War of the Plots (missed opportunity and faux tension)

Rating: 5/10 (1 July 2005)

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!
I knew there was something wrong when I saw the first TV spot for this film. I felt like Dakota Fanning's character must have felt in a scene from the film when strange lightening was flashing from the sky. She knew something wasn't right, but Cruise, her irresponsible father, assured her that it was just lightening, only to realize, too late, that something was wrong. I knew something wasn't right when I saw that the entirety of the ad campaign was resting on the shoulders of Cruise and Fanning when there should have been a host of names. But my irresponsible common sense kept assuring me that it was Spielberg and nothing could go wrong.
What went wrong was, I have come to believe, Tom Cruise. Or more appropriately, a bloated sub-plot wound around a superstar that eclipses the rest of the story. Much like Anthony Hopkins sucked the tension from "Red Dragon" or Jim Carey killed "Lemony Snickets", by drawing too much attention to themselves and away from a story which could stand better on its own merits.
Cruise guarantees big box office and I even find him enjoyable at times, like in "Interview With The Vampire" "Magnolia" and "Born on Forth Of July". Dakota Fanning has carried her weight alongside such stars as Sean Penn, Denzel Washington and Rob Dinero She was great in "Taken" and "I Am Sam". She is adorable and talented and eerily precocious in interviews; a sophisticated, female version of Haley Joel Osment. So both Cruise and Fanning are up to the task of carrying the film. The problem is, they shouldn't be carrying the film.
"War Of The Worlds" is a panoramic story, an epic based on a radio story that was the first of its kind, its own genre'. It should encompass the entirety of the story of Martians attacking our planet. Instead Spielberg,perhaps resting on the draw of his two Superstars, chooses to focus the story almost entirely on the family conflicts between a negligent father and his two estranged children. This is just one among many subplots that could have been explored and by focusing entirely on this, the magnitude of the story is lost. It's bad enough (and perhaps xenophobic in our troubled world) to focus on the crisis of one country in a story like this, let alone the internal disputes of just one dysfunctional family.
One of the obviously missing elements (and opportunities) was a stable to the sci-fi genre' and the film suffers for its absence, and that is the second-guessing scientist (nerd or uberman depending on the era) whose inexplicably accurate expositional monologues explain what is going on in-between scenes of rampant carnage. In an intriguing twist the attack comes not from the skies, as in the original, but underground. Strangely Spielberg depends on a distraught weekend-warrior type character, played by Tim Robbins, to suggest that the Martians must have been hiding there for centuries, since before man, and leave me wondering why the hell would he thrust this rather impractical plot idea into the middle of a scene and just leave it hanging there. Also missing is the harried gruff General, who drops his head to signify that all is lost for mankind. Instead we see brief moments of foot soldiers getting their collective butts trounced or waving for lines of ragged civilians to move it along.
Perhaps Spielberg wanted to avoid those genre' devices and focus on the dramatic elements, but he could have used more than one group of people. And this approach is worse than just insufficient to capture the breadth of the story; it also ruins the tension. I've only seen it once (enough, really), but I know of at least two scenes when characters are woken from sleep, (FROM SLEEP?) by either explosions or aliens or alien probes. Why are they sleeping? I mean, I can assume they have to sleep, but do we really have to watch them? The world is under attack and he opens a scene with characters being woken from sleep to create tension? This pacing for this film should have been frenetic, there should not have been a moment to rest.
There is also the faux tension, generated in numerous scenes but exemplified best, when Cruise and Fanning are trapped in the basement of a crumbled house (an obvious ode to the original film) and waste screen time with slipping from one part of the set to another in a predictable slamming door farce (sans doors), while hiding from an alien probe. In the original film this was given a minute or so to unfold, but Spielberg ups the ante and kills the tension by dragging the whole scenario on way past the time when you were actually worried that something bad might happen. He does this too in the build up to any climatic moment, holding the moment way past the point it was necessary to create tension, as if there was nothing better to do with the story and he had to kill a little time in-between arguments between Cruise and his son (played rather stiffly by Justin Chatwin).
I am not a Spielberg basher. Many of his films are on my shelf: E.T, Schindlers List, Close Encounters, Catch Me If You Can, Color Purple, AI (ignore the naysayers on this last one, most of them mistook the Supermecha for aliens). But something went really wrong here. Maybe it is when he works with Cruise, because I had the same feeling about Minority Report.
In spite of what my rant may imply, I didn't hate the film. There were really effective moments, scary and thrilling too. I wasn't completely disappointed, just disappointed enough. Hell, I might even see it again. But only if friends insist on going and only if they buy the popcorn.