Steven Spielberg is the father of the summer blockbuster with Jaws, but since Jurassic Park all the way back in 1993 he’s arguably been lacking another smash. Minority Report did a respectable $132 million domestic, and Sir Steve obviously thought his partnership with Tom Cruise had potential because they’re reunited with this adaption of H G Wells’ 1898 novel, switching the setting from Victorian London to contemporary America. This change causes some plot holes as certain things don’t work so well in the modern world, but more on that later. I should warn you that there are spoilers in here so if you haven’t seen it yet just know that it’s worth seeing and is very entertaining.

By far the highlight of the film was the appearance of the first tripod. It rises from the ground, a truly awesome site, and then proceeds to indiscriminately kill hundreds of people as we follow Cruise’s character, Ray, attempting to escape with his life (occasionally feeling contrived as countless beams hit those around him and just miss). It’s a stunning scene that really shows that this isn’t ET or Close Encounters, and the rest of the film, though very entertaining, never quite manages to match up to it.

Something that I liked was that Spielberg went and subverted Hollywood’s current predilection for flag-waving jingoism. Ray’s son spends much of the film wanting to join the army and fight the invaders (never identified as Martians for some reason, possibly because we’ve been to Mars and found nothing but ice), and eventually passes over a hill after a convoy to join in the firefight. This is where most films would have him become a hero and save the world from tyranny or die a hero’s death, but not here. Fire flashes across the horizon and they’re all dead. Sort of…

The ending was one of the main downers about the film. The plot twist, the same as the book, feels contrived in a world where we’ve seen Independence Day (“I gave it a cold”) and Signs, and just doesn’t seem logical in a world of antibiotics. And why couldn’t they have brought their tripods out of the ground when humans were ape-men who would only throw rocks instead of missiles and nuclear weapons?

Spielberg’s inability to end a film without liberal sprinklings of schmaltz also rears its sad, teary head. Like AI, which was an absolutely wonderful film almost ruined by the dreadful ending (should have ended at the Blue Fairy), War of the Worlds ends with the family reunited, all remarkably unhurt despite living in one of the biggest cities in the Americas. I can live with that, but then the fucking son turns up as well – the same one that ran over the hill into the “napalm” attack. It was unnecessary and I definitely wasn’t the only one who groaned when he appeared.

Nonetheless, go and see it. It’s a good popcorn movie that there’s a lot to like about.

I’ve been using Xbox Media Center for a long time now, since I got my first Xbox chipped back in March 2004, and never really used it much. That Xbox became an emulator more than anything. I don’t know why, but I just decided yesterday to try out the latest version of XBMC to see how far things have moved on.

First, some background for those who don’t know: XBMC is a homebrew application that runs on modded Xboxes either as a basic application or a complete replacement for the standard Microsoft Dashboard. From within it you can run your Xbox games as normal, but also do almost everything that you’d expect from a full HTPC system.

It can play any format you can throw at it from the hard drive, disc, or streamed over a network – DVD, DivX, XviD, Quicktime, MPEG, WMV, MP3, AAC, etc, so that you can watch or listen to them on your TV. Even online streams and iTunes network shares can be played through it. The only features it lacks are the ability to burn DVDs and record television, and you can bet that if the Xbox hardware supported it those would be implemented in a heartbeat.

In did a complete reinstall of XBMC with the latest version, which was worlds ahead of the one I used to have. To test it out I sent a couple of gigs of assorted media over (mostly Quicktime and XviD videos, with a smattering of JPGs, WMVs, and MP3 and Ogg Vorbis music) and played around for a few hours. Everything, including HD videos with much higher resolutions than my TV, played flawlessly. Prerendered or not, seeing Killzone 2 running on a TV looked great.

One of the coolest features, and one that I didn’t even know existed until I stumbled onto it by accident, is the ability to stream from web pages. Included are scripts to let you view movie trailers direct from the Quicktime site, with the navigation implemented into the XBMC theme very nearly perfectly. You can also view any of GameSpot‘s video content in a GS-themed browser. It wasn’t quite as seamless as the Apple one, but seeing on-demand video reviews of new games is just too cool.

You honestly couldn’t tell that this was free software by looking at it. It’s more polished, feature filled, and works so well that I could easily justify spending the price of any other piece of Xbox software on it. You can’t help but feel that Microsoft missed the ball a little (or a lot) by barely including even the most basic of XBMC’s features in the standard Xbox, and the potential shown must have influenced the media functionality of the 360.

This is one amazing piece of open source software that I’m definitely going to be following the future progress of and, if I can’t afford a full HTPC by that time, I might use the 360 to play all my games and simply turn that Xbox into a media center. It’s really a great achievement.

Anyone who has read Slashdot will be very familiar with the rhetoric that Linux is on the verge of taking the desktop crown away from Windows, but also anyone who isn’t an open source zealot who has tried it will know that it still has a long way to go before it can touch Windows and OS X in the usability and overall polish stakes. Recently Ubuntu has become something of a cult within the cult, coming from nothing to being the most popular Linux distro in a little over six months by selling itself (or not selling itself, as the case may be) on the fact that it was “Linux for human beings”, so I got my hands on a bunch of the free CDs to try it out.

