Infinitive Splitter

While I was away, Matthew Yglesias wrote to disagree, correctly, with Gregg Easterbrook’s assertion that shooter is an inappropriately PC term and should be replaced in news reports with murderer. Further on in Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column (whose 2006 series began two weeks ago, to my pleasant surprise), TMQ complains that, in Mission: Impossible III, “the supervillain, previously shown commanding a heavily armed private militia and protected by bodyguards even when at the Vatican, nevertheless travels nearly alone to Shanghai to confront Tom Cruise, world’s greatest secret agent.”

I haven’t seen that movie, but I did finally get around to watching The War of the Worlds yesterday morning. It started off very impressively, I thought, but deterioriated significantly in the middle, when the tension between the Tom Cruise character and his teenaged son comes to a head while they are literally standing on an active battlefield between human and alien armies. The “let me be my own man” talk could probably have waited for some other time. Characters in action movies too often fail to properly triage their various disputes.

Also — spoiler alert — the end was a total bust. Maybe it works better in the novel (if the novel ends that way), or maybe that’s just how a lot of science-fiction stories go (”Aaaaaand then by some lucky fluke they all died, and the earth was saved. The End”). Michael Crichton did the same thing in The Andromeda Strain, which disqualified it from the running for My Favorite Book when I first read it sometime in junior high school.