War of the Worlds: Goliath

In Malaysia, they apparently don’t know what to do with their money, as they literally throw it into projects like this by the truckload. War of the Worlds: Goliath is a desperate jumble of everything imaginable, but in the end it raises only one question: who is this actually for? The idea of making a loose sequel to Wells’s War of the Worlds as an internationally appealing animated action movie (with English dubbing) seems just a bit too ambitious. However, the result exceeds all negative expectations. It’s not just that the animation style is reminiscent of cheaply made American series from the 1990s, but also that someone had the idea to put the whole thing in 3D, which is a very profligate decision in the case of a “flat” 2D film. We can add to this the design of the characters taken from the “Gears of War” video games – all of the guys are invariably mega-jacked and the women are models. Then there is – to put it politely – the half-baked choreography of the fight sequences and the topography of the world, as well as the uncertainty as to whether or not this is supposed to be steampunk. Similarly unclear is the whole world of the film, which doesn’t know if it wants to be steampunk or just an alternate history, and even though it deals with the radical progress of humanity resulting from a conflict with aliens, it’s still supposed to lead to the First World War. However, the main failure consists in the narrative, in which naïve pathos intended for ten-year-old boys is mixed with long dialogue scenes about global politics before the First World War, which children will find boring, and a handful of sequences with close-up shots of soldiers being torn apart by alien ray guns. The many nonsensical would-be impressive effects (whenever a cover or door opens or closes, it hisses steam) are simply ridiculous. (02/22/2013)