Try to look at this movie in a different light

Rating: Null/10 (29 June 2005)

"It's a Spielberg so it's got to be good" is an easy statement to make but a little more difficult to substantiate. Take the first half-hour of War of the Worlds. All the impressive stuff you see there you have seen elsewhere: bombardment from whatever source above, hideous things disgorging from below, devastating mayhem in a concrete jungle, horrendous carnage in the same concrete jungle, and more. Yet, this first half hour demonstrates convincingly that Spielberg does it better, not so much with anything that you can conveniently point to, but as a sum total of everything he has done. These include the photography, particularly the play of colour and light, the sound (and alternating silence to increase tension), the angle of the shots, the movements and timing of them, just to mention a few. Every shot is brilliantly conceived, meticulously executed and painstaking edited into the traumatic, shattering virtual reality experienced by the audience in that first hour marking beginning of the alien invasion.
WOTW does not go out of its way to be preachy on morals of humanity or to be a testament to family sentiments, although there is a bit of both. That the tripod machines have been buried for millions of years underground has been repeatedly mentioned, to signify something that is left to the audience's interpretation. The relationship of delinquent father Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) with son Robbie and daughter Rachel is somewhat standard fare.
Nor does the movie attempt to be entertaining in the normal sense. For example, there is very little humour, the only noticeable crack at a laugh being where they take temporary refuge in Ferrier's ex-wife's house, when all the "food" that Robbie had scooped up in the rush constitutes ketchup and an assortment of sauces.
What Spielberg seems to want to do with the movie is to create a realistic world of horror and despair depicted in H.G. Well's story. He does it through the eyes of a trio of father, daughter and son, and later only father and daughter. There is a noticeable absence of any macro picture, as seen in "Day after tomorrow" or some similar movies. The problem with the standard approach of giving you a few shots in different major cities around the globe is that it often comes across as so very artificial and formulaic. Focusing only on the protagonists actually makes the experience more realistic for the audience.
One particular technique he has used very successfully is to employ a rather abrupt shot, the meaning of which is puzzling for one second, but then starts to sink in. One example is Ferrier emerging after a night's hiding in the basement. We see a part of the living room of the house, as the camera pens to showing what looks like a huge fan. This turns out to be the remnant of the jet engine of a crushed plane, as the camera reveals that the "living room" we see is just what is left of the collapsed house, which is in the middle of something that look like the remains (if any) of a V-2 bombardment. Just brilliant. Another example is where close to the end, we see one of the terrifying tripod machines sitting on top of a industrial building, and it took us a second to catch on the fact that the machine is in some kind of a trouble, the turning point of the entire story.
Tom Cruise has made a reasonably good attempt to take on a new persona, this one verging on an anti-hero. It will do him good to make more attempts in this direction (but obviously not in MI 3 scheduled for 2006)  just see how well Kevin Costner has done in "The upside of anger". Dakota Fanning is not challenged as much as in "Hide and seek", playing here a child living in an essentially normal environment with her mother and model stepfather. With the character being quite normal herself, albeit with a bit of claustrophobia, Fanning did get a chance to scream her head off portraying all kinds of fear and horror. Justin Chatwin playing Robbie is not that well known. Miranda Otto who has been so wonderful in LOTR has miserably little to do here as the estranged wife. Tim Robbins does get to do some acting as one of those eccentric characters.