"Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded our planet with envious eyes"

Rating: 7/10 (7 March 2010)

In 1964, at age 18, Steven Spielberg premiered his feature-length debut, 'Firelight.' The film ran for 140 minutes, and depicted a hostile UFO attack on a small American town. As such, it was only a matter of time before the benevolent extraterrestrial beings of 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)' and 'E.T. (1982)' began blasting people with lasers. I remember first seeing 'War of the Worlds (2005)' in cinemas, and the special effects really blew me away, a full-blown assault on the senses. Aside from the bookends (narrated by the commanding voice of Morgan Freeman), Spielberg basically does away with H.G. Wells' original novel, though there are still a few nice touches, like the red alien weed that keeps cropping up all over the place. I also liked how the film narrowed its focus to one family's experiences, with Tom Cruise spending most of his screen-time avoiding heroism and instead just trying to stay alive.
However, even in the cinema, the film's flaws were apparent. The two young actors playing Cruise's children, Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin, are an unwelcome distraction. The former spends minutes on end screaming shrilly or asking annoyingly-persistent questions, such that I occasionally did wish for her demise, whereas the latter fronted every scene with an expression of faux teen-angst. In a sickly-sweet ending that feels like an afterthought, the older child reveals his survival, apparently for no other reason than to affect a happy family reunion. Wells' original ending, the definitive Deus Ex Machina, is a difficult one to sell to today's cynical audiences, and Spielberg doesn't quite pull it off. In particular, Cruise's character briefly and inexplicably becomes an action hero in the final act, an unfortunate tarnish on what I otherwise found to be a sincere and authentic performance.
Yet the film's merits outweigh its flaws. Spielberg's mastery of atmosphere is evident in every scene, often the result of the smallest details: the wind blowing towards an ominous storm, lightning striking the same place twice; Tom Cruise smothered in white dust; an endless wall lined with the photographs of missing family members. There's a wonderful scene where a weary crowd of vagrants turns into a violent mob at the sight of a working car. This sort of inexplicable barbarism reminded me of another tense post-apocalyptic drama, Ray Milland's 'Panic in Year Zero! (1962).' Spielberg's 'War of the Worlds' probably also tops Byron Haskin's 1953 adaptation, which had excellent special effects but faltered in its final act – when, with no small amount of religious symbolism, the aliens are stopped outside the walls of a church. Spielberg had no such religious sentimentality. In his version, the church is the first building to crumble.