Alden Bates' Weblog

This is the third of the War of the Worlds movies to be released this year. It's no Spielberg masterpiece but it's not technicolour puke either. It's the Asylum take. To the right you should see the cover, on which one of the walkers (they have six legs, not three) is doing an Independance Day impression with the White House. Like the picture on the back with walkers destroying the city, this doesn't occur in the movie.

The trailers which played when I stuck the disk in didn't really fill be with confidence, being full of bad acting and (unintentionally?) hilarious gore. But fortunately, the movie itself didn't plumb those depths.

George Herbert (astronomer) is seperated from his wife and kid at the start of the movie as mysterious objects plung from the skies. He approaches the crater with a group of people, only to be confronted by a huge six-legged machine which starts with the killing and the mayhem. The story swiftly gets to the action, with walkers stomping around heat-raying people and wiping out civilisation in the first half hour, while Mr Herbert attempts to make his way to the Lincoln Memorial to meet up with his wife.

The special effects vary a lot from average for a TV series to pretty good. Fortunately they show stuff sparingly and the movie benefits from it. I'm not big on gore, but this movie has it, and it seemed like about the right amount to me. This movie didn't have a huge budget, but by the looks they made more of it than Pendragon did. The pacing was a little odd at times...

Not a Hollywood masterpiece, but better than a B movie.

In 2007 will be released (hopefully!) yet another War of the Worlds movie, the completely CGI version based on Jeff Wayne's soundtrack...