Uuuuuu-lah!

For those of you who don't know, that was the call of the martian tripods from the Jeff Wayne War Of The Worlds musical. We went to see War Of The Worlds tonight and it was gooood.

Awesome effects, (mostly) naturalistic acting and some genuine creepiness, mainly in the form of Tim Robbin's character. Given the advances in technology, they were quite faithful to the original tone of the story. The martians turned up and just kicked the fuck out of everyone. There was no "America, Fuck Yeah" scene, no sudden upsurge in the humans' ability to fight back, just a slow build of tension and scariness that I really enjoyed. The effects for the heat ray were great, with people just puffing away into ash as their clothes fluttered down around them when they got hit.

Another cool thing is that the machines weren't splashed all over the previews, so when they turned up they were just... cool. And new. And unexpected. They were biomechanical looking and huge and really well done. As were the aliens themselves.

Dakota screamed her young head off with conviction and Cruise managed to portray fraying-sanity, near-hysteria very well. Robbins was, as I said, creepy as fuck and there were some good, again natural, supporting roles from a bunch of people.

Now all I have to worry about is nightmares.

Y'see, when I was a kid, the aforementioned Jeff Wayne musical used to scare the crap out of me. This history of being scared by martians means that while I was watching the movie it is possible that I was getting a mite more freaked than would normally be the case for me in such a film.

Four fighting machines out of five.