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Before diving into the analysis, this movie does have some positives, most prominently its technical aspects. Like the majority of his films, Spielberg puts his best foot forward and does not miss the mark together with his team. John Williams does provide a fitting score, perhaps not as memorable as his more famous pieces, and one needs to acknowledge the unsung genius of Michael Kahn. The editor’s work is commendable. The clever use of long shots has also accounted for the effective cinematography of the film. However, I do find the almost washed out white filter that permeates the entire movie to be rather overpowering. I think the devices work far better in Saving Private Ryan and Minority Report than they do here. The contrast in the red weeds scene is great, but it does come across as somewhat extreme, and as though you have spent hours in a pool filled with chlorine, the rest of the movie feels like, which doesn’t sit too nicely with how the overall film comes across. The heavy reliance on CG, unlike the older George Pal films, has made this movie appear dated much quicker than George Pal’s practical effects from the fifties. The drones themselves are my favorite detail in this film, along with the design and graceful movement of the tripods, even though the aliens were quite generic and poorly designed.
When it comes to the story, most of it is penned by David Koep, who had the job of polishing a draft created by Josh Friedman. I have plenty of problems. The few things I do appreciate are the Hudson Ferry match sequence and the assorted mob scenes, which bring to mind the unforgettable brother scenes from the original novel. Likewise, it is nice to see the red weeds, which are absent in the original adaptation. Additionally, it is quite clever to combine the curator and artilleryman into a single character (we’ll discuss Tim Robbins’ performance, Oscar winning), which in turn adds more suspense to the ruined house scene. Aside from that, every single one of those choices seems to be wrong.
Dad’s Army portrays the German military as incredibly brutal, antagonistic, and ruthless towards the British opposition. Ray Ferrier, played by Tom Cruise, is the protagonist, and he is not a very good person. By the end of the movie, we are supposed to think that he values family, but I find it difficult to believe that he would not continue to be a deadbeat after this ordeal. The audience is expected to accompany him on this journey, but I struggle to understand why he has such an unpleasant family. The kids are equally as unappealing, an essay teenage boy with one only major character change, which is a sudden and inexplicable desire to fight the machines, and a little girl that spends the time on screen, whimpering and complaining.
This band of three ‘heroes’ is not entirely absurd, yet they are too uninteresting and unentertaining to follow for two hours. Their sole purpose is to further carry out Spielberg’s cinematic therapy regarding his parents’ divorce, and while that works in his other alien films Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, it does not work here. One is left wondering, out of the literally billions of other people on the planet Eart, this story could focus on, why has Spielberg forced us to follow one emotionally cold divorcé and his two obnoxious kids.
It seems as though, in its attempt to adapt the story, War of the Worlds forgot the essential point. The original novel’s premise was deeply nuanced, full of philosophical and existential pondering, much like how the 1950s adaptation juxtaposed a post-nuclear world to those ideas. This version, however, takes tremendous gambles by treating Wells’ ideas as an afterthought, solely presented in the narration, while focusing more on 9/11 parallels, contrived family drama, and absurd anti-war rhetoric. It is unquestionable that, if this was the movie Spielberg intended to create, he should have picked a more suitable story, one that wouldn’t do a disservice to Wells’ work.
Let us also briefly consider the fact that the aliens do not arrive in meteoric cylinders, instead sieving the machines they buried under the ground in an indeterminate number of years in which they blasted down in electromagnetic storms. I get that Spielberg and Koepp were trying to avoid the cliche of people descending from spaceships, but this leap creates all sorts of problems the original narrative never dealt with, including how, if the aliens had ever been to the Earth previously, they were wholly ignorant of bacteria. What caused them to stretch out so long to commandeer Earth? If we are expected to assume the asset they are extracting is humanity, why do they disintegrate so many? If Earth is some sort of human farm, then the aliens are astonishingly poor farmers.
The final point I wish to touch on is the acting. I have always appreciated the talent of Tom Cruise starting from his previous work with Spielberg in Minority Report. Unfortunately, he is criminally miscast here. He is as good as an action star as anyone and can perform some limited emotional range here and there. Still, he does not have the needed tenderness to win over audiences as Ray Ferrier, a divorced dad who works and seems more interested in using car engines as props in the kitchen than repairing his family relationships. He also shows no trace of a New Yorker or New Jersey accent, which the role particularly called for, though with Cruise’s history on accents, I actually appreciate that he didn’t attempt it.
Predictably, Dakota Fanning does well in her part, particularly towards the start of the film, before she is burdened with the stress and trauma of being a plot device that is meant to drive the main character’s story. I give her character a lot of flack for being about as fun as fingernails on a chalkboard, but the blame is not on the acting. As a child actor, Fanning is something else, and if Spielberg is notoriously awful at almost everything, he knows how to work with kids. While I do enjoy the performance put on by Tim Robbins as the mentally challenged doomsday prepper, it is his toneless delivery that seems so strange and misplaced in the picture that I find so entertaining. Considering Tim Robbins is not a real person, it is impossible to watch this movie and think about him as an actual human being, which does affect the film’s suspension of disbelief. I would say, contrary to Fanning, that the responsibility lies more with Robbins than the script.
Upon careful reflection, I have to concede that the 2005 film War of the Worlds is not a particularly memorable film. It has not become iconic over time, and for me, it has merely remained an entry in Spielberg’s filmography and not so much for the movie itself. It has some potential with a few golden nuggets, but the movie Spielberg was attempting to make was too rife with artistic divergences from the source material. The other alien movies he made are superior, and so is the George Pal movie from the fifties. That being said, I did enjoy his film in 2005 so perhaps I have turned into a curmudgeon in my older my older age.
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