Misses the mark; an unfortunate Spielberg failure

Rating: 5/10 (29 June 2005)

Like the giant tripod robots from hell that invade Earth, War of the Worlds is shaky and collapses easily under its own weight. Sure, the effects are typically extraordinary for a Spielberg film, but the invasion itself is illogical and the scenes in which the human characters interact with each other fall flatter than the buildings that the robots stomp.
A freakish lightning storm knocks out all power, including cell phones and automobiles. This shouldn't have been much of a shock to anyone, since apparently every news report leading up to the storm discussed electromagnetic pulses in other parts of the world that... knocked out all power. I guess that might have been a comment on how Americans don't pay much attention to world events. As the local denizens scratch their heads in consternation and frustration, giant machines rise up from underground and then obliterate everyone in their paths. Madness ensues.
We see all of this death and destruction through the eyes of Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) and his kids Robbie and Rachel (Justin Chatwin and Dakota Fanning, respectively). Robbie's a typical sullen teenager, veering between responsible older brother and impudent jerk. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't have a strong relationship with his father, and neither does Rachel. The kids have been conveniently dropped off for the weekend by their very-pregnant mom (the seldom-seen Miranda Otto), all the better for them all to potentially reunite at the end of the movie.
Much of the movie involves ducking and running and running some more, and mobs of angry people who resemble zombies without the cold logic, and tentacles, and aliens, and about a zillion shocked looks on Mr. Cruise's face. That's about it. Run, run, take a breath, run some more, peek around a corner. It goes on like this for a while, during which time we see humans alternately being vaporized or eviscerated. In fact, the violence is pretty intense, and I wonder what had to be cut in order for the film to attain a PG-13 rating.
The scariest movies are the ones that have at least a strong hint of realism - the audience, in other words, must feel as if what is happening on screen could definitely happen to them. And it's easy to imagine the events in War of the Worlds happening. Oh, perhaps not a full-on alien invasion, but a gigantic catastrophe of some stripe. That's why Independence Day was so popular, and it's also why Close Encounters of the Third Kind was so special.
Of course, Spielberg was responsible for Close Encounters, but this one doesn't approach the magic of the earlier film. At least with Close Encounters, we had a vague idea of why we were being visited; here, although we know they're here to kill us all, we don't know why, exactly. And how is it that giant machines could be buried underground for millions of years without anyone knowing? Surely we have the necessary equipment to detect giant metal.
While the effects are a huge credit to the movie - and ultimately save it - the script and the acting are two major debits, particularly Cruise and Fanning. Cruise normally plays characters who are the Smartest Guys in the Room, exuding coolness at all times. Ray's not a smart guy. He's an idiot and an incredibly bad father, as he seems to have a knack of putting his kids in danger (although he gets better at that as the movie progresses). Unfortunately, Cruise simply doesn't have the range to play an idiot; Ray comes off as just an obnoxious and selfish. Indeed, he spends much of the movie shocked, shocked at what's going on - which would be anyone's natural reaction, of course, but this movie needed a hero of some sort, kind of like Dennis Quaid in the similarly themed The Day after Tomorrow.
Once upon a time, Fanning was cute and talented. She's all of 11 years old now, and she's neither cute nor talented. True, her character spends much of the movie fleeing in terror or screaming her head off, but any actress could have done that. Rachel is far too broadly written, and inconsistently so; sometimes she's precocious, offering Ray advice on dealing with Robbie, and other times she's dumber than your average 10 year old.
Why couldn't this movie have been better? Spielberg and Cruise worked very well on Minority Report, and Spielberg's gone the aliens route before with E.T. and Close Encounters, so why did this one fail? I don't think it's unreasonable to expect their collaborations to be pretty good, given their track records, and War of the Worlds simply misses the mark. The action scenes are very intense, almost draining the audience of emotion, but the scenes with actual dialog are terribly shallow and predictable, not to mention unintentionally funny.