War of the Worlds A Movie Review	MPAA Rated - PG-13 It's 1:58 Long A Review by The Dude on the Right

Tom Cruise is Ray. He’s divorced, kinda a gear-head, and his ex is now married to some rich dude. It’s his weekend with the kids, so the ex drops then off at his shabby New York house. Enter Rachel and Robbie, played respectively by Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin. Dropped off at the house, we get the idea that the kids don’t get along with Dad too well, especially when Robbie throws the baseball through the window. Another morning, another day when your son steals your car for some cruising, only you can’t be too obsessed with that because there is this weird storm cloud nearby, and all of a sudden lighting strikes the same place a bunch of times. You hunker under the kitchen table with your daughter, and when the storm is over, you find your son and then head to investigate the lightning strike. Then, wouldn’t you know it, this big, ol’ machine thing comes out of the ground and starts vaporizing your neighbors. The aliens have arrived.

So what is Ray to do? Well, he steals a car and brings along his kids, figuring it best to get out of town. Where to go? Maybe to at least keep his daughter from screaming so much, Ray decides to head to the ex-wife’s pad where the kids don’t realize that mom isn’t there, mom’s in Boston with the grandparents, much to their dismay, although Ray does actually know this. Another catastrophe, though not the aliens, and Ray decides that the best thing to do, probably because he is sick and tired of his daughter’s screaming, is to get the kids to Boston so he can dump them with the ex and go about and live his normal life again. Well, for Ray, things don’t go as planned, especially while Ray is napping and Robbie decides to drive the only working car to a crowd of people trying to get to the ferry to get across the water, to maybe also make it to Boston. Sadly, without a vehicle and the aliens still coming, now Ray finds himself and his daughter in the basement of a crazy person. Getting out, they make their way to Boston, somehow, and even destroy one of the alien machines, and then there is the sappy ending instead of the realistic one that would have been sad, but more believable. No, I’m not talking about the facts that the aliens simply die because they can’t handle the germs that we live with, that’s part of the book, I get that. I’m talking about the family reunion that should have been one less family member.

Okay, I admit, that’s a hodgepodge of a story synopsis, but pretty much I couldn’t buy into the movie because the people are just stupid. Sure, Ray comes off initially as a dad who really doesn’t care about his kids, and then realizes they are his life, and sure, even with the constant screaming, Rachel comes off as a little girl being chased by aliens. But it was the ferry scene that did it in for me, that and the shacking up with the crazy dude, and I just couldn’t buy the chasing anymore. Come on, it appears the aliens are looking for groups of people, and you decide a crowded ferry is a good place to be, and sure, you’re running from the aliens and a stranger offers you shelter in his storm cellar, but is this really the place to be while the aliens are blasting everything in their way? I lost it.

There is some entertainment value in "War of the Worlds," and as we would expect, Steven Spielberg makes the movie look great, but, and I know it wouldn’t really work because we need stupid people to put themselves in stupid situations, but sometimes can’t we have characters who seem to have some common sense? 2 stars out of 5 for me for "War of the Worlds." The only reason I would recommend paying the bucks for the theater is spectacle-wise, it’s one of those movies that looks and sounds better in the theater, as long as the person behind you isn’t talking on their cell phone.

That’s it for this one! I’m The Dude on the Right!! L8R!!!