War Of The Worlds Remake by Speilberg

I just stumbled across a new story reporting that Steven Speilberg is going to direct a remake of HG Wells's classic with Tom Cruise staring or producing. I will try to put up a link.

Thumbs up or down folks?

Anyone else know anything more?

~Face

[Edited on 17-3-2004 by Facefirst]

Sounds cool, I give it a

Go to Dark Horizons and read the article:

www.darkhorizons.com

Yeah that'd definately be a cool movie. Speilberg is one of my favorite directors, I'm sure he'd do the story justice.

Coolhand,

Thanks for the link. I originaly read the story at: www.drudgereport.com

I think Speilberg & Cruise could do the story justice.

Now, get ready for all of the "is this to prepare us?" theorists.

I recently started a thread about war of the worlds that already covered the "is this to prepare us?" side of things Facefirst

www.abovetopsecret.com...

I look forwards to seeing any remake that they do.
It would be great if they could achieve the same sort of atmosphere that comes across in the musical version.

Pantha,

I participated in that thread. Thanks for the heads up though. I merely interjected the "prepare" thought in anticipation of what people will probably start writing in response of the project.

Musical version? Please elaborate.

I'm going to dissent on this idea. War of the Worlds is already a great movie...I can think of no reason to remake it except laziness. Hollywood needs to concentrate on quality original ideas instead of mining the past. I can't really think of any remakes that turned out to be as good as the original (and if it's not at least as good as the original, why bother?)

edit: Tom Cruise?! Oh. Hell. No. best case: it lands up being like Minority Report and is good up until the last 20 minutes. worst case: it ends up like the Last Samarai and is just Tom Cruise shaking his hair and looking pretty for 90 minutes.

[Edited on 3/17/2004 by MorningtonCrescent]

MorningCrescent,

I agree that the original movie is great and normally I would agree with you on your remake point, but the x-factor is that the movie is going to be in Speilberg's hands. Not your average director. His track record speaks for itself.

As far as Tom Cruise, there are conflicting reports that he is either staring in the movie or producing it.

I am curious to see the "Dawn of the Dead" remake.

[Edited on 17-3-2004 by Facefirst]

Cool I've hoped for this to happen. Its kind of funny though because I was talking with a friend of mine about the idea (could it be done right?...) and we bothe came to the conclusion that either Speilberg or Lucas should do the job.
(I first thought Kubrick should do it but then gave the idea up as he is a little to "extreme" for the market today)

Kubrick is deceased, but he would have been my first choice.

[Edited on 17-3-2004 by Facefirst]

Originally posted by MorningtonCrescent
I'm going to dissent on this idea. War of the Worlds is already a great movie...I can think of no reason to remake it except laziness. Hollywood needs to concentrate on quality original ideas instead of mining the past. I can't really think of any remakes that turned out to be as good as the original (and if it's not at least as good as the original, why bother?)

The Night of the Living Dead remake by Tom Savini was better than the original in my opinion. Spielburg is an awesome director. He could have made the Brittany Spears movie good...

Lucas, even though I love the guy for the first Star Wars trilogy, has gone senile. He's already messing up Indy 4, and I don't think he'd do this story justice. Spielberg is a good choice.

Also, I might be the only one that thinks Tom Cruise is a good actor, so he'd probably do well in the movie. I thought The Last Samurai was one of the best movies of the year, top 5 in my opinion, but that might be just me.

It would be cool if he could get away with it not being a movie, like War of Worlds starting as a news report.

Wasn't ID4 basically a remake of WoWs anyways? They both had the same kind of core elements: Alien Invasion, Ships with invincible shields, weakness to a virus. It seems to me that ID4 did a good job of faithfully replicating WoW's plot well. Maybe I am the only one drawing this kind of correlation between the two films, its my opinion however.

Personally, I'm looking forward to Hellboy. One of my favorites!

DC

I agree, alot of ID4 was definitely gleamed from WoWs. But I would still like to see WoWs in Speilberg's hands. Perhaps with a bit less of the gung-ho aspect of ID4.

I wonder just how much of it he will change? One thing is for sure it'll be set in America and as far as I can remember it's actually set in London. It'll be better then that crap 50's version, which even though is crap is rather cool.
Would be really cool if he used the sound track, the one which had Richard Burton nerating the story with some of the best music I've heard playing in the background.

I think Speilberg would set it in a large city in America regardless of where it was originally set.

DC

The 1938 Radio broadcast was set in NJ, but the 1898 book was set in England.

[Edited on 17-3-2004 by Facefirst]