[ARCADIA]

Wells would have nothing of the leftist concept that it was useless to try to stop the enemy

I finally saw the movie last night and I didn't pick up on any of this. I would have preferred to follow the action rather then Tom Cruise's loser character, but the message was not about apathy at all. There were alot of plot goofs, and society seemed to melt into disorder way too rapidly (that was the real liberal bias in the movie); but, there was resistence all along. It would have been better if we could have pull back from the front lines once in a while to get a glimps of how the battle strategy was developing (the older kid would have made an excellent vehicle for this) but then Tom wouldn't have been able to keep his face in every scene, and we all know that is how his movies always go.

[Northern Yankee]

I thought the ending was marvelous.

The special effects were great.

You are on target with man melting down into chaos.

[Austin Willard Wright]

Actually, the Spielberg version has a more positive view of military anti-Martian defense than the 1950s version (where they were totally helpless).

[PLMerite]

I suspect that society melted into disorder so rapidly simply because there was no other choice. With no electricity, no information and those machines literally popping up everywhere, running was the only choice. It would have been nice to have a little narration (a la the 1953 film) to tell us how many machines there were - it seemed like there must have been hundreds in the US alone.

Militarily I doubt that there was much of a battle plan. Judging from the single engagement we saw ("No effect! No effect!") our end of the fight seemed to be mostly hit and run. I'll give Spielberg credit for this - he showed the military doing their duty heroically.