Sound and Fury Signifying A Summer Movie

Rating: 8/10 (5 July 2005)

With all due respect to the Bard, Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS was certainly jammed full of the requisite sound and fury. Whether it be the lightning blasts the alien hordes road in on, their reigning devastation as humans were vaporized by the hundreds (that's one solution to Earth's over-population) or the fury  the outright horror  that human actors Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning and Tim Robbins, nearly mimicking his award-worthy role from MYSTIC RIVER, experienced, WAR OF THE WORLDS was a great summertime amusement-park ride.
Spielberg provided many of the elements fans of his films come to expect, and provided them dead-on. The alien invaders were as creepy and menacing as the news coverage on Tom and Katie's engagement as Dennis Muren and the ILM team set out to create a very menacing, and ultimately very cool, threat. Spielberg once again allowed the everyday man, a member of the post-nuclear now-acceptably dysfunctional family, to play witness to the fantastic with Dakota Fanning picking up the 21st Century role of cute, screaming blonde kid once held by Drew Barrymore.
The signification? Other than summertime action, not much else. Perhaps Spielberg has done his "everyman" story format once too often as not only does Tom Cruise fail to live up to this Spielberg-ian status, but the story does tend to become slightly ridiculous as this superman tends to be the only human that not only survives every encounter with the invaders but also becomes one of Earth's saviors as well. Perhaps Cruise's superhuman ego could not simply disguise itself with eyeglasses and a fedora.
As the movie lumbers forward like the Tripods, the alien tech just does not make sense. Would not space-faring aliens have better ways of tracking these insect-like humans other than line-of-sight targeting? Even the mighty Tom Cruise must have some form of kryptonite  other than bad q-ratings.
The end result is that the film satisfies the need for a summer action hit as well as giving humanity a nice positive ending in this pc-world we are specimens in. It's well known that Spielberg can be highly sentimental  just look at SCHINDLER'S LIST  so it should come as no surprise that the aliens meet their ultimate end, as fans of Wells' story were already aware of, in the city of the world champion Patriots and Red Sox. This ride has it all: plenty of dips and loops, but also high-speed action that can take your breath away.