m.p.

One of the commonest complaints about sci-fi movies is that there is too much reliance on special effects and not enough character development. In this movie, the sci-fi story is just background noise to one of the planet's most dysfunctional families. Cruise's character is a clueless jerk and his kids are obnoxious. Every time that little girl screamed or decided to be a pain in the butt at the worst possible times, I was hoping that the death ray would get her - or at least that someone would stuff a sock in her mouth. When the son is determined to go off and fight the aliens, all I could think was, "Great, 1 down, 2 to go, and now maybe the real story (of a war between the worlds) will begin." It's usually a big mistake to make your main characters and hero totally unlikeable and lacking in charm - I didn't care if they were all pureed into alien V-8 juice. This could have been a great movie if it had used the title as its storyline. As it is, it should have been called, "Father Doesn't Know Best, His Kids Think They Do And They Never Let Him Forget It."

There was something a little too shallow and bubbly about this; it reminded me of a Disney movie trying desperately NOT to be a Disney movie. It should have been a great adventure but instead it comes off as a kiddie movie with gore and violence. A major problem were the characters themselves: most of the main characters were annoying and irritating and definitely charisma-less. In particular, one of the lead female characters (Kate the archeology student) comes off as such a strident and shrill pain-in-the-butt that I had high hopes of her meeting an early demise. If I had been there and it was up to me, instead of catching her, I would have given her a little shove off that thatched roof - ooops! Another annoying character, who seemed essential to the group, was surprisingly disposed of early on and all I can say is, "Merci beaucoup!" As for the other problems with plot holes, etc., such as that the English and French that was spoken at the time would probably not have been intelligible to a modern speaker of those languages...well, so what? You have to suspend logic in the first place to accept the main premise of the movie (time travel). To sum up, not the worst movie I've ever seen but I wouldn't recommend it either.

I am very tolerant of really bad sci/fi and horror movies - I've been watching them since I was 4 or 5, so I've seen some really bad stuff, but I deal with it. I've even watched a lot of SciFi Channel movies so I know not to expect much - a usually promising movie that has no ending to speak of. Hope springs eternal, I guess - or the triumph of hope over experience, as they say. Unfortunately, this is a dog right from the beginning and I knew it, but like a moth to the flame, I kept thinking something, anything, interesting would happen. It doesn't. All of the actors give a decent performance - given the script, I don't know how they all kept straight faces. It has something to do with collagen-starved worm parasite creatures who are slowly taking over the human race, one body at a time. There's an evil plastic surgeon who collaborates with the enemy by giving them the outward appearance of humans...don't worry, he gets what's coming to him. The slug people themselves don't really know where they came from, they think they might have thumbed a ride on a meteor that landed on earth, but...somehow they know about the members of slug royalty among them - the slug princess has managed to breed with a human being who knows that she's the worm queen and loves her for her self...oh, must I go on? Please, I implore you, do not waste 2 hours of your life watching this...anything would be better...think of the worst, least enjoyable way you can spend two hours...it would be better than this.