Atmospheric but hole-ridden tale of the apocalypse

Rating: 7/10 (4 August 2005)

Whether you like "War of the Worlds" (WotW), the latest Spielberg/Cruise collaboration, probably depends on your expectations. If you're looking for another one of Spielberg's more "serious" movies like "Schindler's List" or "Saving Private Ryan", you're in for a disappointment. However, judged as a summer blockbuster, WotW more than delivers, although it clearly suffers from some severe flaws.
The most important of them is that the script simply doesn't make much sense. It's just full of amazing coincidences, lucky escapes, and lots of things that are simply very hard to grasp. Just to name a few: are we really supposed to believe that out of thousands of cars, Cruise's is the only one that keeps running? Are we really supposed to believe that Cruises's son makes it to Boston alive all by himself? Why is somebody still filming the aliens after an EMP burst has supposedly knocked out all electronic equipment? It's a shame that not more attention was paid to ironing out all these implausibilities, because for the most part "WotW" is still a very good movie. For one, it's an amazingly suspenseful movie that really kept me on the edge of my seat. The action sequences are frantic and brutal (as they should be), and the scene in which Cruise tries to evade an electronic eye in a basement is simply amazing (even if it's copied from the kitchen scene in Jurassic Park).
In general the movie succeeds in creating a wonderfully apocalyptic atmosphere. The alien tripods are really ominous and threatening, and there are a lot of unpleasant images that really help to create an atmosphere in which it actually feels like the survival of the human race is at stake. If only more action movies managed to create this level of immersion and suspense...
Of course, Steven Spielberg wouldn't be Steven Spielberg if he didn't try to bring out the positive amidst all this despair. In this case, it comes in the form of divorced father Cruise growing closer to his alienated children again. Given Spielberg's knack for sentimentalism, I feared the worst here, but stays within acceptable boundaries. Cruise and Fanning do a convincing job, and the scenes between them never become too sentimental. There are still a couple of moments that made me cringe, but I've seen far worse.
That being said, the movie does get out of hand towards the end. I'm told that the demise of the aliens actually stays true to the book, but it feels very much like a "deus ex machina", and is hugely anticlimactic. Also, in the last scene in which Cruise finds his wife's family back, everything that is wrong with the movie comes together (with a vengeance). The ending both makes no sense whatsoever, and enormously sentimental.
In spite of its flaws, I still immensely enjoyed this movie. It's without a doubt one of the most atmospheric and suspenseful movie I've seen in a long while, and in this case that more than outweighs the poorly thought-out plot and the horrible ending.
***1/2 out of *****