Film adaptations is not the same as rewriting someone's book. The only time you will see someone's name attached to the movie title is when its attempting to be a direct adaptation, such as Brahm Stoker's Dracula.

There is rarelya movie produced these days that are not based on a book or story written by someone given almost no credit.

I saw it yesterday and liked it very much. As a big fan of the original novel and also the Welles radio production, I was delighted by how much from the books made it in, from the artilleryman to the red weed. But most importantly, the overall theme. I'm so glad they didn't succumb to the temptation to take out the "deus ex machina ending" and put in some kind of cheesy victory, because that's a whole 'nother story. The point of this one is knocking a few pegs off of human hubris, the idea that we're undisputed masters of the world, showing how fragile our dominion is, and how important even the simplest and most humble things are. I think Wells would appreciate how this movie depicted that, for all the changes. And the other half is how people react to what's going on, to that realization. The explosions and such are great eye-candy, but don't forget to look at the people reacting to them.

That said, there is one thing in the ending I find pretty awful and annoying, but I think I'll just pretend there's a director's cut where they took that tiny, inappropriate bit of "feel-good ending" out and owned what the story was about, since it's only in one moment that doesn't connect to anything else.

On balance, though, a very good movie. I hope it makes a few people check out the other versions (notably the book and the radio show).

Glad you agree . The only one of those movies I liked was...mmm..pretty much none. Some had half-decent stories and I originally did like IWTV, until I read the book which craps all over the movie.

Tom Cruise is like the average roleplayer, he plays himself, more or less.

I am glad I didn't have to pay to see this, because it wasn't worth it. While the original ending worked well for other mediums, in this adaptation it just plain didn't work that well, combine that with the rest of the ending and it was very meh. Up until the ending though the movie worked pretty well, both staying true to the broad outline of the original and simply on entertainment value, but to me at least, they could have built up to the ending a bit more instead of having 1:58 of decent movie followed by dropping the ending on you like that in the last two minutes.

Spoilers deleted.

Ok... stop ruining the movie for everyone... Generic endings are fine cause the book is like 100 years old, but how they did little things like "streat of the ex-wife" is really a bit too much detail for me.

er, I'm so sorry. I was surfing two forums at once, and one of them read *spoilers* in the subtitle. I'll edit.

On that topic, it would be kinda nice if the Admin instituted the "spoiler" forum hack, where you just wrap what you want around the tags and it provides a little button you can click on to see what was written. It would be useful not only for things like this, but other IC stuff that other people might feel questionable about reading. Ooh, also NSFW stuff too probably.