what we thought of it somewhat specifically one page back.

EDIT: Or what cowboy said while I was making my post.

Quote from: cowboykurtisno one is shitting on you or picking an aruguement -  

I have not  seen it but i'd imagine it's the suspense/terror of jaws but replace the shark with aliens.

it seems very clear if you read any reviews and/or watch the trailer that this a popcorn film about a bunch of aliens blowing up a city.

A fair and respectable answer.  It informs me that I should clarify.

Clarfication:  Reviewers sell their movies to the masses.  As a film fan, what should be my mindset going into this film?

Ghostboy:  But I don't want the spoilers.

You ask too much! But here you go: expect a horrific sci-fi film  with an appropriately limited scope.

Haha.  Awesome Ghostboy.  Thank you.

I understand the argument made today against me, honestly, and for some reason there was this part in my heart that perhaps was hoping for more from Speilberg, perhaps was hoping he'd turned a dynamic new leaf and was interested in making films that were honest to the human condition.  Which was a hopeful thought but not at all merited and appropriately received.  If I had thought he had turned the turner (which I had) I would have been dissapointed.  Knowing he hasn't it I can experience it for what it is.  This guy and his "Ameria is ready for evil aliens" had me all mixed up.  Cheers.

i am rather excited about seeing it, but now have my reservations about the ending, etc....whatever.  ebert's review made me kinda nervous, but upon re-reading it, it seems that really the only reason he disliked it is because the tripods have three legs instead of the more stable four.

i feel kinda weird, i havent been this excited by a summer movie in a looooong time....

Quote from: ewardi am rather excited about seeing it, but now have my reservations about the ending, etc....whatever.  ebert's review made me kinda nervous, but upon re-reading it, it seems that really the only reason he disliked it is because the tripods have three legs instead of the more stable four.

i feel kinda weird, i havent been this excited by a summer movie in a looooong time....

..not even for Matrix Reloaded? I was really pumped for that.

Going to see WOTW this weekend!

I'm going to go see this in about an hour. Rotten tomatoes is showing good reviews so I'm all excited but trying to not get my hopes up.

AND THE VERDICT IS...


As awesome and intense a movie experience as Jaws or Jurasic Park, didn't disappoint me at all :)

Speilberg's worst movie. For a filmmaker who usually does well trying to be imaginative with a genre, he follows this one on a dead end track through every cliche hoping he can do enough with his filmmaking to just get by. Its sloppy storytelling with a bad dramatic story that has little focus or clarity. Chalk Tom Cruise up yet again for managing to dismemeber a movie into a movie star show off because even when playing a normal guy, he seems to have all the answers for every problem the movie has. (plus a car that likely costs more than his character's house)

Not even the special effects helped. By twenty minutes in, I felt I had seen everything and when remembering how I loved Jurassic Park, I realized the T-Rex was just the appetizer to the good things in that film. The good things in this film are just repeated endlessly through out. This films throws everything at you at once and really makes no attempt to be nothing more than a destruction movie.

Quote from: The Gold TrumpetSpeilberg's worst movie. For a filmmaker who usually does well trying to be imaginative with a genre, he follows this one on a dead end track through every cliche hoping he can do enough with his filmmaking to just get by. Its sloppy storytelling with a bad dramatic story that has little focus or clarity. Chalk Tom Cruise up yet again for managing to dismemeber a movie into a movie star show off because even when playing a normal guy, he seems to have all the answers for every problem the movie has. (plus a car that likely costs more than his character's house)

Not even the special effects helped. By twenty minutes in, I felt I had seen everything and when remembering how I loved Jurassic Park, I realized the T-Rex was just the appetizer to the good things in that film. The good things in this film are just repeated endlessly through out. This films throws everything at you at once and really makes no attempt to be nothing more than a destruction movie.

Is it better than Independence day? :lol:

It's way better than independance day. And if you think this is his worst movie you obviously haven't seen 1941

So is the movie good? I'm hearing it is. I was gonna see it today but just couldn't get the energy. It would have been the first movie I have seen in the theater since Life Aquatic and Pirates Of The Carribean. I'll be waiting for video most likely. I'm pumped though. A problem that irks me though is Tom Cruise. I just can't buy him as Joe Schmo, ya know? He has a tendency to overact. He reminds me alot of Harrison Ford in the sense that you always know it's Tom Cruise cause he acts the same in everything. I think I might be in the minority here but I really really liked Signs and I thought it was fantastic the way it stayed with one family through the whole ordeal and took the "less is more" approach that Spielberg helped make famous. War Of The Worlds seems to try and do all of that plus everything else. Am I right? haha what do I know, I haven't seen it.

Quote from: GhostboyI predict that, come Wednesday, this will be the new Best Movie in themodernage's signature.

almost!  damn, but when it comes down to it i still think i liked batman a little more.  this is probably tied with star wars as #2/#3, (even with its flaws).  

not sure what my problem is lately but i cried through the whole movie.  it might've been because of the 9/11 parallels but it has happened during all kinds of weird movies, (like in batman when bruces parents get killed?)  weird.  anyway, i have a problem.  so i enjoyed it as much as one can enjoy something so harrowing.  i've heard that the lack of humor was a problem, but it's hard to see where would've been an appropriate place to put it in this survival story.  

maybe it's just hard to approach this story and make it have the proper impact because all the newness is gone from the many iterations of the story and movies of this kind.  though i think the berg's take on it certainly showed M Night or Emmerich/Devlin how its done.  the scene with the car was just awful.  interesting to see Spielberg reveal the sometimes ugly nature of humanity instead of everyone helping each other and pulling together in a time of crisis out like one might expect.  but this was definitely more true to the real chaos that something like this would cause.

the movie really seemed to lack plot and everything conventional in favor of a 'just stay alive' sort of randomness.  i see how it works for this version but it wasn't really what i was expecting.  still, i prefer Minority Report and A.I. personally, but this was pretty great for what it was.   so a minor disappointment but overall pretty damn good.  not a total miss but missed the bullseye.  A-.

Quote from: thadius sterlingIt's way better than independance day. And if you think this is his worst movie you obviously haven't seen 1941

1941 is still better than The Terminal.

It's funny cause at the premier, I was sitting near Will Smith. I kept looking over at him wondering if he was thinking, 'damn, this puts my movie to shame.'

He kinda had that look on his face.

Saw it tonight. It was incredible! First-rate performances and special effects. It was very intense and realistic. Pure Speilberg.

saw it tonight...blew me away...

spoiler..



fucking awesome special effects and action, followed by fucking awesome scenes of horor/sadness (the bodies floating down the river) and panic (the mob scene with the car) followed by fucking awesome scenes of adventure.


i have never disagreed more with ebert i don't think.  when he said he'd of rather seen a world destruction scene like that in The Day After Tomorrow i wanted to throw up.  I think what spielberg does best here is focus on 3 characters the entire time.  There is no figuring out how to destroy these things, there is no contacting the president or following a character in the army.  That is what raises this above something like independence day.  Its a movie about  3 characters surviving.

This movie fucks your head with the special effects. There's not much talking either, everything is shown. I could write a paper on the way this movie treats class issues as well as humanity. It's both incredibly optimistic and incredibly cynical. This movie has me so interested, I think I might write a paper on it. It's really interesting.

SPOILERS~~!!!~!#@#$!


When the aliens attack with the heat ray, and Tom Cruise is running away......one of the best sequences Spielberg's ever done. The mob getting the van....so bizarre and scary. The flaming train. The velociraptor camera things. Tim Robbins. The airplane. Terrorists. Crazy. The kid should have died, however.

enjoyable, didn't think it was that intense however.  the gay bad-father resentful-kids thing was handled really well at the beginning, but the scenes later fucking sucked (the car scene, the scene with his son as the tanks drive by, the end).  i would rather have not seen the aliens.  action was handled very well, and the mob scene around the van was very very intense.  great fun.

GT says this has no focus or clarity, but that doesn't make any sense to me - it does lack clarity, but that's because of the intense focus, which keeps the special effects in the periphery and puts the experience of the invasion front and center, rather than the invasion itself. And this is a great thing, because otherwise, indeed, this would just be another variant on - well, on all the cinematic variants of the original Wells novel, which were too bombastic to end as simply and organically as the book did. I'm very pleased that the movie's scope was so limited, and that it followed the book so closely - in this constriction, Spielberg really seems to find new opportunities, a new story to tell. Yes, it's about destruction - I personally think that's the point of it. As I wrote in my full length review, he's using the strict context of Wells' story to reinterpret a disaster that has in this mass media age become a pop culture cliche. This is far more valuable, at least to me, than another rollercoaster ride of an invasion film - or, for that matter, Jurassic Park, which I was never that fond of anyway.

Would it have been better had John C. Reilly played the dad? Sure, but I'm not going to complain - I like Cruise enough, and liking him is enough to make the movie work (whereas if you don't like him, you're screwed from the get-go). And yes, to get into semantics, he could have afforded that car, and that it costs more than his house is a good bit of character development. Notice the engine sitting on the kitchen table? All there for a point.

