Despite neat special effects and terror, it's not the best alien flick

Rating: 7/10 (31 March 2008)

The first time that Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise teamed up to make a movie together with Minority Report (2002), it really put them on the map where from dazzling special effects to a good story line proving that you can have a top actor and a top director making one of the best movies I have ever seen in my life.
Spielberg and Cruise second time is really more flat like a soda than the first.
"War of the Worlds", based on the famous Orson Welles radio broadcast that left the world in a frenzy is on the big screen. It's Steven Spielberg's third time around making "alien" pictures after his first attempt in the 1970's flick Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the best in my opinion) where it showed how something out of the ordinary can be something amazing to everybody. In 1982, Steven brought the "awe" back in movie experience by making E.T. (The Extra Terrestrial) where it showed that an unlikely bond between an alien and an outcast child. Now Steven is back but bringing more menace to his aliens than the cute creatures.
Tom Cruise is Ray Ferrier, a divorce father who sees his children whenever the wife (Miranda Otto) needs something. His children are played by Justin Chatwin and the talented Dakota Fanning in which they don't seem to fond of their father once they arrive to spend the weekend with them. It's all moaning and argument until something happens in the skies leaving all of the citizens in New Jersey to wonder what's happening before an alien invasion takes place. People are being hit with laser beams and buildings being destroyed while Tom Cruise and his kids try to get away from everything as possible.
It becomes too annoying when Spielberg makes too many references about 9/11 from a frame photograph of Tom Cruise's character and the family of the twin towers in the background along with the American flags we see at each house to the references of the attacks from the rubble, the destroyed planes and so forth. Dakota Fanning is a wonderful actress but her screaming had to make me want to get ear plugs after one too many screams made me want to hit myself with a pillow.
But despite what I wrote in my last paragraph, I'm still recommending this movie as a thriller where the special effects along with the tension music from John Williams (a Spielberg regular) doesn't make this film so bad to watch.
Not the best alien flick I've ever seen, but it's entertainment.