War Of The Worlds – The Extinctive Cut

Review by Daewa — October 2, 2009 @ 1:00 pm

*This rating was given before reviews were required*

Review by zeppelinrox — November 15, 2009 @ 5:04 pm

Thanks for another great edit boon.
As mentioned above by Rock Savage, there was one wtf moment when, in the shack, Ray call out to his daughter and runs to her.

Everything else was great.
FYI, I prefer the second ending, where the world doesn’t get blowed up real good.

8/10

Review by jjrdias — November 19, 2009 @ 2:35 am

Finally got round to watching v2. It’s an ambitious fanedit, and given what Spielberg left for (fan)editors to work with, a difficult one. Sure, there may be some issues – i actually didn’t notice anything too distracting in the shack sequence -, but even so i feel any they are not major. I really like the extinctive ending. It’s brutal, yes, but does take the picture away from Spielberg’s “happy end formula”, showing, IMHO, a bit more respect for the audience’s intelligence. And the last line whispered by Fanning was very well placed. That’s the Cut i’ll be watching and showing off to friends. The Purist ending may suffer from the lack of voice-over to fully expose what caused the demise of the aliens, another reason i prefer the EC.Very good DVD presentation – great menus and always happy to see editors going the extra-mile in providing subtitles.

In conclusion, an 8 outta 10.

Review by Syfo-Dyas — February 14, 2010 @ 9:51 am

This movie was ruined from the get go. All the crowds magically know where the safety zones are being set up at, and of course they all move in herds making them selves easy prey…

…actually, come to think of it, moving in herds and making themselves easy prey does kind of sound like a lot of people I know…

Of course there is the fact that Tom Cruise is in it, with his 2 dimensional acting, though thankfully he wasn’t quite as Tom in this movie, then again I could not help but remember who I was staring at and how stale the characters were.

Anyhow, aside of the fact that this edit is about a lost cause, I still got to hand it to the editor for doing such a great job! Everything was edited beautifully and seamlessly till the end. The whole scene where Tom Cruise puts a grenade up the walker’s reversed rectum did not work out well because right after they fall, you suddenly see his daughter looking off into the horizon, then it suddenly switches to a bunch of people walking to the fall out shelter. I felt everything ran smooth up until that moment. Perhaps if the editor would have paused on the girl’s staring scene, then faded it out slowly, while fading into the crowds walking to the fall out shelter.

Then again, how did the crowds all know where the fall out shelter was? You’d think that communications would pretty much be wiped out at this point, and mass organization and planning impossible. It wasn’t like people could sit on the comfort of their couches, eagerly waiting on new instruction from the TV to guide them along, and I’m sure all the Radio DJ’s went home, or died in their studios.

I think what I would have done is try to find a way to provide an ending where we just presume they are dead, but given that I’m only a fan of this film’s effects, I don’t think I’ll be taking on that effort and will end by saying that if you are a fan, this is probably the best version you can watch at the moment. My complaints aside (most of them not the editor’s fault), this is a drastic improvement over the original with it’s typical Steven Spielberg ending.

October 15, 2010 @ 10:01 pm

This has been my first encounter with Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (FE.org rules only stipulate one has to *own* the original DVD, not *watch* it), and I can’t begin to imagine the total and absolute horror that must dwell in the theatrical version, as despite Boon’s work being clearly excellent as usual, I had to force myself to keep watching it. Problem is, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about that badly written stock TV movie family, about Tom Cruise being totally unable to be even remotely believable as a working class Joe (that opening sequence of him operating machinery got me thinking of Jennifer Beals’ steel worker at the beginning of Flashdance!) or about uncle Steven’s usual and tiresome parenthood obsession. I kept waiting for them to get vaporized or eaten or whatever by the aliens, and in a movie that depends entirely on the audience caring about the characters that’s not exactly a good thing. Of the elements from the original, only Dakota Fanning’s performance was worth it. That kid is amazing. Her dialogue is not.

This said, on a purely fanediting level, it was amazing! Boon delivers again. I don’t know how big Tim Robbins’ role was in the original, since his part does not appear in the deleted scenes section, but one would never guess there was an extra character there. Boon went a long way to delete him from individual shots, and did so masterfully. Be sure to check out the comparative featurette on the subject! We’re also presented with two different endings to choose from, and I must say I vastly preferred the totally original and much darker Exctinctive one, warts and all. Kudos as well to the special guest President of the USA, great voice and delivery. Yet I, once again, thought that some extra bits should have been excised, particularly that baseball sequence in the first act. Enough with the fatherhood thing, Steven! It’s not meaningful as character development, we’ll get plenty of the same estrangement cliché later from the son, and just slows things down. Not a fan of the peanut butter sequence either, at least half of it should have gone.

Overall I’m giving this a 7/10. Not Boon’s fault at all, it’s just the movie is not for me. I greatly *admired* this fanedit, I wish I could say I *enjoyed* it as well.