This week was supposed to be about documentaries. I?m a bit of a documentary buff, and recently they?ve made a huge break into the mainstream.

A brilliant doc called March of the Penguins was released over the weekend, notably narrated by Morgan Freeman. It is beautifully put together, and it tells a fascinating story with emotion and comedy, and I urge everyone to check it out.

That was what this week was supposed to be about.

Unfortunately, War of the Worlds came out this week, and for a wide variety of reasons, this is a movie that needs to be dealt with.
Documentaries can wait.

War of the Worlds tells the story of Ray Ferrier and his two children who find themselves as refugees from an army of giant alien tripods, which are laying waste to the world.

Directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise as Ferrier, War of the Worlds came as a big surprise for me.

I was first surprised because I thought that even in Hollywood some things were sacred, and H.G. Wells would never get remade or adapted.
As it is, only a team like Spielberg, Cruise, and Dakota Fanning, the darling child actress of Hollywood these days, could pull something like this off.

With a lot of press being given to an 18-week box office slump, and increasing trends towards people renting DVDs instead of going to the theatre, I was also surprised that the industry was hanging all of it?s hopes on this movie to break the loosing streak.

But most of all, I was surprised that it was any good.

Don?t get me wrong, it was far from great, but I was expecting a big disaster movie with plenty of special effects and not much else.
That being said, there is a lot to like about War of the Worlds.

All of the reasons that Spielberg is held in awe as a storyteller and as a legendary director are evident in this latest work.

Cruise takes on the character of a negligent divorcee with two insolent children who turns hero in the face of disaster. He plays this role with unexpected depth and complexity.

At the same time, the movie doesn?t skimp on the special effects, and the end result is an impressive disaster movie on the scale of Armageddon or The Day After Tomorrow.

However, with a lot to like about the movie, there?s also a lot to hate.

Tim Robbins puts in an appearance, but it?s lackluster and disappointing.

The script isn?t of the highest grade, and it?s only Spielberg?s expert directing that saves the movie from dragging.

The thing that bothered me the most though, was the perpetual 9/11 imagery that Spielberg can?t seem to get away from.

Cruise gets covered in white dust at one point, there are walls of Polaroid pictures of missing persons, and when things start blowing up, Fanning screams, ?Is it the terrorists??

I think we can look forward to more and of these glorifications of 9/11 in the next few years, both with outright dramatizations of the disaster, as well as imagery and allusion in other disaster movies.

All in all, I don?t think War of the Worlds will be enough to break the slump.

This time last year, Spiderman 2 had just demolished previous box office records with an opening weekend of $180 million. I just don?t think War of the Worlds will be able to match that.

Furthermore, the movie industry is cutthroat right now. Between Netflix, Video on Demand, and Blockbuster eliminating late fees, theatres can barely compete.

Famous Players unilaterally dropped their prices to $9.95 the day after Blockbuster abolished late fees, and while they vigorously deny any connection, it seems as though the movie theatres are running scared.

Personally, my bet to pull things up is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory starring Johnny Depp, which is coming out on July 15.

If you do feel the need to see something great in the next couple of weeks, Murderball, a documentary on wheelchair rugby at the Athens Olympics goes into limited release on July 8.

It made a huge splash at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto, and if you can find a theatre showing it, this is one you?ve got to see.






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