Steven Spielberg's rendition of H.G. Wells's classic novel scores for a thrilling, if flawed experience

Rating: 7/10 (1 February 2017)

For the past few decades, Steven Spielberg has been an expert at crafting both inspiring and riveting stories into outstanding cinematic pieces. Sprawling across nearly every genre in the book, Spielberg has proved to be gifted with a hefty hand with mesmerizing storytelling, engrossing characters, and for science-fiction entries, flashy special effects. His tour de force style of filmmaking explodes on screen in this dark, atmospheric alien-invasion thriller inspired loosely off the pages of H.G. Wells's acclaimed novel. With many liberties taken from the source material including giving the lead character a name and being a divorced father of two, Spielberg takes heavy inspiration from the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to generate an intense, disaster-esque alien invasion thrill ride with a more heart-throbbing direction than many other alien flicks like Roland Emmerich's 'Independence Day'. And the main star of the chaotic thrill ride is Tom Cruise who's collaborating with Spielberg for the second time following their first adventure together in cyberpunk thriller 'Minority Report' which took from the pages of Phillip K. Dick's novel of the same name. This film follows a Brooklyn dock worker Ray Ferrier (played by Tom Cruise), a divorce father who's set look after his ten-year old daughter Rachel (played by Dakota Fanning) and sixteen-year old son Robbie (played by Justin Chatwin) for a week. Upon their visit, the city of Brooklyn suddenly attacked by an army of alien tripods that mysteriously arrived from the sky. Fleeing in Ray's van, the family sprawls on a cross-country trip in efforts to reunite the children's mother Mary Ann (played by Miranda Otto) while fighting vigorously to arrive against the extraterrestrial invasion.
Steven Spielberg is no stranger to stories dealing with extraterrestrial invasion when looking at his work in 'Close Encounters of The Third Kind' and 'E.T'. Unlike those entries, Spielberg ventures on the more bleak side of alien encounters that fully defies the friendly portrayal of extraterrestrial lifeforms as shown in the latter. Focusing firmly on the ground-level survival of a family rather than a series of spaceships battles demonstrated on 'Independence Day', Spielberg rarely pulls any punches when portraying the horror of the chaos and pays fair inspiration from the 9/11 attacks, which is firmly demonstrated in a shot with Tom Cruise's character looking in the mirror tattered in dust and rubble from head to waist. From the opening minutes of the aliens' arrival, the story plunges into a grim, tension-heavy atmosphere where the lives of our main characters are in grave danger and innocent lives blasted into clouds of dust by alien laser beams. And it is all frightening to sit through. These sequences are blissfully crafted together with a hodgepodge of explosive special effects and clean-cut CGI. The story, which follows a largely divergent trajectory from H.G. Wells, advances at a solid pace but hits a major speed bump during a scene with Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning's creepy encounter with a mentally crazed man in a basement cellar, played by Tim Robbins. This scene marks easily one of the biggest weakpoints, with other being the anti-climatic ending which slams the door on the story in a ludicrously lazy manner, as if the writers suddenly ran out of ideas. Though the film effectively sets stone a firmly thrilling experience, it is left with a burnt fuse during its conclusion. In final words, Tom Cruise exercises a fine, though slightly inconsistent performance. Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin stand solid in the underage roles, nothing more, nothing less.
War of The Worlds is a compelling rendition of H.G. Wells's classic source material that scores for a thrilling, if flawed experience. Although it does not stand tall as one of Steven Spielberg's most profound works and suffers a disappointing final turn, it stands solid as a thrilling science-fiction popcorn flick.