War of the Worlds

I was really in two minds whether to see this or not. I've not been a big fan of Spielberg since Schlinder's List, ever since then he seems to want to clutch at our heart strings all the time, which I'm not interested in. I haven't been a big fan of Tom Cruise, especially with all the publicity games he's playing at the moment and so I expected this to be over schmaltzy and sentimental.

But I came away pleasantly surprised, the effects were very impressive and the story was "quite" faithful to the original. I did make the following observations.

Tom Cruise and kids managed to escape when others couldn't, examples being him running from the first alien, having the only car that worked, managing to get on the ferry, escaping from the aliens in the fields etc etc. The coincidence was just too great.

Could a single line of soldiers really keep hundreds of people from getting onto the ferry, even if those people were pushing for their lives?

Why didn't the alien at the end sneeze.

And what was the ending about; it has to go down as one of the worst in cinema history.

As I said earlier I did expect the film to suck, so came away pleasantly surprised.