Word: alienations
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...know the rest if you've seen this latest adaptation of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (script by Josh Friedman and David Koepp) or even if you haven't. Out of the rubble rise giant alien ships that walk on three spindly legs and whose deadly heat rays not only destroy civilization as we know it but also threaten to split up Tom Cruise's latest movie family. The 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...
...more serious ambition undermines the domestic drama that War of the Worlds also wants to be. In a land with millions of humans vaporized by alien rays, with the Hudson River turned into the Styx, awash in corpses--in such a world, the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans. Yet we are meant to care for Ray (Cruise), his teenage son (Justin Chatwin) and young daughter (Dakota Fanning)--natural antagonists forced together by disaster. How do three members of a broken family behave during an alien invasion? Exactly the way they...
...actors--especially Tim Robbins, as a daft homeowner--could you please stop hyperacting? This is a monster movie, not a Bergman film. The monsters are pretty cool: hood-headed, dog-faced critters that suggest the Alien beast mixed with one of the nastier Gremlins. They, and the tricks Spielberg uses to display the devastation they wreak, are the show. A splendid horror show it is, except when three little people...
...neutralize, better yet to destabilize, and ideally to communize other states. They wage war abroad, either outright or by more covert means, for the same reason that they oppress internal opposition: because it is opposition, and because they are totalitarian. Genuine live-and-let-live peaceful coexistence is as alien to a Marxist-Leninist foreign policy as power sharing is to Marxism-Leninism on the home front. The Sandinistas show no sign of being an exception to this rule...
There can be no one left at the network who has failed to get the message. Since Capital Cities Communications assumed control of ABC in January, the newly merged company has embarked on a stringent cost-cutting campaign, an alien notion in the high-living world of network television. Layoffs have hit nearly every part of ABC's TV operation. More than 70 people were let go in the news division; some 300 positions were cut at ABC-owned stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. Such familiar trappings of the executive life-style as limousines...