Seriously flawed... still extraordinary...

Rating: 8/10 (3 July 2005)

The film suffers from the inheritance of the title. This is not a film about a war of worlds, but about a man who needs to become a true parent. If the powerful early action scenes haven't said it clearly enough, it's said explicitly soon after - this is not a war, it's an extermination. Hence an irresponsible father of no material use to his children is brought into direct contact with issues of life/death/survival/responsibility in the most extreme way possible.
The film's journey is his journey, and we never leave his point of view except (from memory) a couple of important scenes where we stay with the daughter.
I was reasonably content with the abrupt "ex-machina" defeat of the aliens, since this was extraneous to the central father-son-daughter story.
The final reunification of the family certainly feels peculiar and slightly mishandled, but also have some sympathy with it - Its logic felt a bit inconsistent with the rest of the film's world but otherwise worked on the symbolic level.
The serious flaw for me was the climactic killing of the tripod, which just didn't work for me at all. The father goes through a symbolic death and rebirth, which is great, but the use of hand grenades just feels meaningless and lazy.
I loved the way, continually, after all seems lost, there is still hope, but it stopped short. The process of his "going into the dark" didn't complete.
This climactic and symbolic death of the father is one of the few moments in the film in which we do not stay with him, and it's a moment where we absolutely should have stayed with him, at least symbolically - even (and especially) if his experience in there was dark and hardly comprehensible.
Also, I'd have liked to have seen something like (say) the man in the basement having half an idea of the aliens' weakness and the father exploiting this knowledge somehow. This would have fulfilled the man's archetypal role in the story and connected the father's story more solidly to the final defeat of the aliens. (In the end, we're saved by a "parental" planetary environment, which is a thematic connection, but not a symbolic one.)
I've focused on flaws in the narrative, but the resolute cinematographic focus on the family for the entire film, always over and above the spectacular effects and epic scale of surrounding events, is absolutely true to the story and makes the sense of imminent physical threat all the more palpable and nightmarish.
It's enough to make the film special.
My only other qualm - a 12A certificate??? I don't think any kid younger than 11 should see this for all sorts of reasons. There were whole families when I went to see it, with kids as young as 5 or 6.