I loved Signs, and will be in the minority in thinking that it is ultimately a more finely constructed film than this; but this takes the whole subjective invasion story to an entirely different level - the same means to a very different, and ultimately better end.

It lacks the imagination of Minority Report and A.I., or the joy of any number of his films, but there's no need for that in this story, and I'm glad Spielberg did something different.

Quote from: Ghostboy

Quote from: thadius sterlingIt's way better than independance day. And if you think this is his worst movie you obviously haven't seen 1941

1941 is still better than The Terminal.

I haven't seen WotW yet, but this statement has been quoted for truth.

I enjoyed it a lot, so far my pick for best film of 05.  The actions sequences were great and the film never slows up.  It reminded me of Jurassic Park, and that is a good thing.  I don't know why, but I always fall for Spielberg's americana and always added cheesiness, kind of in the Capra way.

IGN Interviews David Koepp
In depth on War of the Worlds with Spielberg's screenwriter.
 
How cool is it to write something and get to see it really pay off in movie theaters? David Koepp gets to see exactly how cool it is. He wrote or co-wrote Spider-Man, Lost World: Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Panic Room and Carlito's Way. True, talent does rise to the top in Hollywood, but don't you still have to be a little lucky? I mean, you type a scene in which alien invaders destroy New Jersey's Bayonne Bridge, concrete and cars and trucks bouncing every which way, and Steven Spielberg makes it happen. My guess is David Koepp considers himself a little lucky. Could any success in Hollywood really be taken for granted? One just gives it their best shot, and Koepp has done that more than a few times. He's also directed his share of movies: Secret Window, Stir of Echoes, The Trigger Effect and Suspicious.

But today the focus of attention is, what else? War of the Worlds. IGN FilmForce's Steve Head recently spoke with Koepp about getting this new version of the science fiction classic on paper for Spielberg.

IGN FILMFORCE: The New York premiere is tomorrow night but you've already seen the movie?

DAVID KOEPP: Yes, about three weeks ago.

IGNFF: I dug it. I loved destruction and all that stuff. I'm not slighting my sensibilities admitting that, it's just this is pretty far away from an art house film and it has a non-typical ending. There were some people who walked out of War of the Worlds saying, "It's atrocious." I'm thinking to myself, "Why?" I mean, I like to understand why somebody doesn't like something. It probably doesn't do any good for us to go into detail about the ending because we want to protect our readers from spoilers, but what would you say to somebody who doesn't agree with the ending? You can't for the most part change somebody's mind on a movie, but what can you say to someone to make them think about it the way you saw it? Is this faithful to the original story? Was the ending too abrupt?

KOEPP: Was the ending too abrupt? I don't think it is.

[SPOILER WARNING: Koepp next discussed spoilers relating to the ending of the movie – if you want to read the spoilers, click and drag your mouse over the below blank space. If you're avoiding spoilers, just continue reading with the next question.]

It is exactly faithful to the book. I think if you look at it again, the ending is set up throughout; you know what their fate is going to be. But also, the ending of the story is really the ending of [Ray Ferrier's (Tom Cruise)] story with his kids, not so much the ending of what became of the invasion. The invasion failed, but we weren't... we made a conscious choice from the beginning to make the story of the movie about the invasion from space. The plot follows this guy and his kids. And the conclusion of the plot is when it goes from being a father who would do nothing for his kids to a father who would do anything for his kids, including die. So, once that's done, that was our movie. And what becomes with the invasion is, we also felt like it's such a well-known piece of material, and we say from the very first shot of the movie it's going to be bacteria, just like you read in the book if you're paying attention. So that to us didn't seem like the kind of movie we were making. You know how Independence Day ends with the big fight scene and where they figure out the computer virus and they blow up the ship and all that. We just weren't interested in How Does Randy Quaid Defeat The Aliens? You know what I mean? It's more about how does [Ray Ferrier] reconcile himself with fatherhood? That was our story. We feel like that story was fully told.

IGNFF: What were some of the challenges adapting the book? Was there a lot of freedom that Steven gave you or did he have specifics about certain things that he wanted to do?

KOEPP: The nice thing about Steven is in the first draft he'll always, he lays back. He'll have a few ideas and he'll say, "This would be nice and that would be nice and if you could work in a scene where..." Blah, blah, blah. But then he'll just say, "Now go write it." Even if you ask additional questions, he'll say, "I have an opinion but I'd rather see what you do, so why don't you just write it." Because I think he just feels like from the first draft he wants to get your opinion. What he pays for is your opinion, you know? And he wants to get that because he knows perfectly well he's going to have his way with the script, and if he wants something in it he knows that it's going to end up in it. But what he'd like to do is get your opinion first.

IGNFF: You've been working with him for a very long time. Does Steven go to you as a Go-To Guy? Does he really trust your instincts on certain things? Give you a lot of trust?

KOEPP: I think so. I mean, I think the fact that he keeps hiring me I think shows me trust; that he's giving me trust. I think so. We see movies in a similar way, which is fun. What's good is I was a little more calm this time than I had been in the past because I was really nervous. On Jurassic Park I was like twenty-nine and it was very hard to forget like, "Oh, my God I'm working with Steven Spielberg," you know? Which tends to freeze you up a little bit. And this time I was just a little more relaxed about it and I think I did better as a result. What's fun though is what hasn't changed: it's that all movies still have to start with a couple people sitting in a room saying, "What about a scene where...?" And that aspect of pitching and coming up with ideas is still great. [Spielberg] is incredibly boyish and enthusiastic about it. That's the fun part and it's the part of the movie-making where anything is possible; where it's as good as you see it in your mind. When the movie finishes, it can be really good, but it's never quite as good as what you saw it in your head because that's impossible.

IGNFF: There are some shots in this film that are quite amazing. For one, the extended sequence on the highway with Ray and his kids in the minivan. There's no edits and the camera swings around them.

KOEPP: Isn't that amazing?

IGNFF: It is.

KOEPP: That was on a soundstage.

IGNFF: My film appreciation course leads me to say I hope some in the audience appreciate that.

KOEPP: I know. It's amazing. They shot the footage on a motorcycle. The camera footage behind them was from a camera mounted on a motorcycle on the highway and the actors were on a stage with a blue screen, and it's so seamless. (He laughs)

IGNFF: A couple minutes into that shot I was thinking, "Damn! There isn't even an edit in this shot so far." And the camera pulls back to a wide shot. Impressive.

KOEPP: The filmmaking is astonishing.

IGNFF: Did you write that scene as is or how does that work?

KOEPP: I didn't write it as one shot. I wish I did. (He laughs) But, I wrote them as people in a car talking, racing down the highway.

IGNFF: I'm guessing Spielberg can just take your stuff and see it in an entirely different way?

KOEPP: What's amazing is, I did the three movies for Brian De Palma and now the three for Steven. Whenever I show up on the set with Brian, what he's doing is always the mirror of what I wrote. You know, so if I wrote it and I pictured the door on the left, I go to the set and invariably the door is on the right, just because he brain must be exactly backwards from mine. (He laughs) With Steven I write it and I see it in 2-D. Then I go to the set and it's in 3-D. Like shot around the car, I would of course just picture the usual set-ups, or when they swim across the river and they get that big view of all the death and destruction, I saw them as swimming across the river, climbing up a bluff and looking back across the river and seeing down below. But the way Steven shot it, it's happening all around them. It's happening in the foreground and in the background and they're in the middle instead of as if they're seeing it.

IGNFF: What you'd thought of as one shot became much more than that.

KOEPP: Yeah, it was a bluff on the river over on the Connecticut side, but the tripods were on both sides. I'd pictured them all happening over there and [Ray and his kids] get up and look and you cut to their faces and you cut to the tripods. And instead [Spielberg] shot it as one big swirling nightmare.

IGNFF: I was pretty much blown away by it. I mean there's some things that happen on the screen that make me think, "Damn, this is some unreal s***."

KOEPP: (He laughs) It's cool.

IGNFF: The ferry sequence. That's like some super production value going on there, that maybe only Spielberg can do.

KOEPP: Maybe in terms of accomplishment. He's the only one who can do it in terms of the price he does it for. I mean it's really an affordable movie for what happens in it.

IGNFF: An epic bargain?

KOEPP: (He laughs) Yeah, I mean he's so economical when he shoots. If you can ever get on his set for a story someday it's fun to just watch how quickly and decisively he moves.

IGNFF: How is it for you when you're on the set with him? Being the writer, do you get to do that that much, be around when he's working?

KOEPP: I'll go sometimes. But I don't really like to go to the set because, or I didn't for long periods of time, because they're interpreting what you wrote, they're not just recording it and they're not doing it just exactly the way that you saw it, and that feels weird, you know? So it's just better to go away and let them do it because they've got to do their job; they've got to change it a little and they've got to make it work for them and it's not always fun to be around that. What's amazing is how quickly he shoots and how quickly he'll compose a master [shot]. With a dialogue scene you'll see it and it's just coming together in his head, but it's amazing. He shot this in seventy-two days, which is crazy. Nobody could have shot this in seventy-two days; they would have needed a hundred-and-forty.

