Not one of Spielberg's best...

Rating: 6/10 (10 December 2018)

I only got around to seeing their film now, years after it came out. I'd seen snippets on TV and it looked good enough. And it is, it is suspenseful and taut, as you'd expect of a Spielberg film. There are reminders throughout that it is a Spielberg film, though I had forgotten that he did direct it until the end credits.
You don't need me to summarise the story. Other reviewers do that. Essentially, Cruise plays a father who basically spends the film trying to keep his kids and hims of alive. But to do this, he and his family survive by chance near certain death repeatedly. They stumble from near disaster to near disaster. Cats don't have as many lives. From the beginning, when the first machine rises, Cruise survives due only to luck. People die all around him. Cars tumble and crash to ground just missing him. At no point does he really show smarts, aside maybe from right at the end, when he tells a soldier how to spot a weakness in the machine. He also is clever enough to destroy a machine at one point, but again mostly by chance and not really with much preplanning.
There are lots of weird moments in the film. Tim Robbins character swings from sense to nonsense. It feels purely contrived to generate the story. This happens plenty of times in the film. Cruise's son in the film, Robbie, is daft a lot of the time. He's clearly from early on a bit wild and rebellious, yet cares for his sister. But as the film winds its way, he repeatedly acts like a mindless moron. He wants to fight the invaders despite the fact they are wiping everyone and everything out. He disappears about two-thirds of the way through as he runs blindly toward the machines, needing to see the army confront the machines. The machines decimate the attackers and we don't see Robbie again until it turns out he makes it to Boston before Cruise and his daughter. It makes no sense. He should be dead. Maybe the focus groups didn't like the original ending and they added him back in. I'm only guessing here that there was a different one. Probably not. Probably thy always planned for him to apparently die just to appear at the end.
In the end, it could have been a story of an ordinary man keeping his kids safe in the face of an overwhelming terror. Like a mouse running between the feet of giants, it could have been a story of the inconsequential surviving and seeing a greater story play out as a background. It tried to be that. But it ultimately requires a series of contrivances to achieve that end.