War of the Worlds (2005)

Rating: 6/10 (4 July 2005)

Middling Spielberg. On the positive side, War of the Worlds boasts spectacular, although not ground-breaking, special effects, and an excellent performance from the 11 year-old Dakota Fanning: the director has always had a facility with child actors, and this is no exception. The film is obviously addressed to the post 9/11 American audience. It's an 'everyman's' experience of disaster compared to the panoramic 'presidents, scientists and quips' scope of Independence Day. Crowds flee in dust-covered terror, more often from a menace heard rather than seen, and there are (very obvious allusion, this) photograph galleries of the missing. The film of course updates and relocates the action from HG Wells novella. Victorian Surrey becomes New Jersey. The source of the threat is not the obviously dead Mars but an unspecified extraterrestrial source. The cinematography is appropriately sombre and dark and the sound effects are very good: the noise emitted by the tripods is a dark inversion of the greeting of the mother ship from Close Encounters. Yet there is a curious lack of imagination here. The film follows the course of the novel, and even the 1953 film version, surprisingly closely, and the aliens, when they appear, are creepy but pure Roswell. More damaging is the director's recurrent weakness of insisting on sentimentality: one either goes for his scenes of family bickering and bonding or gets a little irritated and in a film as brief as this (under 2 hours) and with this theme (apocalypse) one is inclined to the latter. It's also very much a star vehicle, and at one point we're supposed to believe that little Tom has physically got the better of Tim Robbins (whose supporting role is very brief). Worth seeing then  on the big screen  but not in the same league as Close Encounters, or even ET, and certainly not as much fun as Independence Day. But then we live in a different world.