Excellent, but surprisingly dark.

Rating: 8/10 (22 November 2005)

Sitting down to watch War of the Worlds recently on DVD, I was expecting a return to the type of movie Spielberg would happily make throughout the eighties and nineties, before becoming the more experimental and more thoughtful filmmaker he is nowadays. To be honest what I was expecting was basically Jurassic Park with aliens, but what we get is something very, very different. Instead of it being a fun packed thriller with comic relief spread throughout, what one gets is something very dark, very serious and at times downright distressing. This is basically a big budget blockbuster from the man who has brought the world Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, not the man who brought us the Jurassic Park movies and Jaws. This is not to say that the film is bad, because it's not, in fact it is very, very good. Terrific in fact. It has all the usual aspects one should expect from a film like this such as budget busting special effects sequences, thrilling action set pieces and a genuine sense of terror, but what makes the film more than that is the way that instead of focusing on characters that are mere fantasy figures like a fictional president or smarter than thou scientists, what we get is the invasion of earth by extra terrestrials from one family, in this case the Ferrier family as played by Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin. The whole movie is played from their point of view and it makes it a treat. As Spielberg said in a lot of the publicity before the film was released, it is the biggest small film ever made. Like Batman Begins (the best film of summer 2005), more thought is put into the script and characters, so much so that we truly care about them. One truly distressing sequence has Cruise and his family being car jacked, but Fanning's character being left in the car and Cruise struggling to get to her. It is a moment of pure suspense, but one that is very distressing and almost full of despair.
Technically the film is also superb, as it should be. The invasion sequences are some of the best put to film and best of all they don't look like special effects, something so rare in the movies of today. The tripods are terrifying, equally so the aliens themselves. Janusz Kaminski's photography is eye catching, as always. Much like his work in Minority Report and Saving Private Ryan, he goes more for a washed out look, with a tendency to shoot at a higher number of frames. It gives the movie a beautiful and ugly look, mostly at the same time.
In a summer blockbuster season that has given us some of the best blockbusters in some years (Batman Begins, Sin City and Revenge of the Sith), War of the Worlds is more than equal to stand alongside some of the output of this year. It is in effect an old master doing what he does best. It amounts to one thrill packed ride.