Reviews

War of the Worlds was a truly awful, terrible mess of movie with starship-sized plot holes. As there are already reviews here which tell you just how awful this movie is, just one additional commentary from me.

The ridiculous, braindead, record-breaking unbelievable, extremely stupid "invasion plan" in this movie: Place tripod weapons and ONLY tripod weapons dormant in the ground of a so far uninhabited planet millions of years before a technological species arises on it and then send your soldiers by LIGHTNING THROUGH THE GROUND out of nowhere into these tripods which have never been discovered or damaged over eons although they only lie perhaps 100-200 feet below the ground of major cities to activate them and take over the planet without knowing that it features bacterias and viruses although they were already existing when you visited the planet the first time... To make this brief, this turkey of an invasion scheme lets the Plan 9 from outer space look like D-Day.

As someone who has read Jon Krakauers novel I was really interested in this movie although I did not expect much and how right I turned out to be. The movie is extremely rushed, we are barely introduced to the expedition members and already we go up to the summit. In only a few days of course because nearly everything concerning the preparations, the partially really amusing incidents in basecamp, the acclimatisation was cut out of the movie to show us a rush, no a blitz up the summit. The other expeditions, especially those responsible for a lot of the disaster because they were completely incompetent and inexperienced from Taiwan e.g. and the Indians who perished in the storm are ignored (Indians) or have minimum appearance (Taiwanese, I hated these jerks when I read the book). And although I am not an alpinist myself I did not believe a second this movie showed us Mt. Everest but some mountain in a much lower mountain range (actually Austrian Alps). I mean they are supposed to stand on the highest summit worldwide and in the background you see at least one clearly higher summit, how cheap is that? Well it is obviously as cheap as this movie was although the actors are really trying but they cannot create sympathy for their paper-thin characters with the few lines they got from this poorly written script. But I simply cannot take (or even stand) a scene seriously where a professional mountain climber in the midst of a snowstorm in the death zone takes of his gloves, breathing mask and other protections for no reason whatsoever...only perhaps because we shall see his face's expressions in a death scene? Too inaccurate for a documentation and not good or interesting enough for a movie-drama. And that the other 7! deaths of this day were not even mentioned in the epilogue was quite tasteless. Because the movie was fairly entertaining and the actors at least tried 3 out of 10.

"Nero" as the title of the movie is in Germany is a another attempt to show one of the most interesting Roman emperors, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, better known as Nero. Although this attempt at least tried to show a more historic accurate Nero than the amusing but completely fictitious Nero Peter Ustinov played in "Quo Vadis!" it still is a major failure. And to those IMDb-commentators who still believe that Sueton and Tacitus propaganda is true, please read a book about Nero that was published less than 20 years ago. Nero did NOT burn Rome, this is proved! He did not murder Britannicus. He did not torture, kill and maim for pleasure, he was the first emperor who BANNED the gladiator fights. The movie still shows a lot of mistakes, errors and is by the way made in a really cheap style, especially the sets were cheap and unconvincing, the palace looking like some villa, the city itself looked like..well like a cheap set. The acting was between good and sub-par, the music nearly insignificant and the movie soon deteriorated after Nero became emperor to a rushed, bad edited mess without any clear narrative structure. So there still is the potential for an epic biography of Nero that shows the true Nero, who was one of the best emperors who ruled Rome, despite the lies of Sueton et al.

CONTAINS SPOILERS! "Tsunami" is a TV-Movie produced by a commercial German TV-station, Pro7. Criticized in Germany for being shown less than a year after the tsunami-disaster in South Asia it was actually produced before the Christmas-Tsunami but not shown. Until now and what a pity. It's a disastrous disaster movie that doesn't avoid a single disaster-movie-cliché and violates several sciences (hydrodynamics, seismology, etc.) to create the completely unrealistic scenario of an explosion-triggered (guess by whom? YES by an greedy, evil corporation that ignored warnings by the scientists, how unique!) 50 m tsunami in the North Sea that is miraculously stopped by some silly, rather weak explosive devices. The film ignores nearly any known facts about tsunamis and shows us a single, huge wave that travels at perhaps 50 km/h. Tsunamis are never higher than 1-2m while still on Sea, they travel at jet-speed (900 km/h), they never come single and it's absolutely impossible to stop them with anything! Throw in cardboard-characters, REALLY bad acting (so bad it actually hurts), stupid subplots, annoying dialogue, terrible forced action-scenes stolen from e.g. "The Perfect Storm" and you get a really disastrous disaster-movie. Like real tsunamis, RUN and avoid at all cost.

Yes, this movie is by no ways a good movie. It has a paper thin-plot with a lot of completely unnecessary and really cheesy elements like e.g. evil storm chasers who want to make money with stormchasing, now thats a good one and a cliché-struck herd of stormchaser-science-nerds, it has partially awful dialogue, sometimes so forced it hurts, it is as realistic concerning true stormchasing and true meteorology as "Alice in Wonderland" and even it's tornado-sfx are actually not that convincing (the "wizard of Oz-tornado" looked far more realistic!). But it is fun, it is a true popcorn-movie and I like it. It has some really good scenes, the prologue although unrealistic (you can't be sucked from a stormshelter!) was chilling when seen in the cinema on big-screen! The soundtrack is OK too, both the score by Mark Mancina and the additional music by Van Halen a.o. Of course this movie is nothing special...if you are not a potential stormchaser like myself! Give it a try and don't expect (and THINK) too much, just let yourself be entertained.

Sorry but this pathetic japanese try to create a warning about the threat of a nuclear war during the cold war is so dumb it hurts. The movie shows us how an international crisis escalates to a global nuclear war wiping out mankind! The second plotline shows us the life of an average japanese family in Tokyo which dies when the city is hit by a nuclear warhead. The problem is that this movie has a completely unbelievable storyline not to mention the cheap SFX. World War Three takes place in the year 2015!! but the cities we see, especially Tokyo, the cars, the complete technology is that of the sixties of the twentieth century. The uniforms of the military are pure fantasy designs, the soviets look more like nazis and the NATO-soldiers look like the came out of an extremely cheap SF-movie. But the main problem with this movie is that the whole scenario is unrealistic, the superpowers seem to trigger the war just for fun. No real political and believable crisis takes place, no military action that makes really sense (the script by the way doesn´t make sense too). Add the extremely cheesy dialogue and you know why the movie cannot fulfil its purpose. When the miniature missiles finally hit the city models in the end you don´t really care (actually you have to see some very bad SFX and see how Tokyo is covered by LAVA!!) and I was actually glad that this bad movie finally came to an end.