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It was an Orange Wednesday yesterday so, for the first time in the decade he’s been an Orange customer, Paul took advantage of the two-for-one cinema tickets and we went to see War of the Worlds.

It was very spectacular. Of course, after Minority Report and AI, Spielberg’s last two sci-fi films it was inexitable it would be packed with effects, but what strikes you about this film is the way that the effects, while unfeasibly large and unbelievably realistic, seem somehow incidental. The story sweeps past them, paying them little heed; it’s almost as though Spielberg is trying to tell us that such things are ‘just so easy’ they’re barely worth pausing for.

Almost more extraordinary, though, must be the fact that the whole thing was filmed in just 73 days. Two and a half months from start to end. Two and a half months in which they seemingly smashed up everything between New York and Boston. Two and a half months in which they actually sliced up a real 747 so they could film the most realistic airline crash aftermath ever (apart from the seeming lack of bodies).

There is one scene that particularly sticks in my mind, where Tom Cruise and his kids are fleeing the invading aliens, racing down a motorway in their car. The scene is perhaps six or seven minutes long, without a single cut, yet the camera is all over the place. It is high above the car, then it swoops down to film them through the windscreen, swings around to film from inside the came, sweeps out through one of the back windows and scoops down to the road so that it can film the wheels, then slides back up to film from the front again… on and on and on it goes, making you have car sick, half air sick, with a very clever piece of visual slight of hand. It’s almost worth watching for this alone.

It is also genuinely scary, as Chris of the Phin warned it would be, despite its 12A rating.

Well worth watching.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 14th, 2005 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.