(POSSIBLE SPOILER)...Spielberg's take on the H.G. Welles saga is lacking in many respects...

Rating: 5/10 (3 April 2006)

TOM CRUISE is a New Jersey dockyard worker who is taking care of two rather insufferable kids (one of whom is DAKOTA FANNING who outdoes Fay Wray in the scream department). He promises to watch them while his ex-wife goes off with her hubby to visit her parents in Boston.
All hell breaks loose in his backyard when aliens who have been hiding for maybe a million years under earth decide to shake up the neighborhood with some scary earth-shaking movements that start out as severe thunderstorms and extreme flashes of lightning but proceed to get more ominous when the tripod aliens make their first appearance.
It's a good beginning--although the script is weak from the start on developing characters we can care about--neither Cruise nor the insufferable kids are worth bothering about for a couple of hours. And yet, we are forced to view all of the happenings through their viewpoint, which would have been fine if they were halfway interesting instead of puppets thrown about by the aliens and the scriptwriters.
Most effective scene is a somber basement moment with a slithering tentacle trying to probe their hideout. It's a tense scene that introduces TIM ROBBINS in what has to be a bit of typecasting genius. He plays a quirky survivalist with a crazy gleam in his eye who makes so much noise that he has to be exterminated by Cruise in an off camera scene. Robbins plays the part of the mad-eyed eccentric looking eerily like he does in real life whenever he steps up to a mike and gets on his left wing political soapbox--clearly enjoying himself as a man who is off his rocker and spouting inane comments about man's survival in a world gone amok. Sounds familiar.
Cruise supplies the star power necessary to give Spielberg the courage to spend $135 million on special effects, but it's a mechanical performance. He's no more than adequate in an underwritten role--he plays Joe Bloke on an off day, with his kids proving more difficult to handle than the aliens.
Not the blockbuster I expected it to be from Spielberg, the man who gave us some really good films in the past--not the least of which was "E.T." which was a marvel of cinema ingenuity compared to this one. The script is the fault here--and the idea that aliens would want to destroy man and everything on earth in order to conquer it and take over what? What would be left? Not a shred of landscape would be worth owning if their scorched earth policy were successful. The irony is that they are defeated by germs--the common cold.
Somehow I think an alternate ending would have been an improvement. Too bad the DVD doesn't give us one.
Summing up: A story that starts out with a bang and ends up with a whimper.