A Pretty Decent Update of the Story

Rating: 8/10 (19 January 2008)

It's been a long while since I either watched the original movie by the same name or read HG Wells' novel, on which both movies are based, but my memory tells me that Steven Spielberg did a pretty decent job of updating the story for a modern audience, while at the same time keeping the essential elements of Wells' story intact. The updates are necessary to make the movie relevant to the modern era. The basic change is that Wells story begins with radio reports of explosions being observed on Mars. This movie features television reports of strange, electromagnetic weather disturbances - a necessary change since (a) radio is no longer the medium through which we get news, and (b) we now know too much about Mars for the explosions to be believable. In another bow to the modern context, there are also some shades of 9/11. The kids think the alien attack at first is a terrorist act, and watching the dazed people walking by posters of the missing brought back memories of that terrible day.
Within the movie itself, there was sustained action right from the beginning, a pretty good flow to the story and generally good performances. Tom Cruise was good as Ray Ferrier, a divorced father who has to protect his children once the aliens begin their attack. I say Cruise was "good" only because that's my general reaction to his work. He always seems to handle his parts well, but there's just some intangible quality about him that prevents me from going any better than "good." In this movie, frankly speaking, his performance is not as good as Dakota Fanning's was as Ray's daughter Rachel. She nailed the part, I thought - showing exactly what I think would be the quickly rising level of terror a young child in such circumstances would experience. She is completely believable. I must say that I never really connected with the character of Robbie - Rachel's older brother, played by Justin Chatwin. I had trouble figuring out exactly where his character was coming from.
After so much action, the end of the movie is a bit anti-climactic, but so is Wells' story (and deliberately so.) The point of the rather sudden and understated ending is the irony involved in it - for all our military and technical prowess, it turns out to be something that we usually try to eradicate that saves us. On the subject of military prowess, one thing I found passing strange is that in putting this into a 21st century context, Spielberg didn't portray the military using nuclear weapons against the alien invaders which to me, given the desperate circumstances, would have seemed reasonable.
All in all, though, this is a very well done movie and well worth watching. 8/10