Aliens come to Earth and terraform our planet in order to escape their dying planet.

Rating: 7/10 (17 March 2006)

Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), a middle-aged dock worker in northern New Jersey, is watching his children for the weekend while his divorced wife Mary Anne (Miranda Otto) and her new fiancée Tim go to the grandparents' house in Boston. About an hour after she drops off Rachel (Dakota Fanning) and Robbie (Justin Chatwin), there is a freak electrical storm and the power goes out due to an electromagnetic pulse. Ray goes to the intersection where the lightning hit to investigate, and the hole in the road cracks open to reveal an enormous, three-legged metal monster.
The Tripod raises itself out of the hole and begins killing people by shooting a blue ray at them that causes anything in its path to explode. After narrowly missing being vaporized, Ray goes home and tells his kids to pack up their things again, they're going to Boston.
Since no cars are working because of the pulse, Ray steals his friend's car, which, conveniently, has just had its solenoid changed, although I'm not sure how the spare solenoid wasn't affected. This movie is filled with gaping plot holes such as this, so don't try to find a logical explanation for them; just watch the movie and enjoy the extraordinary special CGI effects and acting.
On the way to Boston, Ray meets a news reporter who somehow knows a lot about these aliens, even though they've only been around for about an hour. She shows him frame-by-frame footage of the lightning striking, and they see that there are large, cylindrical capsules hidden within the lightning containing the creatures, an obvious reference to the book. The aliens buried the Tripods when humans first came into existence, and picked this particular day to get into them and destroy humanity.
They drive north, and when they're miles away from the Hudson River, a few guys with no means of transportation beat up the car and steal it. Ray takes his kids onto the Hudson Ferry to get across the river, but another buried Tripod rises out of the water (how did the aliens get underwater to this one?) and capsizes the ship, harvesting all the passengers except for Ray and his family, who escape into the forest.
After a few hours of walking, Robbie decides he has to be the hero of the movie and tries to follow the soldiers over a hill to fight the aliens. Ray tells Rachel to stand by a tree while he goes to get Robbie, and as he's arguing with him, a well-meaning couple see Rachel alone and take her. Ray lets go of Robbie and runs after them, and just as they are on the other side of the hill, the field below it where Robbie is is lit on fire with an enormous explosion. A Tripod rises out of the fire and it is revealed that it has a magnetic shield around it, preventing any missiles from hitting it.
Heartbroken Ray and Rachel find shelter in a man's basement. The man, Ogilvy, starts out as just being depressed because his family was killed, but throughout this unbearably long, still scene he slowly goes insane. The aliens hear him yelling and send a remote-control probe that looks just like the one from the 1953 movie into the basement.
After they hide behind a mirror, the probe goes away and the actual aliens come into the basement. This scene is terrifying, because the whole time the aliens are just creeping around in the shadows, and Ray, Rachel, and Ogilvy are just praying that they don't come around the corner and see them. The aliens finally leave, and there is another three minutes of unbearable silence.
Ray and Ogilvy look out a small window and see that the Tripods have probes attached to their undersides designed to penetrate and drain human bodies of blood. Seeing this, Ogilvy goes completely insane and starts shouting, so Ray kills him with a shovel.
Unfortunately, the aliens already heard him, so they send another probe into the basement. It sees them and Ray chops it apart, but a screaming Rachel has already run upstairs. He goes outside looking for her, and sees that the entire Earth has been choked with a disgusting, glistening alien weed that is fertilized by blood. He walks over a hill, and sees that the scorched countryside is soaked in blood.
A Tripod sees Rachel and puts her in a cage hanging on its back. Ray throws a grenade at it that conveniently popped out of nowhere, and it puts him in the cage with her. He starts to get pulled into the machine for "testing", but the other prisoners pull him back out, and he spits out two grenade pins. The machine explodes and the cage falls into a tree. How everyone got out of the cage after that is unexplained.
Ray takes Rachel to Boston, where the weed is dying and the Tripods are mysteriously malfunctioning. Soldiers take the last one down, noticing that its shield is down because birds are sitting on it, and a sick alien falls out. The aliens have been killed by the common cold, after all of our weapons failed.
Ray takes Rachel to the grandparents' house, (the grandparents are played by Ann Robinson and Gene Barry, the main characters in the original film) and they are reunited with Robbie, who somehow survived the explosion. I guess Spielberg couldn't live with that sad ending.
This movie was perfect as far as acting and CGI effects go, but there are too many plot holes to call it a good movie. I loved it and saw it twice in the theater, but it seems like Spielberg just said, "Aww, what the hell, no one will notice THAT."