I’d never really thought of using anything other than OS X on my iBook so it was with some trepidation that I slid the live CD into the precious. The free CDs that you can order come in a nice card slipcase, each containing both the installation CD and the live CD so that you can test it out before installing, and it really makes the package look professional. Within a few minutes it had detected all my hardware (even the Microsoft Bluetooth mouse, and only the Airport card was unsupported) and booted from the CD into the full GNOME desktop. I’d previously only used KDE under Knoppix and was pleasantly surprised with how nice to use GNOME was.

Obviously a live CD is no way to test the speed of an operating system but performance on files that had been cached was nice and snappy. I messed around with Firefox and played a few rounds of the included Poker game while holding a few chats on Gaim and only recall a slight delay for the disc to spin up upon loading the programs for the first time.

I’d imagine that it would be as fast as can be expected of any OS when running from the HD, but I’m too careful with my iBook and its contents to try that. I might drop it onto one of the spare partitions on my Windows PC at some point but I haven’t even plugged that thing in since I switched to OS X.

Linux had seemed like something too esoteric and impenetrable to the beginner for me to think seriously about trying, but the developers of Ubuntu have done a fantastic job of making it very usable. Even though I admittedly I have more computer knowledge than the average person I still think it would be easy enough for most to use. I’m something of a pessimist in that I can’t see Linux ever becoming the dominant desktop OS platform, but this shows the potential of it to become a viable general use alternative for most with a few years of development. They have a stable and fast OS already, so with some more work on user-friendliness the saving of at least £80 on every PC you own starts to look better and better.

Batman may have begun his film career in the 1960s, but he’s run the gamut from his campy-but-fun beginnings with Adam West, through his gothic reimagination at the hands of Tim Burton and Michael Keaton, and then into a campy-but-terrible spell under Joel Schumacher with the “help” of Val Kilmer and George Clooney. The franchise was left for dead, assumedly killed off by the likes of the bat skates and bat credit cards. To be fair, Arnie in fluffy polar bear slippers can’t have helped.

Looking at their respective portfolios, Chris Nolan and Christian Bale (who went to the same school as me, incidentally) weren’t likely to try to do anything other than put the “dark” back in “Dark Knight”, and bring one of the deepest and most troubled comic book characters around into the more grown up territory where he belongs. It’s been rare to see any of it with more than multiple shades of black, but with dark overtones being the modus operandi of the majority of the current comic book adaptions it doesn’t guarantee a successful film. Thankfully this is one.

Batman Begins is pure, undiluted awesomeness. It’s not very often that I come out of the cinema with no real complaints about a film (the Kill Bill duo, Shaun of the Dead, and Team America are the last ones I can remember) but I loved every minute of this. It’s funny when it’s meant to be, hits all the right notes, looks spectacular, works as a great example of the correct use of CGI, contained no extended and melodramatic “NOOOOOOOOOO”s, and was just thoroughly entertaining all-round. As a casual Batman fan I loved it, those in my group who are more dedicated loved it, and those with only a cursory knowledge also came out satisfied.

I’ve yet to see how the likes of War of the Worlds will fare, but so far this is the must-see movie of the summer.

If I’m honest I was probably genetically programmed to love this film. Dark, noir setting, beautiful visual style, Bruce Willis, Jessica Alba in very few clothes, brutal and stylised violence? Plus who can forget that it was directed by both Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, as well as Frank Miller (creator of the original comic)? I’d honestly have been more surprised if I’d turned out not liking it and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I really enjoyed it.

As someone who hasn’t read the graphic novels in any great depth I have to admit that it could be slightly recondite in places, but it was still great fun. It’s structurally fairly similar to Pulp Fiction in that it’s made up of several stories which might cross paths in small ways but are otherwise independent, and timelines are not something that has to be adhered to as characters who died can turn up later on. Tarantino’s influence is probably most obvious there.

Ratings boards get a lot less squeamish about violence and content when it isn’t completely realistic and that’s obviously what happened when this was let through as an 18 in its uncut form, because some of it is absolutely brutal. In no particular order I came out of the cinema having seen (skip to the end of the paragraph if spoilers aren’t your thing) a man being eaten alive by his own dog having had all his limbs cut off, hatchets to crotches, swastika-shaped shuriken attacks, genitals shot off, genitals pulled off by hand, guns backfiring through foreheads, and men being turned into “human Pez dispensers”. Not what you could call a date movie, but since most of the blood is either white or brilliant yellow that apparently makes it OK.

It’s the best thing that Robert Rodriguez, Bruce Willis, and Mickey Rourke have done in a long time, but even if that’s not particularly high praise it’s a good movie by Tarantino’s standards too. I had great fun watching it and it will be a worthy purchase on DVD as well. Watch it, take in the style, and just enjoy some good old bloody rampaging – the best since Kill Bill.

Consider my Star Wars demon exorcised.