Has Very Strong Aspects but Falls a Bit Short

Rating: 6/10 (17 January 2020)

Even when I first saw this film as a kid, I noticed the invocation of 9/11 imagery to help show the horror that the characters are facing. In a country no longer experiencing the bliss of 90s excess, films like this are more in touch with the times they come out in than their comparatively tone deaf counterparts of the 90s. This, however, has already been said before, but it's still one of my favorite aspects of this film.
Ultimately where this version of War of the Worlds is at its strongest is when we follow the main characters and experience this attempted extermination of humans by the alien invaders. This survival aspect of the film helps to make it feel much more grounded and realistic than if the characters decided to become fighter jet pilots or something and blow all the tripods up. Instead, the characters are powerless, unable to influence the larger scale of the situation at all, let alone their own personal ones.
The danger with a film like this is that it is difficult for it to not eventually become repetitive. On top of that, there is also a danger that the thing that you end up doing to differentiate from the formula also can end up being the weakest part of the film. The latter happens to be true for this film, unfortunately. The survival horror aspect of the first two thirds of this film are really well-done, but then, as many already know, it falters a bit in the final third. The pacing in this part of the film is strange and is mostly quite forgettable. The sequence where the tripod probe follows the characters around in the basement is a recreation of the raptor scene in Jurassic Park except much weaker, and aside from that and the scene where Dakota Fanning's character sings Hushabye Mountain to herself mostly because I'm a fan of Chitty Chitty Bang bang but...
This version of War of the Worlds, as of writing this- before having seen the BBC series, I believe is, at the very least, the definitive modern cinematic adaptation of the story to date. Yes, this film is far from perfect, hence the 6/10 rating, but I still think there is enough here to give an enjoyable experience. Maybe not a family movie night-kind of movie since it is pretty dark despite it being a Spielberg film, but good for a movie date or for anyone interested in exploring some of the deeper cuts in Spielberg's filmography.