Epic, Exciting, Modern-Day Version Of H.G. Wells' Classic Alien Invaders Yarn

Rating: 7/10 (21 August 2005)

Ray Ferrier is a docker in New York City. Following a freak storm which causes a power blackout, his neighbourhood is suddenly attacked by a monstrous alien war-machine. He steals a car and flees the city with his children, only to discover that a global invasion is taking place and mankind is powerless to resist.
Despite changing the setting and characters completely, this is - like the fifties version - a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the classic H.G. Wells novel. What it does best are the tripod war-machines, which are a triumph of sinister visual effects at their best, wading through the population, incinerating people and buildings with their deadly heat ray and booming their mechanical victory cry. All the big mass panic scenes are sensational; riveting, full of action and brilliantly shot. This movie has some nods to its predecessor; the sequence where the characters are snooped on in the basement by the alien camera is a spiffy souped-up remake of the eerily effective scene from the older movie, and the stars of that film, Barry and Robinson, have a cameo at the end. It also has a lot of stuff from the book though - the red weed appears and the vampiristic habits of the invaders are shown in great grand-guignol style. The cast are not bad, if not great. Cruise does a good job portraying Ray as a simple man, albeit not a very bright one, and his moments of genuine terror at the hopelessness of the situation are very affecting. I have one gripe with this movie however; I don't mind the changes to the setting and the story, or the strange amalgams of character (Robbins, for example, has the name of the astronomer from the book, but the character of the curate, with a bit of the artilleryman thrown in). What I cannot forgive however is the removal of the word Martian. The book is about invaders from Mars; to make a movie of the book and neglect to specify where they come from for whatever reason is like adapting Moby Dick and changing the whale to an octopus. That aside though, this is a first-rate sf movie. Kudos to the great stuntwork by Vic Armstrong and the dazzling visual effects by Dennis Muren and Pablo Helman, and especially to Spielberg, for proving he can still make terrific science-fiction films.