IGNFF: And he's able to get what he wants out of his actors. You know, I mean this isn't some kind of lame soap opera or TV movie or something like that where you've got two, maybe three chances to get the shot and then move on. They really deliver. In their early character-defining interactions the actors come across naturally, as real, no forced affectations, all great interaction.

KOEPP: Yeah, he makes them work.

IGNFF: In studying the book, what made you most excited about adapting it? What gets you jazzed about doing this new interpretation in screenplay form?

KOEPP: The first thing that caught my attention, and I hadn't thought about it when I read it as a teenager or when I first saw the movie or when I listened to the musical version about a hundred times in my dorm room in college... are you familiar with the musical version?

IGNFF: No, I've never heard it before.

KOEPP: A lot of your readers will know it. It's big on the Internet. Jeff Wayne, a British musician, in the '70s did a musical version of War of the Worlds narrated by Richard Burton, which you've got to get a hold of. You can get it on Amazon. It's great. It had a slight disco influence, which was unfortunate, but mostly it was rock and roll which was great. It was the sort of thing you listened to if you were in college in the Seventies or early Eighties with towels shoved under your door. (He laughs) I listened to it like a hundred times. So I knew the story really well but what I had forgotten was the way H.G. Wells told it; it was strictly first person, except for that little section in the middle where he talks about his brother and what he'd gone through in London. You stick with the narrator the whole time. If he doesn't see it, you don't see it. He hears rumors about what's going on elsewhere in the world, but he doesn't know if it's true or not.

IGNFF: You've worked in a scene where you've got townspeople talking while Ray and his family push through a crowd. You know, where one guy's saying Europe was incinerated and a moment later another guys says he'd heard they were able to fight them back. You don't know what to believe.

KOEPP: Yeah, and they're wrong and you know... But that's the key to our movie, because we've seen so many alien movies and so many disaster movies we can sweep the clichés off the table if you just limit ourselves to one person on the periphery. That idea seemed exciting to me because, then I got to the cellar section in the book and thought, I want to see if I can run this between what is traditional the climax of the movie structurally, let's see if we can run twenty pages in a basement, you know? And see if the audience will stay with it. Because that's usually when these kinds of movies are exploding and you're cutting back and forth between the Taj Mahal and Washington, D.C. and the Great Wall. Let's go in a basement instead and try as much as possible upend what we've seen before in this kind of movie. That's what's exciting I thought.
 
IGNFF: It's an interesting perspective; a change in the presentation. I was telling a friend last night that I was so sick of the needless voiceover from a news anchor telling you what's going on from some TV station or report.

KOEPP: That was one of the other things we wanted to get rid of.

IGNFF: With one exception I think.

KOEPP: The one lapse in our rule – because one of our rules was No On-Camera TV People except at the very beginning, but that's only because they turn it right off. But we really needed that information about how the [alien's tripods] came down, to see it in order to understand it. So we had that news van. And the only way we figured we were still sticking to our rule was she was the news producer not the on-camera person. (He laughs) That was the only way we could coolly rationalize it.

IGNFF: Was Ray and his family always on his way to Boston? Was Boston part of your original concept?

KOEPP: As I saw it, yes. I wanted it to be road movie and I wanted them to be getting to something very elemental, like Mother. Because everything in the movie is about something elemental: food, shelter, heat, survival. I picked Boston because I wanted the river crossing and I felt like I needed the river, but also it's old. I wanted like the Ironbound and the docks to represent this kind of rustbelt American early industrial look to contrast with the super-sophistication of the tripods. I wanted Boston because it's old and it also represents the birth of our country and it's got some antiquity to it.

IGNFF: What's interesting is we'd interviewed Spielberg a couple of times for his other movies, A.I., Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, and I don't recall him ever mentioning that he was doing War of the Worlds or that he was even interested in it. There must have been in the back of his mind, War of the Worlds, but he wasn't saying anything to us. Then a few months later, he's starting production on War of the Worlds. How did you keep that thing under wraps?

KOEPP: [Spielberg] wouldn't give [the screenplay] to anybody. I would email it to him, and he would give a section of the script that was relating to whatever somebody was doing. Like only five people read the whole script.

IGNFF: I guess he really knows what he wants to be secretive about.

KOEPP: Yeah, to quite a scary degree. (He laughs)

IGNFF: Really, is there anything I shouldn't know?

KOEPP: I don't know. I don't know it. (He laughs) I think deep down it bothers Steven that I was allowed to read the script.

But you know, that personal point of view was really the interesting thing to me. The other was the political aspect of it, because I thought even though we try never to deal overtly with the present day world situation.

IGNFF: A connection could probably be drawn from Ogilvy's (Tim Robbins) line "Occupations never work."

KOEPP: There was one line that I overwrote a little bit because I couldn't resist.

IGNFF: Was it the "occupation" one?

KOEPP: Yeah, but Steven was smart enough to have him off camera while he's saying it. The great thing about the book is, if you look at its history, it was written in the 1890s about British imperialism. When Orson Welles moved it to the late '30s it suddenly became about fear of fascism, you know, like the rise of fascism and "Oh, they're coming to get us." In the early '50s, of course, I think it was about the fear that the commies are coming to get us, and that's why religion became so important in the George Pal movie because the commies were godless, we believe in God, and that's what's going to save us in the end. Now today, it will be interpreted... politically I think the movie will be seen as a prism that will reflect whatever people already believe. Some people think it's about terrorism in this post 9/11 American paranoia; I think elsewhere in the world it might be viewed as an allegory about the Iraq war; in other countries where they're afraid of an American invasion they might see it differently.
 
IGNFF: Yes, one may just draw from War of the Worlds what they already believe, as if they'll see it from their paradigm; they're thinking a certain way, they'll connect with or read certain elements.

KOEPP: It's like most people tend to read... I mean, like you know how you only read op-eds that you agree with already? It's like I can't bring myself to get more than two paragraphs through David Brooks so I'll go and read Bob Herbert who confirms what I already think is true.

IGNFF: There's a comfort in that. It's like working in an ideological comfort zone. It doesn't rub you the wrong way and then repel you. I guess you're right, people are going to draw out of it whatever they want. Do you think this War of the Worlds might rub some people the wrong way?

KOEPP: No. Well, my crass response is that's actually good. That means they'll be talking about it. If other people want to defend or attack it, they have to go see it. (He laughs) If people are talking about it and some are upset I think it just sells more tickets.

IGNFF: Makes me think, Sam Peckinpah believed that anyone talking about his movie, whether it was good or bad, it was a good thing for the box office and they'd see the movie was good.

KOEPP: You know, this is the first intelligent conversation I've had about the movie. The only other people I've talked to they're like on-camera entertainment show people. (He laughs) Their teeth are so bright I can't concentrate on what they're saying.

Am I the only one who saw serious class issues?

SPOILERS

First of all, the aliens, as we see them, begin attacking in Tom Cruise's neighborhood, which is essentially a working/mid-class neighborhood. Where do they run to? The mother's house, the rich white suburban home, which has been untouched. When the aliens make their way there, they yet again run, now to Boston where they find the rich white family standing in cardigans, sipping tea, not covered blood or ash, and they're wondering what all the racket's about. I dunno, it's the only thing besides the ending that pissed me off.

I think its great that the story feels like its intentionally meandering, because it's what's really happening, the characters are forced to wander from situation to another without any really sense of planning or destination. They see a shotgun raised in the air, they know that whoever holds it is their best option. They just react and move.

now this has to be a publicity stunt:

From IMDB....

Cruise Believes in Aliens

Hollywood actor Tom Cruise believes in aliens - claiming it would be arrogant to think we, as humans, were alone in this universe. The movie star is currently promoting his new film War Of The Worlds, which sees him on the run from extra-terrestrials who cause havoc on earth. In a interview with German newspaper Bild, Cruise says, "Yes, of course (I believe in aliens). Are you really so arrogant as to believe we are alone in this universe? Millions of stars, and we're supposed to be the only living creatures? No, there are many things out there, we just don't know." Cruise is a long-time follower of the controversial Church of Scientology and is believed to be converting his fiancee Katie Holmes to the religion.

http://www.xixax.com/viewtopic.php?t=2733&start=180

Quote from: Finnnow this has to be a publicity stunt:

From IMDB....

Cruise Believes in Aliens

Hollywood actor Tom Cruise believes in aliens - claiming it would be arrogant to think we, as humans, were alone in this universe. The movie star is currently promoting his new film War Of The Worlds, which sees him on the run from extra-terrestrials who cause havoc on earth. In a interview with German newspaper Bild, Cruise says, "Yes, of course (I believe in aliens). Are you really so arrogant as to believe we are alone in this universe? Millions of stars, and we're supposed to be the only living creatures? No, there are many things out there, we just don't know." Cruise is a long-time follower of the controversial Church of Scientology and is believed to be converting his fiancee Katie Holmes to the religion.

