The New York Review of Books: Cold Comfort

The New York Review of Books: Cold Comfort "Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds is a movie at once authentically unsettling and deeply nostalgic. The nostalgia is for scary, long-cherished fantasias concerning alien invasions and men from Mars as filtered through boyhood comic books and drive-in movies and tattered paperbacks, a whole century of cheap thrills summed up and transfigured in a return to their primal source, H.G. Wells's 1898 novel. But Spielberg doesn't try to reproduce the camp goofiness of Mars Attacks! or the video game hijinks of Independence Day: he wants us to care about what is happening in front of us, as if we were contemplating this scenario for the first time."

Thought-provoking essay. I saw the movie recently and found it both disappointing and disturbing.