- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
100Contains all of the hallmarks of classic genre Spielberg: It shows you things you've never seen before, instills an accompanying sense of awestruck wonder, and delivers long stretches of heightened, delirious excitement that remind you why people started going to the movies in the first place.
-
100It is, simply, the alienation-invasion movie to beat all alien-invasion movies: meticulously detailed and expertly paced and photographed, with sights so spectacular and terrible that viewers will have to consciously remind themselves to close their mouths when their jaws drop open.
-
100Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds is huge and scary, moving and funny--another capper to a career that seems like an unending succession of captivations.
-
100Working in the spirit of his predecessors but with the kind of uncanny special effects they could barely dream of, Spielberg has come up with an impressive production that is disturbing in the way only provocative science fiction can be.
-
91An attack-of-the-aliens disaster film crafted with sinister technological grandeur -- a true popcorn apocalypse.
-
90It's the human struggle that makes this a sci-fi masterpiece.
-
90A gritty, intense and supremely accomplished sci-fier.
-
90With this genuinely big entertainment, powered by a beating heart, Steven Spielberg has put the summer back in summer movies.
-
88Rivets and amazes, even if it falls just frustratingly short of the mind-expanding grandeur it could have had.
-
83It's impossible to praise too highly the verve, skill and authenticity with which Spielberg brings off his alien invasion.
-
80Might be too realistic for its own good: The film takes perhaps a little too much glee in its abilities to manufacture mayhem. That being said, the ride is extraordinary.
-
80Dark and stormy, even gloomy, this is a distinctly autumnal blockbuster from the man who invented summer.
-
80The imagery is startling not just for its symbolic resonances, but for the breathless intensity with which it sears the screen.
-
80The filmmaker who once aimed to enchant his audiences with cheerful stories of beatific visitors from outer space now wants only to scare the hell out of us. E.T., as it turns out, is a mass murderer after all, and we are his Reese's Pieces.
-
80The audience is treated to one extraordinary vision after another; the sense of a world literally being destroyed around the principal actors, the sense of their flight through panic and destruction, the sense of concussion, collapse, rubble and ruin.
-
80Kaminski, who is as good as any cinematographer working today, matches the chromatic tones of shots to their content in ways that can only be called exciting.
-
78Certainly one of the most lovingly crafted, end-of-the-world, cinematic feasts ever made, a spectacle of destruction and survival not even C.B DeMille could have envisioned.
-
75It's those dark visions of destruction that stick, even when Spielberg pushes the script to an unlikely happy ending. Great foreplay, failed orgasm.
-
75The film isn't quite excellent, though, since it sags in the middle and starts to seem repetitive.
-
75For the first 100 minutes of his 117-minute film Spielberg holds the audience in a grip of fear. When Ray and Rachel take refuge in the storm cellar of a survivalist (a miscast Tim Robbins), the director's grip relaxes only a bit, but the film never recovers from this excursion into the Gothic.
-
75But expect a logical plot, and you'll walk out of the theater with a host of questions, mostly concerning procedural points of the alien attack.
-
75War of the Worlds is not vintage Spielberg, and it's on the grim side for a summer action blockbuster, but it's worth the time and money invested.
-
75This is B-movie material all the way, yet it's not only watchable, it's engrossing. That's because the material is in the hands of an A-talent director, who knows, as few of his contemporaries do, how to manipulate the plastic qualities of a film: the lighting, editing, composition, camera movement and production values.
-
75Alas, Robbins is far more interesting than Cruise, and you wonder what the film would have been like if their roles were reversed -- if Robbins were the loser in search of redemption and Cruise the agitated freak in the basement.
-
70I thoroughly enjoyed the street level perspective of the world being destroyed, it just would've been nice if they hadn't crapped out at the end.
-
70In an unfortunate case of star casting, Cruise strains credibility as a hard-edged Jersey dockworker.
-
70Although it's thoroughly retooled, H.G. Wells's scenario doesn't allow for many soft landings, and the extreme respect for havoc on view quite properly keeps the Spielbergian cutesies to a minimum.
-
70Acting is not really the point of this movie, which seems to arise above all from Mr. Spielberg's desire to reaffirm that he is, along with everything else, a master of pure action filmmaking.
-
70As is his wont, Spielberg can't resist stuffing the ending of the movie with a bit too much cheese and baloney. Despite those quibbles, War of the Worlds is taut, gripping and surprisingly dark filmmaking.
-
63Now that this technically impressive - but seriously flawed and self-referential - remake is finally in theaters to swell the July 4 weekend box office, conversation will doubtless shift to the lamest ending yet to a Steven Spielberg movie.
-
63War of the Worlds pushes some of the right buttons and enough of the wrong ones to make you wish that Spielberg would move on from aliens already and use his unparalleled talents to focus once more on earth.
-
63Has masterfully polished mechanics, some of the most seamless CGI effects in recent memory, and the Wells veneration is admirable. However, the film takes far too many creative shortcuts, like bookended narration and aliens that make strategically humanlike mistakes, completely incongruous to their technological superiority.
-
63Forget what Tom Cruise does outside his movies: What he does inside his movies is more than enough to wreck them.
-
60It unfolds in the angst-haunted shadow of the 9'11 terror attacks and teeters on a thin edge of sheer panic.
-
60It's the right role for Cruise, but the movie is so devoted to him, so star-driven, that it begins to seem a little demented.
-
50A big, clunky movie containing some sensational sights but lacking the zest and joyous energy we expect from Steven Spielberg.
-
50Go for the extraordinary special effects, by all means, but not if you want to feel good about yourself or humanity. And heed the PG-13 rating, because this movie takes no prisoners.
-
50The new film is a toss-up with George Pal's very watchable 1953 version: the special effects are even better here, the drama even lamer.
-
50Newly updated but shamelessly hokey, Steven Spielberg's version of the 1898 H.G. Wells yarn about murderous invaders from outer space starts off as a nimble scare show like "Jaws."
-
20Extravagant in movie terms but stingy in emotional ones, it embodies all of Spielberg's bad impulses and almost none of his good ones: It's a grand display of how well he knows how to work us over, and yet the desperation with which he tries to get to us is repulsive.
prev
next
Page:
- 1
Recommended Products
- Release Date: Dec 20, 1989
- View Trailers »
- Release Date: Jun 21, 2002
- View Trailers »
- Release Date: Nov 10, 2004
- View Trailers »
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 300 out of 547
-
Mixed: 56 out of 547
-
Negative: 191 out of 547
-
10