I doubt it is.  He has an alien movie and someone asks him if he believes in aliens.  He answers yes, an answer many of us would probably give.

what the.. do some of YOU think we're the only people in the universe? come on now.


oh and for the record, spielberg has said FOREVER that he believes in aliens. so this shouldn't be a huge deal to anyone..

Yeah, I don't understand how that's a "publicity stunt".

Okay... saw this last night and... oh yeah SPOILERS!!!

...the movie is amazing as an experience, but fails as a complete film.  The ending is so boring and abrupt (yes, I'm aware it's how the book ends) and the kid living was predictably aweful, but everything until Tim Robbins shows up is so intense and expertly executed.

The spinning around the mini-van shot?  Fuck You! That was incredible!

And it was so 80s... it was like the other side of E.T.  We've got divorce from the parent's view and we've got bad aliens instead of good aliens.  
The CG matched the classic camera-work so well that you just buy everything that's going on... man... amazing.

I think this is the film's problem... it's so intense that it can't do anything but piss-out in the end... Speilberg endings can't work with a movie like this... and this is no exception.

but the rest of the film... wow.

Quote from: GhostboyI loved Signs, and will be in the minority in thinking that it is ultimately a more finely constructed film than this; but this takes the whole subjective invasion story to an entirely different level - the same means to a very different, and ultimately better end.

I completely agree, I loved signs. And it was more intricately constructed, balanced on a pinpoint even. But the subjective invasion is uprooted, and is more wide-scale. In Signs they come like a theif in the night almost, in WoW they launch a military attack. I also liked that Spielberg did a good job of de-cruising cruise.

And I actually liked the Terminal :( I have no excuse, either. It seduced me with its sappy cliche movie mechanics.

FEATURE - Industrial, Light and Muren
For Dennis Muren, the wizard of George Lucas' special effects house ILM, the highlight of War of the Worlds occurs at the very beginning. Source: FilmStew.com

The images of death and destruction and alien attacks on view in the original 1953 version of The War of the Worlds still play out in Dennis Muren's mind, even now, even though he's blowing audiences away beginning today with his work on Steven Spielberg's latest sci-fi adventure, War of the Worlds.

"I know everything they went through," says Muren of the original's director, Byron Haskin, and his visual FX crew, during a recent interview with FilmStew. "I saw that when I was six years old, when it came out, and I still remember it. Green is still my favorite color because of that movie, because the ray machines had these green things on the side. They shot most of the effects for that in three weeks, which is amazing. They had no time on it."

"But I understand definitely where they came through and what they had to work with," he continues. "So I'm very aware of the past. I think it's a good time now to be doing this stuff. There are thousands of kids coming out of schools that want to do what I do. Most of them need to study filmmaking. They're studying how to use a computer and that's important, but that's not what my job is about."

Muren's job on War of the Worlds and so many other features such as The Abyss, Terminator 2 and Episodes I and II of Star Wars is that of visual effects supervisor. And so, for War of the Worlds, he helped devise the lethal tripods, the stark imagery of people blasted to dust, the actual aliens on view, and all the shots of stuff crashing down real good.

"I just saw it two nights ago for the first time," marvels Muren as he addresses his handiwork and that of the ILM team he oversaw. "Seeing it with the sound and all was really great. But I think the intersection sequence (in which the alien tripods materialize in a New Jersey neighborhood) is just terrific -- the way that grows from this sort of benign event in the street to another level to another level to the tearing of the church to the church collapsing to the ground to the things emerging to the very stillness of them to suddenly them moving to blasting to walking."

"And that's all from the script."

Muren gives all the credit to his high-profile collaborators for setting such a dynamic cinematic stage. "The way it's staged, and it grows and grows and grows, it's just brilliant. It's just great."

"Steven and [co-screenwriter] David (Koepp) came up with that," he continues. "[It's] slow knowledge of who your enemy is. You don't even know yet it's invincible. You don't find that out until a little bit later on in the story. You're always learning more about [the enemy], which is what I think probably happens in a real war situation, with a primitive people being attacked by another, more advanced technology people."

In some ways, it harkens back in reverse to the horror of Vietnam films like Platoon, with an urban jungle standing in place of a tropical one. "You wouldn't be able to understand it [the invasion]," suggests Muren. "You'd hear a sound over there and something's hitting you in the shoulder. You don't even know what's happening.

Right now, Muren is leading the charge at ILM to do more in less time and still do it better than the competition. It's part of an overhaul tied into the FX company's move from the Lucasfilm compound in San Rafael to the old Presidio grounds in San Francisco. Muren, in fact, skipped out on Revenge of the Sith in order to follow through on the project, but made time for War of the Worlds when it fell into place at an unexpectedly brisk clip.

Ask Muren what's next for him and, wearily, he says: "Vacation. I never look ahead. I won't know anything for a few more months yet." And query him about a next classic sci-fi film to reinvent and he smiles.

"I don't know," he muses. "I haven't really thought much about that. I've got a lot of favorites, and War of the Worlds sort of came out of nowhere. There's been talk about making Forbidden Planet and sort of doing that as another classic."

Quote from: RegularKaratethe movie is amazing as an experience, but fails as a complete film.

i think this sums up exactly how i feel about it.

This was one of the most ruthless, astonishing displays of filmmaking prowess I've ever seen. Period.

spoilers.


There was some kind of power cut in the screen I was in as Tom Cruise and the kids were fleeing down the motorway. The film recommmenced about 2 minutes later and I instantly forgot about the screw up. Thats how captivating and gripping this film is. At least the first two acts.

The scenes at the start with the just the dad and his kids were really well done and for a brief moment I felt the same sense of wonder I got from watching a real family in Close Encounters. But alas, it didnt last long enough.

I still enjoyed the last segment of the film but just wished it were more about the three people we cared about in the film. Standout parts of the film for me are Ray letting his son go and doing his best with a beach boys lullaby for his daughter. If only we could have seen a little deeper than a parental reconcilliation through devastating circumstances. Thats a tall, tall order, though. I just think the bookends betray the intimate nature of the rest of the film.

Quote from: RegularKarate

The spinning around the mini-van shot?  Fuck You! That was incredible!

Definitely. Best special effects in the film.

I'd really like to see how they did it. The only thing I can come up with was that it was just a steering wheel and some seats on a blue screen.

Actually, fuck that. I really love not knowing how they did it. I love that I can still be amazed by a special effect.

The part I really appreciated was the Martian Death Ray.  It harkens back to the old 1950s martian invasion movies where the humans get hit but just disappear into nothing.  But what I dug out of it was how it turned each human into dust the second they get hit.  I knew it was coming, but just went "WTF?", especially during that shot where Ray runs inside the store and runs pass some bystander and they get zapped and gets blasted with their dust.

To me, it's what makes these aliens a whole lot more threatening than those in ID4.  Some big blast of fire from some laser and people are running.  Sure.  If you're a fan of digital imaging, that's pretty much porn for you.  But it's a whole lot threatening to me with the tripods are picking people off one by one and snatching the occasional straggler.  A close second goes to the long van shot.  That was just amazing.

Or this: http://www.moviecitynews.com/reviews/war_ofthe_worlds_stuart.html

Quote from: mutinycoOr this: http://www.moviecitynews.com/reviews/war_ofthe_worlds_stuart.html

I haven't seen it yet so I can't confirm or deny your thoughts --

however, i'd be curious to hear further about your negative opinion about vertigo - for I disagree with them -- if interested let's take it to the hitchcock thread...

Quote from: mutinycoOr this: http://www.moviecitynews.com/reviews/war_ofthe_worlds_stuart.html

I retracted a prior statement because I realized I've already negatively reviewed something you've posted, but I saw your reply (that's what that was, right?), and I'll narrow my opinion to this, while adding some positives:

You have passion, and passion is always a good thing.  There's room for many different ideological camps in the film community.  Personally, a future in which Fight Club, Elephant, and War of the Worlds are regarded as classics and Vertigo and Citizen Kane are no longer is boring to me, I'm bored.  Not at all because of the new overcoming the old, I've stated before that I'm more a fan of contemporary cinema, but those just wouldn't be my picks.  But hey, you keep going strong, keep the passion.

I appreciate the sentiment.

I'm not suggesting that Citizen Kane or Vertigo won't be classics -- so much as I think their positions need to be reevaluated. And that happens with each generation. L'Avventura used to be at the top, but now it's disappeared much like its main character. It took 20 years for Kane to build momentum as the generation it influenced got into a position to make the case. And I can assure you Vertigo's cult made sure it hit the top 10 -- Paul Schrader talks openly of conspiring with Andrew Sarris. Right now it appears some Ozu fans are pushing Tokyo Story. And so on.

I'm not necessarily the biggest fan of Magnolia or Fight Club. But there are a lot of people who are. And I see a trend where 20 years from now they will carry considerable weight.

Quote from: mutinycoI'm not necessarily the biggest fan of Magnolia or Fight Club.

