Ever obedient to Kathryn — She Who Must Be Obeyed — I went off (with a bunch of kids, mine and neighbors) to see War of the Worlds. Good movie!

Yes, Tim Robbins chewed the scenery a bit, but didn’t spoil it for me.

Neither did the family psychodrama stuff (“Dad, you’ve go to let me go…”).

It’s irritating, but I guess the producers feel they have to put that in to keep the attention of women moviegoers.

Remarkably faithful to the original, down to the red weed. H.G. Wells’s sci fi was one of the great joys of my childhood, and in WotW he was at the top of his form. I didn’t know any of the (real) places he named in his book — Leatherhead, Weybridge, and so on — but have never since been able to see their names on road signs without conjuring up an image of those terrible tripods and the heat ray. What an imagination Wells had! And — though it is not much credited now — he was a very, very good writer. (This opinion shared by Vladimir Nabokov.) His sci fi is of the disilluioning variety, though, and made me an atheist for a while. Once you’ve entered imaginatively into Wells’s mental world, it’s hard to think of humanity as other than a vulnerable speck in a vast and uncaring universe. That was the thrill of it, to a 10-year-old mind — the thrill and the terror.