War of the Worlds

Saw Spielberg's War of the Worlds in the Sony Cinestar at Potsdamer Platz. Took the early show at 5 to be back home to bring the children to bed.

I had always hoped that Spielberg would make another "serious" film on extraterrestrial life visiting planet Earth, the "unserious" film being E.T. (which I never got around to seeing, surprisingly). I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind when I was a kid in Burbank (just looked it up, it was 1977), that was quite a demanding film for a 13-year old.

This time around the aliens were here with a vengeance. Similar to "Ecounters of..." they do not really appear very often in the film, maybe 10 minutes in total. Acutally I thought their appearance was one of the less appealing parts of the movie, I dunno, from their looks they just looked too much the steroptype: dark, slimy, long limbs, and big goblets of eyes. In my opionion the film derived most of its suspense from their furtiveness, being behind in the background while havoc erupts all around. Special effects were really brilliant and the story line made sense, most of the time. The ending and resolution of the film (was anyone surprised that humanity was saved), was a teeny bit too simplisitic. An ambitious director would have maybe chosen a lesser happy end.

By the way, for those not acquainted with German cinemas: the "OV" on the ticket stub stands for Originalversion, original version, i.e. not dubbed. All foreign language films are almost without exception synchronized into German, very few are shown with sub-titles. I personally would always prefer the original, but that's the market, and you can't fight the masses. Living in Berlin it's no problem, since you have Cinestar, a multiplex cinema. But go to a city in Germany with less than a population of 100 thousand and you will be hard pressed to find the film in its original language version.

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