:shock:

Quote from: mutinycoI appreciate the sentiment.

I'm not suggesting that Citizen Kane or Vertigo won't be classics -- so much as I think their positions need to be reevaluated. And that happens with each generation. L'Avventura used to be at the top, but now it's disappeared much like its main character. It took 20 years for Kane to build momentum as the generation it influenced got into a position to make the case. And I can assure you Vertigo's cult made sure it hit the top 10 -- Paul Schrader talks openly of conspiring with Andrew Sarris. Right now it appears some Ozu fans are pushing Tokyo Story. And so on.

I'm not necessarily the biggest fan of Magnolia or Fight Club. But there are a lot of people who are. And I see a trend where 20 years from now they will carry considerable weight.

Well now I'm glad I didn't I approached our conversation differently, because this is a level headed and smart reply.  I originally miscalculated the tone of your War of the Worlds review, and I apologize.

I shudder the day, however, that Fight Club is on any top 20 film list.  And I even like the film.

Quote from: Losing the Horse:I shudder the day, however, that Fight Club is on any top 20 film list.  And I even like the film.

http://www.xixax.com/viewtopic.php?p=107667#107667

Haha, that's unfortunate.

I say that list should be redone.  I imagine a Xixax board full of more vinegar and less perspective voted on that list.

I doubt Pulp Fiction would be number three still, either.

I also appreciate the passion, but I think maybe it's a little blinded because of your over-love for Speilbergo.

I can understand really liking this film.  There's some definite mastery involved and I'm sure you'll find a way to excuse the shitty Speilberg ending just like with AI and Minority Report (you can use the whole "that ending didn't really happen excuse only so many times).

It's just that you wrote it like an angry letter to the editor.  I could almost hear you shouting and see the spit coming out of your mouth as you did so.

I'm not dissing your review... like I said, I appreciate the passion.  I'm just telling you why I, as a reader feel that it's hard to take as seriously.

Quote from: RegularKarate
It's just that you wrote it like an angry letter to the editor.  I could almost hear you shouting and see the spit coming out of your mouth as you did so.

This is what I was trying to say in my first post, it just came out "a warcry to fifteen year olds."  But yeah, that was what the buffer between me agreeing with you and not.  When you said it in this thread it was much more level headed, as I said, and that allowed me to approach what you were saying.

Quote from: The Gold TrumpetSpeilberg's worst movie.

I agree.

Quote from: mutinycoThis was one of the most ruthless, astonishing displays of filmmaking prowess I've ever seen. Period.

hahahahaha!!! i hope you are not serious.  the only rational reasoning i can come up with to justify this statement is:

1. you have only seen 4 films in your life

2. those four films were directed by spielbergh



seriously, as far as story acting and evertyhting except special effects/cinematography this film is whack.....the tim robbinbs chaarcter was so fucking stupid and a waste of money.  why hire an oscar winner for such a stupid role.  this film only proves that a.i. and monority report deserve the masterpiece status......this shit is awful.  i can see if you are into kitschy sci-fi then you could find some amusement.  all i enjoyed were th eeffects.  .........this shit was as ghey as a roland emmerich film..

lastly, for those of you who are going to put this film into their top twen lists, please dig up the old ones to make sure that armageddon, deep impact, volcano, the day after tomorrow,twister, and independence day are in your top ten also..........same shit but those aren't followed by "a steven speilbergh film"

Dude, you're in serious need of a spell check. Take a course in English, then maybe we'll talk.

NEON being spelling accurate would be like McMurphy after the lobotomy in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest."

hahahahaha....

i can't help it...i think i have reallly shakey fingerss..

Is that before or after the pillow treatment?

haha look at yourself, cause I am, and i'm laughing. HAHA. Neons a good guy.

SPOILERS

Just got back from War of the Worlds. Mixed feelings..

Best special effects I have seen in a very, very long time. Spielberg is an absolute genius at getting you really fucking scared of his monsters. I won't sit here and name the number of times I was astonished at the CG skills it took to bring this together and make it truely frightening. There were just too many brilliant moments. Everything from how the machines nuked people to the horrifying sounds they made. Fucking awesome..

..and that said, here comes the stuff that didn't work for me..

The film worked really well until they shacked up with Tim Robbins for 30 minutes. I was totally ready for Cruise to get out there and discover some "master plan" for getting through the shields of these things. Did anyone else notice that they did actually make a point to note that our weapons didn't work? Who else caught that people in Japan brought these things down.

"They must have a weakness!"

All of this was, in my mind, preparing the audience to be ready for our hero to sort things out. Instead we're brought to the edge of our seats and led to believe that a super intelligent race didn't do enough homework to realize that after an invasion, they couldn't survive here.

Somebody's gettin fired on their home planet for this fuckup. They can build tripods of doom but didn't bother to take a soil sample or study our atmosphere? Didn't Morgan Freeman tell us that they'd planned this invasion for millions of years? Hell, they placed those machines in our ground long before we were even here. If they wanted our planet so badly, why the fuck did they wait until we could potentially do something to defend ourselves? Shit, invade Earth in the late 19th century and they wouldn't need EMPs!

Anyway, I was disappointed that Spielberg portrayed the human race as maggots. In the end, all it took was a little bit of what we've evolved to resist and the movie ended because the aliens couldn't hack it.

..not a very cool story. Gotta be a better way to tell it and still amaze me with effects.

Doesn't bother me anymore than Jack Torrance failing in his quest, then freezing to death with an absurd expression on his face...

Quote from: Myxomatosis..not a very cool story.

well then, it's hg wells that you dont like, not el spielbergo.

QuoteShit, invade Earth in the late 19th century and they wouldn't need EMPs!

That's how it went down in the book...you know back when the story was concieved...in 1898

Saw this last night and was quite blown away and even though that Myxomatosis was right about the certain flaws of the film. It still had many moments. Woosh, it jolted me.

Personally i LOVED it. For some reason i was in the absolute perfect mood to watch this movie. From the moment the lightning started to hit and the mood turns desperate and gut wrenching my face was fixed in a strained tight lipped fashion. I got so much into the story that i had to hold back tears when the people started getting pulverized. It felt as if i held my breath during that whole sequence of the first attack to the point where he reaches his house, full of human-dust.

I used to feel so jaded about alien invasion movies and at first i had only a passing interest in this movie, i knew i was going to see it eventually because of the spielberg/cruise combination, but as the movie started getting reviewed and i saw that the human element was so important in the film, i started getting more and more excited about it, and i gotta say it didnt dissapoint. I was ready for the sort of anticlimactic ending, and aside from a couple of problems (SPOILERS**********************  like the kid coming back in the end ***************************************** end SPOILERS)
i gotta say i enjoyed every minute of it.

Moments that stuck with me:

- the guy breaking into the windshield bare handed
- the way they shot the initial sequence w/ the first tripod (the way the camera sort of followed Ray in hand held erratic glory)
- the mini van shot which has been mentioned many times...
- the ferriers walking thru the woods while the people's ashes and clothes "snowed" down on them...
- the plane crash and its aftermath (although i wouldve gotten rid of the news van scenes, talk about annoying)

Quote from: The Gold TrumpetChalk Tom Cruise up yet again for managing to dismemeber a movie into a movie star show off because even when playing a normal guy, he seems to have all the answers for every problem the movie has.

But does he really?

*SPOILERS*


I think his character's lack of not having all the answers is summed up with the exchange, "What's the capital of Australia?" "That's one my brother knows."

Quote from: Ghostboy

Quote from: RegularKarate

The spinning around the mini-van shot?  Fuck You! That was incredible!

Definitely. Best special effects in the film.

I'd really like to see how they did it. The only thing I can come up with was that it was just a steering wheel and some seats on a blue screen.

Actually, fuck that. I really love not knowing how they did it. I love that I can still be amazed by a special effect.

Well, if you ever want to know, it's discussed in the Koepp interview I posted on Page 12 that I guess no one read.

:oops:

I actually did read it shortly after making that post. Honestly I did!

This is actually a B Movie. A really awesome, expensive B movie made by a master. All that 9/11 talk is baloney when Spielberg allows everyone to survive. Did the stepdad make it? He shouldn't have.

*SPOILERS*




Is this a gaffe or did I miss some explanation?

The film makes a point of showing that all of the electronics quit working; cars, TV, phones, Ray's watch. So how is it the guy in the street has a working video camera?  :yabbse-huh:

damnit I'm trying not to read anything here... I couldnt find time to go and see it yet... will try to go tomorrow

Over 100 mill in the first 5 days, which is not bad at all... much better than all the later Spielberg films... of course that very different too

I was blown away...at how unimpressed I was.  I think I was bitter going in b/c I don't think it should have been remade...but anywhoo.  So I'm not sure I could ever make a fair critique of it.  But as good as it could have been, there was one...ONE SINGLE...moment when the movie completely lost me:  when Tom has to tell the mechanic to check the solenoid.  Really?  That's what they're going with?  The mechanic, who fixes cars for a living, has to ask Tom Cruise how to fix a car?  Ruined the whole movie for me.

spoils

this was fantastic and terrifying except for everyone randomly saving Cruise/his son not dying/shut the door! and i'm seeing it again.

