Better than I expected but still a bit hollow.

Rating: 6/10 (13 March 2010)

War of the Worlds starts in New York where the ex-wife of docks worker Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) drops his two kids Robbie (Justin Chatwin) & Rachel (Dakota Fanning) off for the weekend, shortly after a strange storm happens & lighting hits the ground in the same spot several times & afterwards nothing electrical works. Unsure of what's happening Ray goes outside & witnesses a huge alien tripod machine rise from the ground & start destroying everything in it's path, Ray manages to get back home & drive off with Robbie & Rachel as New York is systematically destroyed. News of alien tripods emerging from the ground all over the world reaches Ray & it becomes a desperate bid for survival against the alien invaders as he tries to protect his children & find their mother as the world literally crumbles around them as the invaders obliterate everything in their path...
Directed by Steven Spielberg this big budget adaptation of the classic 1889 sci-fi novel by H.G. Wells (it's an adaptation of an original novel & not a remake of an original film in my opinion) that had already been turned into a successful film by producer George Pal as The War of the Worlds (1953) & I have to say it was better than I had expected it to be. Despite being called a classic the original 1953 The War of the Worlds isn't that faithful to H.G. Wells novel whereas this one is, from the invaders using tripods (something technically beyond the makers back in 1953 & merely chopped the legs off & turned them into flying saucers) to the harvesting of humans to the red weed like growth to the attack on a boat to a dark scene in which the hero has to kill another person to save himself & his daughter. At it's central core the original The War of the Worlds had an old fashioned romance between the two leads where here it's all about a desperate man trying to save his kids & as such we have a small cute little girl for sympathy value so the main focus of the films are different & the social climate of the time is also different so here Spielberg draws parallels between the alien invaders knocking down buildings & indiscriminately killing millions of people & terrorism & a few dialogue scenes directly refer to it. There's a fair amount of ambiguity here too, the word alien is never used & while H.G. Wells called them Martians it's hinted here they come from far further afield than that. It's never really explained what the red weeds are for or why they harvest humans but I didn't mind that too much, the idea that the alien tripods have been buried underground for maybe hundreds of thousands of years is mentioned but never elaborated upon for some reason. At almost two hours it feels shorter & after a deceptively normal & sedate opening once it gets going it never lets up with the alien menace an ever present one & it all comes to a rather sudden conclusion that feels a little abrupt & disappointing Spielberg has a family friendly happy ending cop-out although having said that the sombre lack of any heroic patriotic triumphantlism is refreshing.
The special effects & CGI is amazingly good & there are some outstanding set-pieces from the initial destruction of New York to the attack on a ferry to a cool moment when a speeding train on a track is seen to be totally engulfed by fire to the appearance of the aliens themselves. The alien design is alright, I could have done without the big bug eyed cute face but they look alright & the effects are great. There's some good suspense in the basement scene, the action scenes are exciting & there's good tension as well but it does feel a little bit empty overall as the entire film is told from the perspective of Ray. The alien tripods look great & are certainly memorable. Apparently with a seventy two day schedule filming started only seven months prior to release.
With a supposed budget of about $132,000,000 this was mega budget & it show's with amazing effects & production design. The acting is pretty good, Tom Cruise is fine, Morgan Freeman narrates the opening & closing scenes while the stars of the original The War of the Worlds Gene Barry & Ann Robinson have small cameos.
War of the Worlds was better than I expected & a great big budget CGI filled sci-fi epic that I enjoyed but somehow did feel a little empty overall. Zero budget specialists The Asylum made the awful War of the Worlds (2005) with C. Thomas Howell & a sequel War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave (2008) which is also crap.