NFL.com - NFL News: "Now to Steven Spielberg's The War of the Worlds. We're told that thousands of years ago, super-advanced aliens buried hundreds of attack tripods across the Earth to be activated during an invasion. But if the bad aliens were here with overwhelming force thousands of years ago, why didn't they just seize the Earth then, when there was no resistance? Meanwhile, humanity has engaged in centuries of excavation for sewers, tunnels and subways, yet no one has ever stumbled across even one of the alien machines. Plus, since the tripods are buried under cities how, thousands of years ago, did the aliens know where the cities were going to be built? Anyway, it turns out the sinister aliens want to drain human blood for use as fertilizer for some hideous plant-thing that will turn our world into a planet like theirs. But if the goal was to turn our world into a planet like theirs when they came here thousands of years ago, why didn't they just deploy the hideous plant-thing then?
My main death-ray blast against The War of the Worlds movie is that it represents another case of Hollywood buying the name of a famous work, then producing dreg with only passing resemblance to the famous work. H.G. Wells' 1898 book presented a complex struggle between humanity and its attackers; Spielberg's version presents human beings as appalling fools who practically deserve to be wiped out, while reveling in scenes of slaughter of the helpless and destruction of U.S. cities. Somehow Spielberg manages to glamorize violence, dumb down great literature, be misanthropic and be anti-American all at once -- quite a feat even by Hollywood standards. Wells' book was written at the peak of the imperial era, when European powers were seizing African and Asian lands under the pretext that industrial superiority gave Europe a right to conquer. Wells wrote a parable to ask: If superiority justifies conquest, why shouldn't another world conquer ours? In the book, the Martians believe their technic"