Quote from: MacGuffinSo how is it the guy in the street has a working video camera?  :yabbse-huh:

..haha

My friend noticed this too. Hell, maybe the guy saw the lightning storm from earlier and quickly drove to the scene. There was a good 10-15 minutes before that thing broke through the street.

(I'm saying that the EMP was limited to a specific area where Cruise was living.)

according to imdb boards most emps only take out 98-99% of all electronic equipment. it would've been great if they had made super-realistic looking dv tripod footage when they went for the close-up of that camera instead of the footage looking exactly the same as the movie.

spoilers I suppose. i have no idea. haha



I was also wondering about that dudes camera still working but who cares. when it fell to the ground and we were able to see what was being recorded, it looked cool.

why weren't the people's clothes turned to dust too? cotton is not indestructible no matter what their commercials say.

actually the only thing that really kinda bugged me was the questioning of it being terrorist. I went back and read about the first War of The Worlds and how some viewers thought the aliens to be communists. ha. idiots.  

since aliens are supposed to be sooo smart they should have known about Brita.

.......

I wish Dakota Fanning was my kid.

Dakota Fanning, Tom Cruise, and his son really did kick ass with their acting

For a while there this movie felt a lot like reading "The Stand", except with more people.

Quote from: GhostboyGT says this has no focus or clarity, but that doesn't make any sense to me - it does lack clarity, but that's because of the intense focus, which keeps the special effects in the periphery and puts the experience of the invasion front and center, rather than the invasion itself. And this is a great thing, because otherwise, indeed, this would just be another variant on - well, on all the cinematic variants of the original Wells novel, which were too bombastic to end as simply and organically as the book did.

I disagree about the focus being entirely that though. There's a philosophical context the movie uses to explain why the aliens fail and a human drama behind the mess of the invasion. They are given scenes to show they are important to the story, but no focus or clarity. I thought Speilberg was trying to juggle too many things instead of finding a true focus.

Good point. I think the reason it worked for me, and the reason I had no problem with the ending or the illogical presence of the aliens, is that I was familiar with the story and the ending already, and thus just accepted it all, from start to finish; I was only interested in - and only judged the movie based on - what Spielberg did within those confines.

i think is great that this is a war of the worlds not about anonymous heroes, people getting together to fight back the enemy and aliens comingo to menace our perfect lives, but about selfish mother fuckers, chaos, people losing it and destroying each other, and scarred families.

spoliers maybe

tim robbins appears and you think he's gonna be the one to makes us feel all safe and protected and turns out to be a belicose loonatic...

the ending did suck, not the bacteria part, which even if it's kind of dumb works, but because the son lives, and that's completely stupid from any point of view, its gratitious sentimentality---

Quote from: Alexandrospoliers maybe

tim robbins appears and you think he's gonna be the one to makes us feel all safe and protected and turns out to be a belicose loonatic...

Exactly.

*SPOILERS*




In fact, the two men that Ray encounters are the types of people he is not: The Perfect Father and a Man-With-A-Plan, Action Hero. There's a certain arrogance Ray has at the beginning, thinking he has all the answers, but he really doesn't: "Are we gonna be okay?" to which Ray honestly replies, "I don't know." His way of dealing with things are, "Stop asking so many questions." It's this mentality that probably lead to his divorce. And as we see his interaction with his son that it's almost like the son is the father, and vice versa. "You're only taking us to mom to dump us off." To which, much has been said about the son returning at the end, and I agree he should have died, but only because it would strenthened Ray's 'Sophie's Choice' made on the battlefield (which felt like the film's comment on the Iraq war about sons going off to battle and the strain on families). But as the film goes on, Ray matures, and that shows in the basement scenes with Ogilvy. Previously, Ray's attempt at being a gun-toting hero ends with a riot and he witnesses what his actions turn into, to which he does an unheroic act: He cries. So when he/we see Ogilvy, he/we think everything is going to be okay, but that was not to be. He's trying to be protector and father when he comes up with the Beach Boys lullaby. But the real turning point comes when his fatherhood is threatened again by Ogilvy; "If something happens to you dad, I'll take care of you." He kills Ogilvy, which is to say, he kills any reliance on others, takes responsibility and becomes the two kind of men he wasn't before.

Also, one comment about the ending with the aliens: Knowing what killed them from watching the 1953 version (it's like David vs. Goliath, in that the smallest thing can kill a giant), I thought Rachel's splinter was what was going to end the aliens. I'm glad it didn't go that way.

spoilers

My Pubrick-esque review:

worked
f/x
dakota
tommy c
mise en scène

failed
son alive

winner
invader's gadgets

My reworking of Fernando's Pubrick-esque review (SPOILERS, OF COURSE):

worked
f/x
dakota
tommy c
mise en scène
pacing

failed
EMP-proof camera
son alive entire family and grandparents' house unharmed


winner
invader's gadgets tripod's buttholes



I haven't read back far enough to see if anyone else pointed this out but I love that this movie played as a "Spielberg's greatest hits" collection.  He riffed on so many of his own flicks but it worked.  Overall, this may not be top-shelf Spielberg but it's near the top of the second tier.

*SPOILERS BLAHBLAHBLAH*

Hack, the most obvious one I noticed was the Jurassic Park raptor scene in Tim Robbins' basement.

Quote from: GoneSavage*SPOILERS BLAHBLAHBLAH*

Hack, the most obvious one I noticed was the Jurassic Park raptor scene in Tim Robbins' basement.

Anyone agree that this movie dragged around the time that Cruise and his daughter shack up with Tim Robbins? They spend 1/4 of the time in there.

Quote from: hacksparrowI haven't read back far enough to see if anyone else pointed this out but I love that this movie played as a "Spielberg's greatest hits" collection.  He riffed on so many of his own flicks but it worked.

Quote from: GoneSavage*SPOILERS BLAHBLAHBLAH*

Hack, the most obvious one I noticed was the Jurassic Park raptor scene in Tim Robbins' basement.

* The tripod's leg stomps down in extreme foreground like the T-Rex's did in the mud.
* Rachel looking out the back window in horror was similar to the kids doing the same in JP.
* Ray looking out the window (after throwing the peanut butter sandwich at it) was like Elliot doing the same as he's doing the dishes.

the alien spinning the bike wheel certainly recalled another extra terrestrial

dakota fanning looking up through the screen door looked just like the shot of the little boy in close encounters

the water rings with the aliens in the basement recalled jurassic park and maybe even jaws

Quote from: The Globe and MailOh, but he does repeat himself. That alien probing the basement in War of the Worlds seems a strikingly familiar if unlikely cousin to velociraptors in the kitchen in his earlier dinosaur movie. That other alien leaping up from the water puts us to mind of a certain notorious shark. The single parent and two fractious kids in War of the Worlds has a similar familiarity to E.T. There's a hand-to-hand struggle for a weapon right out of Saving Private Ryan. Even watching people escape from the aliens reminds us of the evacuation of the ghetto in Schindler's List. And don't the alien heads look like a combination of tyrannosaurus rex skulls and German helmets?

When not quoting himself, Spielberg quotes others: allusions to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds or Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin; a taste of American Gothic; a ruined diner from Edward Hopper; a hand holding up a rifle like the photograph of the flag on Iwo Jima. Adding to these, he ladles in images from the 9/11 catastrophe, with ash-covered refugees running, and later holding up signs and plastering home-made pictures of the missing on walls. The effect is abrasively unsubtle, but so dense with allusions that at least it keeps you engaged, feeling the pull of one out-of-context but familiar image after another.

I think this is one of those movies that I recognize has flaws, but I still love it.

Quote from: SHAFTRI think this is one of those movies that I recognize has flaws, but I still love it.

Very well put and agreed..

Spielberg is back as far as I'm concerned. He's forgiven for AI. :)

Quote from: MacGuffin

Quote from: hacksparrowI haven't read back far enough to see if anyone else pointed this out but I love that this movie played as a "Spielberg's greatest hits" collection.  He riffed on so many of his own flicks but it worked.

Quote from: GoneSavage*SPOILERS BLAHBLAHBLAH*

Hack, the most obvious one I noticed was the Jurassic Park raptor scene in Tim Robbins' basement.

* The tripod's leg stomps down in extreme foreground like the T-Rex's did in the mud.
* Rachel looking out the back window in horror was similar to the kids doing the same in JP.
* Ray looking out the window (after throwing the peanut butter sandwich at it) was like Elliot doing the same as he's doing the dishes.

My favorite was Tom blindfolding Dakota and telling her not to look no matter what she hears.  Raiders, big time!

Quote from: Myxomatosis

Quote from: SHAFTRI think this is one of those movies that I recognize has flaws, but I still love it.

Very well put and agreed..

