When 9/11 happened, I was in middle school. I was 13. When the first plane hit, I was just getting settled into second period. At about 9:15, the principal turned on the speaker and delivered the news. But we didn't hear about the planes, because at that point, there wasn't enough information to know about the planes in the first place. All we heard were the buzzwords: "Terrorists" "Attack" "Explosion" So the school was to be evacuated for safety precautions, of course.

It was one of the scariest moments of my life. I saw no explosions that day. I didn't see any death. I just saw the people in my life and strangers completely freaking out, and it wasn't until…

so close to being “pretty good!” this was one of the first sci-fi horrors i was ever allowed to watch and as a 10 year old with a panic disorder i loved it — it really hit home to see a girl my age struggling with the same thing. 

i do maintain that the first half is as good as i remember, but around the midpoint the story slows way tf down and it dissolves into some Casual Propaganda. clearly a post-9/11 piece and in a bad way — military portrayed as heroic good guys instead of the foot soldiers of oppression they are — no thank you! the national guard trucks were real and clearly loaned in exchange for…

WHAT IS IT? IS IT TERRORISTS?
PROS:
~The best element of the film is the tension that is created through various scenes. The first appearance of the aliens from the ground and the following chaotic situation is a foreshadowing of the intimidating entity that will be revealed. Furthermore, the panicked people, the collapsing buildings, the damaged airplane, the scene aboard the ferry and the hide-and-seek in the basement are intense and show the desperation that people can be found into from one moment to the next.
~The film is a commentary of how an invasion of any kind could affect the humans. The scene where the family drives through a crowd of desperate people indicates the fear and the anxiety.…

84

"Steven Spielberg’s filmography is often so encompassing and ambitious that it tends to lose certain works in its wake. For every BFG or Ready Player One, films that offer his stylistic traits but tend to suffer from intrinsic elements of the source material, there’s a Lost World or The Post: movies that linger in the conversation simply by being a Spielberg movie, and in watching them, you’re perplexed as to why they’re so frequently ignored or lost in the shuffle. To be fair, in the grand scheme of things, anything lesser than Jaws, Close Encounters, E.T, Indiana Jones, Schindler’s List, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan and all of his other smash pop culture phenomenon, would of course find trouble…

personally, i think the ending is depressing as hell, i'm not sure what the epilogue implies if the whole thing's supposed to be a terrorism allegory, and the whole basement chunk of the movie is...odd. it's all pretty ridiculous of course, but spielberg could sell ice to the proverbial eskimo if he made a movie about it - nobody else can pull off the human element in a disaster movie quite this well, and nobody else makes mass death by vaporization, bizarre gore, and the imminent extinction of the human race look so beautiful. elegant even. he also borrows heavily from JURASSIC PARK (because who else could he borrow from?) with great results, and uses digital effects in a very…

68/100

[Originally published on Nerve.com]

A decade or so from now, when academics start publishing scholarly tomes with titles like "The Anxiety of Insurgence: Hollywood Responds to 9/11," Steven Spielberg's unsparing adaptation of War of the Worlds is guaranteed a meaty chapter all its own. No doubt aware that images of people running in terror from collapsing buildings now carry unavoidable topical baggage, Spielberg, with the help of screenwriters Josh Friedman and David Koepp, has refashioned H.G. Wells' classic tale of interplanetary invasion into a unnervingly cathartic simulacrum of that Tuesday morning's apocalyptic confusion and horror. The references fly fast and furious and sans subtlety: onlookers covered in ash, walls papered with handmade MISSING flyers, mountains of rubble dotted with…