Powerful And Frightening. War Of The Worlds Is A Disaster Movie Of The Highest Caliber.

Rating: 9/10 (30 September 2015)

Steven Spielberg's adaptation of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds is another home run for the king of the blockbusters. It's big, expensive, and action- packed, but with an overarching sense of terror and real world panic, War of the Worlds succeeds where most alien invasion/disaster movies fail. It is genuinely frightening. I can enjoy lighter disaster fare like 2012 and Independence Day because seeing things get blown up can always provide for some amount of fun, but War of the Worlds is no Independence Day, and that's a very good thing. As an alien invasion story, War of the Worlds doesn't play the conflict up for cheap thrills and fun. It plays it straight, focusing for the first time on the serious real-world implications of such an invasion.
Tom Cruise stars as a deadbeat dad named Ray Ferrier who is called on to watch his kids, a young daughter played by Dakota Fanning, and a teenage son played by Justin Chatwin, for the weekend. Their world is thrown into chaos when a bloodthirsty alien race ascends from the ground beneath them and invades Earth. The majority of the film shows the family trying to seek refuge among the millions of panicked New Englanders as the alien tripods attempt to exterminate the human race.
While the plot is pretty straightforward, the real meat of the story is in seeing how the invasion affects the humans. Between the action, writers David Koepp and Josh Friedman punctuate the story with personal scenes detailing the toll that these events are taking on Ray and his family, as well as the general public. Koepp and Friedman are less concerned with plot and more concerned with character. One scene in particular sees the Ferriers driving through a crowd of desperate, cold, panicked people. Having the only working car in the area, they are targeted by a man with a gun. Without giving too much away, the dispute demonstrates the collective fear that an alien invasion might instill in real life. It is a powerful scene. These personal moments are plentiful and they give the film a sense of weight that is unheard of for similar summer blockbusters. Spielberg handles the human drama delicately and deftly and Cruise holds it all together with an intense and surprisingly heartfelt lead performance as a dad who will do anything to protect his kids.
Of course, no alien invasion movie is complete without two things: Aliens, and scenes of invasion. This is where Steven Spielberg's direction dazzles. The aliens themselves, and their tripod vehicles, are not only extremely convincing special effects, they are utterly chilling characters. Spielberg and Koepp sensibly leave us in the dark when it comes to the aliens. We know what Ray knows; these things are not from Earth and they want to kill us. That is precisely the amount of information we need on these creatures in order to be afraid of them, and afraid I was.
Spielberg got the aliens right, and the action right-er. The invasion set-pieces, which include the jaw-dropping initial attack, a sensational scene aboard a ferry, and an unbearably tense face off in Tim Robbins' fortified safehouse, are so effective in their sense of panic that they affected me on a physical level. These action scenes radiate with a primal kind of horror. Spielberg commands the screen. The man has a gift for rocking an audience, and what he does with the scenes of massive destruction is virtuosic. The big attack scenes are thrilling for sure, but the complete devotion to authenticity is what makes this stuff exceptional. Just look at Spielberg's staging; The ground-level compositions, the cutaways to panicked crowds, and the way the biggest explosions are shown away from the characters, sometimes fully in the background, make it seem as if the events are being captured on film in real time. It's a credit to the brilliance of Spielberg as a director that scenes of aliens vaporizing people can be utterly real and truly horrifying.
That is by far the biggest strength of War of the Worlds. It is entertaining, we expect nothing less from Steven Spielberg, but it is much more than that. As a subtle allegory to post-9/11 America, it's brilliant. The story of a full-scale attack by a remorseless enemy was decidedly relevant back in 2005, and it's just as relevant today. War of the Worlds wisely sidesteps the issues of how the aliens got to Earth, what they want, and what the leaders of the world are doing to stop them. The story of War of the Worlds focuses on the everyday people and how these events affect them. The film is above all else, effective. Here is a film about panic that literally induces it. And as brilliantly realized as those sinister visitors from another world are, It's still the humans that make War of the Worlds profound.
91/100