mystic-redemption dept.

In Mystic River, Tim Robbins plays a man abducted by child molestors as a kid, who spends his adult life finding and beating up child molestors. In that movie, he is seemingly dispatched into Boston's Mystic River by a vengeance-seeking Sean Penn.

In Steven Spielberg's War Of The Worlds, however, we learn that he somehow made it out of the river, moved to the countryside, and found out that his abductors were actually Aliens from outer-space, planning a mass extermination of humanity. Now he waits, talking to his shotgun in a rickety old basement of a rickety old house, biding his time. Until of course, his old tormentors arrive to finish the job.

Then he runs into a guy who calls himself "Ray Ferry", who is actually Mitch McDeere, hiding under an alias -- he brought down The Firm, remember? Mitch is trying hard to pretend he is not a Yuppy, working at the docks, trying hard to look like a slacker, stretching out his perfect abs to simulate a beer belly that isn't there. He's gone underground, taken his older brother's first name (and also his persona, I might add ... but naah, Ray McDeere was way too cooler), and managed to lose his wife to a guy who's not afraid to show his yuppiness (also I don't think Abby really forgave him for that beachside romp in the Bahamas, and of course, for the fact that he got to cheat with a Penelope-Cruz lookalike hottie and she got to cheat with Gene Hackman. Although women are turned on by wealth and power, well, he's still Gene Hackman.)

Abby -- she's actually Eowyn in disguise, conferred immortality after an accident in the grasslands of the Riddermark with a Noldorin Elf and some spare Longbottom Leaf from Pippin's secret stash -- has now moved to Boston.

Meanwhile, all these strange goings on, with people hiding themselves under aliases, talking to their shotguns, Aliens digging themselves into the earth, only to come out of it, first zapping human beings with a death ray, then thinking it would be a good thing to drink their blood and spray the tri-state area with their intestines instead, all of these strange things have been foreshadowed by Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding. He was just fed up of fixing boats in Zihuatanejo is my guess. Besides, when one does too much voice-over work, one does get 'institutionalized'.