The quintessential post-9/11 blockbuster.

Rating: 5/10 (13 July 2005)

50 years hence, film-studies essays will cite Spielberg's *War of the Worlds* as the movie best reflecting the prevailing mood of post-9/11 America; Spielberg ensures this with his "authoritative" visual symbols and direct references to the real-life disaster ("Is it the terrorists?" Tom Cruise's teenage son asks early in the proceedings). But we've come to expect this from Sir Steven, who apparently feels that any Major Event or any Major Issue has not been fully documented until he makes some self-important summarization of said Event or Issue. Earlier in his career, he was more prone to telling original stories that were INFLUENCED by the stuff he loved as a kid, such as sci-fi monster movies and adventure serials. But these days, his ego has clearly grown to such proportions that even his beloved original inspirations, such as, well, the 1953 movie version of *The War of the Worlds*, don't seem good enough for him. He must make the AUTHORITATIVE version. The Spielberg Imprimatur of Approval.
The 9/11 references get cloying very quickly: the hero covered in ash while dodging the marauding tripod that has been incinerating panicked people with a laser beam; the silent cascade of discarded clothes falling from the sky; Tim Robbins, in a role he must have relished, mouthing Bushian tough-talk about taking the fight to the aliens. But damn, Spielberg sure makes it all LOOK magnificent, doesn't he? This is his best picture since *Saving Private Ryan*. The gigantic tripods, first of all, are an absolute triumph, almost entirely free of the fake sheen and unnatural movements of CGI creations. Lovingly sticking to Wells' original vision, Spielberg insists on maintaining their rather low-tech, 1898-imagined grandeur. Their fog-horn blasts (usually preceding some act of devastation or other) are memorably chilling. Several set-pieces are very well done, particularly the lightning strikes early on that announce the aliens' arrival, followed by the first tripod erupting from a busy street. And Spielberg has always had an uncanny knack for the offhand scene that generates acute psychological disturbance, such as the scene where Cruise's little girl (Dakota Fanning, in another unnatural "child-actor" performance indicating too many acting classes) takes a bathroom break in the woods by a river. Suddenly, a dead body floats downstream. And then another. And then a small town's worth of them. From idyllic to ghastly in a moment: Spielberg remains a talented showman.
He also remains an egregious sentimentalist, troweling on the unnecessary histrionics. For example, there was no good reason for Cruise's teenage son to be separated from the rest of his family. Bet on it, a sappy denouement will be forthcoming. If the point was to focus on the deadbeat dad's wobbly competence in terms of keeping his little girl safe by putting them in close quarters with the psycho Robbins character, then the teenager should have been written out of the story entirely. (Besides, it's too unnerving to see a movie in which Tom Cruise, Mr. Risky Business, is old enough to have a kid in high school! Rust never sleeps, eh, my fellow GenXers?) There are also curious lapses in simple logic, despite all the mind-blowing visuals and suspenseful situations. Why, for instance, does a cell-phone camera work early in the film, after it has been established that the aliens have managed to short-circuit all electrical and even magnetic devices (including wristwatches)? When Cruise gets his kids to his ex-wife's house from his own place, he complains that the teenager brought only salad dressing and hot sauce for their provisions (Dad is a TV-dinner kind of guy, obviously) . . . but why don't they simply open the ex-wife's refrigerator? And don't get me started on how thousands of tripods could lie buried in the earth for a million years without detection . . . or how supposedly brainy aliens would not have long ago figured out that our filthy, bacterial planet might possibly kill them. (The latter blunder is Wells' boo-boo, to be sure.)
Well. Despite all this, there IS something to be said for a movie that cost $185 million dollars that also dares to focus its energies on one family's story so as to demonstrate a general story about the end of the world as we know it. The movie, in other words, has the sense to avoid being just an empty spectacle: the lives of people we come to know are actually at stake. Spielberg is eminently commonsensical when it comes to the basic narrative, even as it never occurs to him that a middle-class woman's refrigerator will likely have some food in it.
And on that six-of-one-half-dozen-of-the-other note, I'm giving *War of the Worlds* 5 stars out of 10.