I’m tolerant of bad sci-fi movies but here’s three that just offend me they were so bad (in no particular order):

• Ghosts of Mars: this had a decent cast except for Ice Cube who didn’t act as much as show up in his workout pants and act all tough and gansta. Spare me. The plot and special effects were so bad I couldn’t believe it. Skip this one. I barely consider this sci-fi. This was just terrible.
• Battlefield Earth: this tops my list of worst movies. L Ron Hubbard wrote this book. Maybe that should be enough to warn you off of this. I think it was some sort of Scientology experiment in movie making which explains John Travolta begin in it. He’s too good to be in this movie. Boy, I bet he’s embarrassed. This was so bad it wasn’t even much fun to make fun of.
• Event Horizon: This movie starts off pretty cool but ends up in a gory horror film which just lost me. I hated it.

I just noticed that two of these movies were John Carpenter movies. Note to self. No. More. John. Carpenter. Movies.

War of the Worlds Spoiler Alert! Don’t read on if you haven’t seen the movie yet.

I watched Spielberg’s War of the Worlds over the weekend. My love of sci-fi won over my loathing of Tom Cruise and I watched it anyway, despite my vow to avoid Mr Crazy Couch Hopper. Some parts of this movie were very good. I like the point of view of the every man trying to save his family. The special effects were fantastic. I really liked the part where the first tripod crawled out from under New York. The aliens looked *mostly* real in the basement scene, though I look forward to the day where movies don’t transition back and forth, into and out of, the digitally animated parts. It’s so obvious. That said, I suspended my disbelief long enough to enjoy it. I thought the happy ending was a little too much though. I thought the son shouldn’t have been there. Some ambiguity would have been better. I think I actually said “oh brother” out loud when father and son hugged and everything was all better. I suppose it’s a Spielberg family film, so I can forgive this.

Here’s my problem with this movie. It didn’t make sense. I thought the whole bit about the tripods begin buried was just completely ridiculous. Why would the aliens bury them a bazillion years ago? If they were visiting our planet back then with all this massive hardware, why didn’t they just wipe us out then? Or wipe out Neanderthal man? Didn’t the voice over at the beginning tell us how much smarter the aliens were than us? Would burying these be the most inefficient way possible of exterminating humans on the planet? Why wait until there are billions of humans? Humans with fighter planes and tanks and bazookas? And if they did bury them so many billions of years ago, how did they know Humans would be a threat? If they’re so smart, why haven’t they heard of isolating themselves from the environment? From unknown disease or toxins? Have they never heard of an airlock or a space suit? They don’t seem very smart to me. Sure they built some fantastic equipment, but they sure seem dumb to me. If they’re so smart, and they’re so advanced, why use weapons at all? Why not just tailor a virus triggered by human DNA and just wiped us out from orbit? For that matter, just shoot us with giant ray guns from orbit? I guess there’s something about them needing human blood to terraform Earth to their needs, but that is probably the lamest part of the whole movie. It’s seems like a cheap ploy to make the aliens even more scary. It’s never really even explained. Also there are billions of people on this planet. They expect me to believe that these tripod things are really going to track down and kill everyone essentially one at a time? Do you know how big of a number billion is? This would take a long long long long time. Trust me.

Anyway, all this stuff didn’t add up once I thought about it for five minutes after I watched the movie. Though the truth be told, I did enjoy it. Even if it had Tom Cruise in it.