Alden Bates' Weblog

The War of the Worlds

Sadly not the recent Spielburg/Cruise version, which is quite fab, but the Timothy Hines Pendragon version. To say this is an awful film is an understatement.

One scene near the start of the film has the main character stargazing with his wife, during what appears to be mid-day, with a starry sky laid in during post production. The design of the Martian tripods is fine, but subject to the worst CGI animation I've seen - they move so rapidly they look like they're at most a foot tall and actually looks at points like they've used bad stop motion. At one point a tripod crushes a woman beneath its foot, a sequence which would have been horrific had it not been so badly done. At times, it looks more like a computer game than a movie.

The picture is also highly colourful. Much use is made of coloured filters, and often the picture is so saturated it's almost painful to look at. A lot of the dialogue appears to have been layed on later, with completely inappropriate accoustics.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that it makes Ed Wood look like Orson Welles, but it is dreadfully bad.