Spielberg is back as far as I'm concerned. He's forgiven for AI. :)

AI was one of the best movies ive seen in the last 10 years. If anything he was back after AI and then Minority Report. Then left again with catch me if you can and the terminal, i haven't seen war of the worlds so I don't know where he is nowadays. He's a milk carton filmmaker.

so.. is this thing making money?

its doubled its opening weekend gross (about 64 mill).. so its got that going for it..

(I swear to God I didn't plan this) But it just so happened that I saw "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" a week before I saw "War of Worlds" and for me, just admiring the differences between the two movies was enough for me to keep on sitting in the theater during "War of the Worlds".

It wasn't a bad movie, but I just felt like Spielberg held back. Everything was too perfect in the end.

There were a lot of moments in the movie that were boner. I know a lot of people think that this movie is going to be the one that we all look back at sadly as the time that Spielberg fell, but I don't think it will be that way at all. It had some really amazing moments, which is more than you can say for the other shit that is out there.

I'm just sad that inbetween this movie and Star Wars the box office is still in a slump; I really thought these great movies were going to bring people back to the theaters...

QuoteThere were a lot of moments in the movie that were boner.

hahaha, wiat, what?

Quote from: Daliang
I'm just sad that inbetween this movie and Star Wars the box office is still in a slump; I really thought these great movies were going to bring people back to the theaters...

 
Is all the B.O. angst justified?

The Backlot by Peter Bart
 
Every Monday we hear their clarion call: The gloom-and-doomers peer at the box office data and conclude that the plague years are upon us.

Are they right? At summer's halfway point, the definitive answer is: Yes and no.

For 17 straight weekends, say the gloom-and-doomers, box office has measured lower than last year. But if you take "Passion of the Christ" out of the equation, the numbers this year would be slightly higher than in 2004. And "Passion" was, after all, a "onetime" event, independent in its financing, release and ideology.

The G & D set says this year's downturn reflects the fact that Hollywood is giving us mediocre product. OK, but consider the following: The two biggest disappointments of 2005 are "Cinderella Man" and "Kingdom of Heaven." Both are excellent films, considerably more ambitious than "Van Helsing," "Troy" or the "Day After Tomorrow," which took in far more money last summer. Arguably, this year's problems stem from questionable release dates and marketing strategies, not issues of quality.

The G & Ders point to studies indicating that filmgoers in theory would prefer to watch movies at home rather than in theaters. This is about as relevant as asking couples whether they'd prefer to have sex atop the Eiffel Tower or at a Motel 6. In point of fact, filmgoers still pay to go to theaters and, if anything, seem to be drifting away from collecting DVDs. Indeed, the pattern of DVD sales looks more and more like film: There's a two- or three-week rush for a new release, followed by apathy.

Listen to the G & D crowd, and they'll tell you the downturn has spread to the overseas market. Again, yes and no. Last year saw a cluster of $300 million-plus releases like "The Last Samurai," and "Troy" and even some $500 million-plus phenomenon such as "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," which soared past $540 million, and "Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" which hit $742 million outside the U.S. And, yes, there was Mel GibsonMel Gibson's "Passion" again hitting $240 million overseas.

Those were remarkable numbers, and 2005 won't match them, though the third "Star Wars," "Meet the Fockers" and "Ocean's Twelve" are giving it a try. Even "Kingdom of Heaven," which will barely scratch its way to $50 million in the U.S., has passed $150 million abroad.

So, long-term, are the habits of filmgoers changing? Absolutely. Will consumers spend more time online, or on gaming or watching porn on demand? Without doubt. Will the windows separating DVD release and theatrical release continue to diminish? They sure will.

But here's a suggestion to the gloom-and-doomers: If you want to get depressed, turn your attention to Iraq. Give Hollywood a breather.

I really liked the film. The only bad thing about it is that it didn't surprise me, I got exactly what I was hoping for.


SPOILERS

Quote from: hacksparrow

Quote from: MacGuffin

Quote from: hacksparrowI haven't read back far enough to see if anyone else pointed this out but I love that this movie played as a "Spielberg's greatest hits" collection.  He riffed on so many of his own flicks but it worked.

Quote from: GoneSavage*SPOILERS BLAHBLAHBLAH*

Hack, the most obvious one I noticed was the Jurassic Park raptor scene in Tim Robbins' basement.

* The tripod's leg stomps down in extreme foreground like the T-Rex's did in the mud.
* Rachel looking out the back window in horror was similar to the kids doing the same in JP.
* Ray looking out the window (after throwing the peanut butter sandwich at it) was like Elliot doing the same as he's doing the dishes.

My favorite was Tom blindfolding Dakota and telling her not to look no matter what she hears.  Raiders, big time!

everybody trying to get in the car reminded me of empire of the sun when christian bale and his parents are in the rolls royce, and everybody's knocking on the windows.

the bells ringing before the flaming train speeds by I thought was very similar to the scene in close encounters when roy has is first encounter

edit: just remembered: pelople taking pictures of the aliens is from close encounters too

This isn't bad: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050707/EDITOR/50707002

anybody notice some interesting details through the movie they would like to share with the class...

watch at the beginning of the movie when that shawshank guy is talking about aliens looking on our planet with envious eyes...camera is moving towards the earth but pans up from another planet before it does so, you can catch a brief glimpse of it at the bottom of the frame.  it could presumably be mars considering that's where the aliens are from in the book, but it's the only origin reference in the movie that i noticed.

also look for strange posters in the background of the movie.  there are many identical ones posted on a wall outside of ray's house even before the aliens come, and these posters make several appearances in various places through the rest of the movie, but they were always too far away from me to see.  also look for ridiculous signs amongst the people holding up their missing signs in the crowd: i spotted 'kahn is coming' or something very similar, referencing spielberg's editor.

that article is a bit of a stretch, but I didn't notice The Searchers reference until it was mentioned in the article.

spoils

supposedly the part where the alien is playing with the wheel is a reference to a part of the book that talks about how the aliens came from a wheelless society.

SPOILERS






(well....kind of)

As soon as the Human Dust appeared on Cruise I thought of only one thing: The Holocaust.  The only parts of this movie that worked for me were when you saw middle-class white folk getting the shit beat out of them mindlessly.   The basement? The Underground Railroad.  I think Spielberg was smart to say "this could happen to YOU bitch!"   For the viewer not caught in this mindset, the Robbin's death scene (weakIsay) might have seemed more neccessary. My Dad didn't dig it.
I wish the movie was longer and had more characters just to get the jist of what was psychologically contained.  I mean, it could have ended up like Independence Day in that way (ID4 heehee!), but it's a WAR, not Tom Cruise Looks Scruffy Plus Aliens.
Dakota Fanning rules, and if I was her age, I would have a crush on her. Even if all her roles are the same character a la Hanks Cruise and Norton.

The first act was the best part as far as I'm concerned.  I like Spielberg dysfunctional famblies.

It was big.

SP.  OI.  LER.  S.

There were three moments I really liked:
When the first people start getting killed.  Just like bam bam bam they're all dying.  That was great.
The army on top of the hill.
Cruise walking out of the house.  Wait sorry more specific.  Cruise walking out of the house at the end, when everything is read.

There were other times I smiled during the movie.  The flaming train.  'There will be tunnels there already, we'll have a system of tunnels!'  The people in cages underneath, although it was just the discovering of the cages that was exciting, and the whole grenades and pulling Cruise down thing was way too Hollywood for me.  When Cruise runs through the store, out the door, and down the street.  The television shot of the city being destroyed.

It may have been paint by numbers, but there weren't any numbers under one hundred being used, you know.

Also, I don't know how with all this talk of Spielberg movie similarities no one has said that the alien eye visiting the basement felt exactly like the spider eyes in Minority Report.  Unless someone did say that and I missed it, at which point I'm sure a quote will be offered.

Ebert brought up the spiders.

Watch his 2-star review attack Manhattan and the Mutiny City News cast: http://www.moviecitynews.com/columnists/mutiny/thumbs_up.html

So I finally saw War Of The Worlds. Gotdamn, how good is Kamiski? Hes the best filmmaker in the bergs whole camp (lost souls being forgotten...please). This movie had almost a flawless first half but then it falls to pieces. The Berg feels he needs to add a feel good third act to everyone of his almost classic films. I'm dead serious. Aside from A.I, which is amazing, everyone of the new age Spielberg flicks falls to pieces at the end. It's almost like he feels bad leaving us with a bad feeling ending when in reality, none of them would be bad movies, except for the end. I'm in the minority (pun....maybe?) that feel these new Berg movies are fantastic (ai, minority report and kind of WOTW) but they all lack an emotional punch cause of the third act. The Berg feels it gives more emotion when everyone is reunited after catasrophy when I feel it gives emotion after everything is resolved regardless of who survives. WOTW would have been a classic film if only Tom and Dakota had survived. But no, he has to give it everyone in this quasi family. The Berg nowadays makes amazing first half movies. But his family man attitude intereferes with what we really wanna see. Which is reality. I just watched WOTW but felt like Kaminski came out the real winner. A.I is still one of the best movies of my lifetime but that may have been a misstep for Spielberg. And that's whats unfortunate.

speaking of the new 'BERG....Never saw 'Terminal', looked kinda weak, boring, "gay" (third definition only), but highly enjoyed 'Catch Me If You Can' for all it's fictionalizing and lukewarming of reality.   It got better towards the end, which is rare in many movies.    I think 'BERG too has to give a REAL ending in his next sci-fi outing that is full and complete. Minority felt rushed, WOTW definitely rushed, and AI had a long ending...pretty cool, but I didn't dig them aliens. It was creepy enough sure.
K Im DONE

Quote from: AntiDumbFrogQuestionand AI had a long ending...pretty cool, but I didn't dig them aliens.

Godammit!!!  :yabbse-angry: i tough it was clear all over xixax that those were ROBOTS!!!! Not aliens, ROBOTS...aaaaaaaaaaah it's useless...

(or were you being sarcastic?)

ProDumbAlienAssumtion

war of the worlds sucks...
please stop posting in this thread...

Haha, no.

Not that I had posted in here previously.

NEON has become a straight up hater the last month. Whats the deal NEON?

SPOILERS (do I even need to warn now?  it's been out for a while)

I'm really surprised about how negative these comments are about the fate of the son.  The whole reason he ran away from Ray was because he didn't want to take orders, that he wanted to be 'a man' essentially, and fight his own battles.  Ray really treats him as helpless and pathetic as Dakota-- it makes perfect dramatic sense for them to be separated.  I don't see the reunion as a cop-out at all, just the resolution of their relationship, and Ray finally seeing his son as a free thinking individual (or grown up, I suppose).  Just the way Cruise holds him at a distance for a moment-- that gesture says it all.  

So yeah, anyway, I really liked the movie a lot.  To have a 'popcorn movie' to be loaded with so many ideas and allegories, yet deliver the goods... jeez Louise.  David Koepp doesn't get enough love either-- that guy has been responsible for creating some the best setpieces/suspense sequences in the last 20 years.

Quote from: StefenNEON has become a straight up hater the last month. Whats the deal NEON?

i had scabies....they itch me penis..and they makes me mad
i got no health insurance...doctors are expen$ive..even the doc-in-a-box ones.....but watching eyes wide shut and prescrition lotions cured it...
so i am happy now :-D

i can't believe i sat through this.  


booooooo

Wow im seeing alot of negative comments about this film. Now granted i walked in expecting more form a spielberg film, and i was alittle disapointed with the way the movie it ended (even though it says true to the story). But the movie was really not that bad. I have to say that i think the movie could have been shorter. The scene with Tom and the crazy guy sreaming "not my blood" was way to long and drawn out. That whole sequence took like 30mins to play out. It just didn't do anything for me.

For some reason I just was able to go and see this yesterday for the first time. I read the book many years ago, I re-read it last year when I heard of the project, and I love almost every Spielberg movie.

But this was just a tremendous piece of shit.

I was waiting for something good to happen the whole movie, and it never happened. It was all so ridiculous and so NOT-original that I just couldnt believe my eyes. The excitement I had to see this for such a long time lasted until the first 20 minutes into the movie... and then I couldnt understand how someone so brilliant like Spielberg and an actor that I really admire can take a fantastic book and 100 million dollars and make that piece of shit.

i have a hard time believing that tom cruise and spielberg were behind this movie.  

sure, a father winning over his kid's love may have been original when the book was written but it's just turned into a movie cliche.  Every character was so one-dimensional.    

Had Spielberg just used the book as a starting point, the movie would be way better.

Quote from: JimmyGator
Had Spielberg just used the book as a starting point actually tried, the movie would be way better.

Quote from: JimmyGatorHad Spielberg just used the book as a starting point, the movie would be way better.

what do you mean? he did use the book as a starting point. literally. the film begins with words directly from the book.

Yeah thats the only good part of the film

what i meant was had he changed things around from the book.  Tripods just dont make sense.  It's a lot more efficent to have four legs.   Plus, that whole step-dad winning over his kids hearts may have been original 100 years ago, but now its just a stupid movie cliche.  

i don't know...

DreamWorks has finally announced Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds for 11/22. The film will be available on DVD in three versions: single-disc anamorphic widescreen and full frame standard editions (SRP $29.99 each) and also a two-disc anamorphic widescreen Limited Edition (SRP $36.98 ). Audio on all three versions will be English and French Dolby Digital 5.1, and English DTS 5.1. Extras will include Designing the Enemy: Tripods and Aliens featurette.

The 2-disc Limited Edition will include that, along with Revisiting the Invasion (an introduction by Spielberg), the 4-part Production Diary documentary (2 parts for Filming on the East Coast and 2 parts for Filming on the West Coast), 4 behind-the-scenes featurettes (The HG Wells Legacy, Characters: The Family Unit of War of the Worlds, Pre-Visualization and Scoring War of the Worlds), We are Not Alone (closing words by Spielberg), galleries of design artwork and production photos, and the film's theatrical trailers.

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedigitalbits.com%2Farticles%2Fmiscgfx%2Fcovers%2Fwaroftheworlds2005dvd.jpg&hash=6e11fbea49497548acdc62fa24b44cb1f6bd8618)(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedigitalbits.com%2Farticles%2Fmiscgfx%2Fcovers%2Fwaroftheworlds2005ledvd.jpg&hash=2622585879235d421093408cc8cbb7adc4d7ac64)

i hope it contains giggle free featurettes.

No commentary with Tom Cruise? :yabbse-undecided:

I was looking forward to his fake laugh.

I read this book this week so I decided to watch this movie again and I can't remember why I liked it so much when I saw it back in 05. It's got some cool parts, and it looks really cool but the story and characters are a fucking mess. The dumb son was the worst thing about it. They should have called it the dumb son.

Quote from: Stefen on November 05, 2009, 12:02:33 PM
the dumb son.

I'm stealing that title.

It's yours!

SPOILERS

Everything involving the dumb son in this movie is bad, including the ending with the dumb son magically alive for no other purpose than put the sappy in an otherwise nightmarish, extremely dark and violent film.

Despite this (and it's a big THIS) the film is very enjoyable because Spielberg is doing some wild shit with the set pieces and the camera movements. And it's a good post 9/11 take on the same story. If he wasn't so hung up in cramming characters with "father issues" every single fucking time this might have been one of his best movies.  

Oh, it's so much fun, no doubt. It's everything you want in a summer blockbuster, but as with most everything Spielberg does, he just lays the sentimentality on way too thick.

He gets kudos for having his main character be a fucking murderer, I mean, who else would do that? It was pretty brutal.

It's just frustrating because Spielberg can do ANYTHING he wants. ANYTHING. He has so much clout. I wish he would just be a filmmaker and not a businessman. I understand he wants his movies to make money, but just a few times I'd like him to just make a movie. Not worry about how many people he can get into the theater. I like what Gilliam says about Spielberg, about how he always wants to make sure his audience leaves feeling happy and good about themselves.

Spielbergs ideas are brilliant. This film is a testament to that, but he's always putting more emphasis on tying up loose ends in a friendly way that at the end, instead of thinking, "holy shit. that was fucking awesome." you end up rolling your eyes.

I consider A.I. a masterpiece of this decade and it will be in my top 5 (maybe top 3), but it suffers from the same problem as this does. But what A.I. has that WOTW doesn't is a dreamy, bedtime story quality that lets it get away with pouring sugar on it like a one armed drummer. Also, with A.I., while the ending may seem happy, I don't think it was happy at all. Much like Eternal Sunshine, I think the ending was pretty fucking sad and heartbreaking, but on the surface, seemed happy.

Quote from: Stefen on November 05, 2009, 02:30:18 PM
I consider A.I. a masterpiece of this decade and it will be in my top 5 (maybe top 3), but it suffers from the same problem as this does. But what A.I. has that WOTW doesn't is a dreamy, bedtime story quality that lets it get away with pouring sugar on it like a one armed drummer. Also, with A.I., while the ending may seem happy, I don't think it was happy at all. Much like Eternal Sunshine, I think the ending was pretty fucking sad and heartbreaking, but on the surface, seemed happy.

There's nothing even remotely happy about that ending and when I watched the movie again recently I even felt it was almost unbearably sad. I also love War of the Worlds, but agree that the ending (not everything about the dumb son character. I like him until the moment he goes with the troops) is somewhat lame. Yeah, Tom Cruise and his kids are safe, but he's not their "father" anymore. That just doesn't have, in any way, the power of A.I.'s ending.

Yup. I've talked to people who have seen A.I. and when I ask them if they thought the ending was happy, they say, "yeah, the boy was reunited with his mother!"

lol.

Lol. It's kind of sweet to see David reunited with his mom, but I guess they missed the implications of that encounter. I think that, though very sad, it's also quite a beautiful piece of work. Great movie.

I just found it sad because it wasn't real. it was like a psychological experiment but he kid didn't know any better because he was a fucking robot.  still though, robot kid is way better than dumb son.