Compelling Concept Undermined By Flawed Script

Rating: 6/10 (2 July 2005)

The screenplay is easily the weakest aspect of this movie. It is essentially Independence Day with scarier aliens. The ruthlessness with which the aliens consume humanity is shocking but in practically every other important element, War of the Worlds is a remake of Independence Day, where Will Smith is replaced with Tom Cruise.
Tom Cruise adds a new twist to his typical roles. In many of his movies, Cruise plays a hyper-talented cocky man who is haunted by unresolved father issues. In WotW, he plays the father who is creating issues between him and his son. He plays the distant father rather than play the son whose distant father left him empty and aching for approval.
The screenplay's dialog is average and it adequately conveys the contempt between Ray, his ex-wife and children. He has no credibility with them and there is so little affection that both children refer to him not as Dad but as Ray.
The plot line is initially creative and fascinating. The New York-Jersey Metro area is visited by incredibly powerful lightening storms that end up being instrumental in how the aliens distribute themselves around the world. As the aliens break cover and begin destroying the world, however, the movie begins its spiral down into inconsistency and frankly, utter stupidity.
For example, as the first alien in Jersey (or maybe it was Brooklyn) starts vaporizing people and buildings Cruise manages to avoid ray beams multiple times, discerns flawlessly how to bypass the exploding and collapsing buildings around him and consequently, emerges unwounded.
In one scene that insipidly borrowed from the bathtub scene in Minority Report, an alien probe snoops around a basement looking for hapless humans. And yet for all their interplanetary travel and ostensibly vast intelligence, they couldn't detect three noisy people. What? These guys don't have the ability to sense thermo differences between humans and brick? They can't detect breathing and heart beats? They are cosmic versions of Larry, Curly and Moe who are easily snookered by humans? Come on! (And seriously: at one point, three aliens are scouting out the basement of Tim Robbins and one of the aliens actually spins a bicycle wheel playfully. This speaks to many logical breakdowns in the movie: it seems highly improbable that a creature with interplanetary travel technology would be distracted by something as arcane as a wheel).
Just as the aliens have the world firmly by the balls and are squeezing quite hard, their dominance inexplicably begins to rapidly crumble. Just like in Independence Day, there is a crucial weakness that the aliens have. It is at the point where this begins to be evident that the movie utterly collapses. After Morgan Freeman's opening voice over asserted the staggering intelligence of these creatures, we find that their due diligence was inadequate and failed to take a simple biological reality into consideration. The movie doesn't explain how they could have made such a mistake when clearly they are technologically advanced and capable of decimating an entire globe.
Which leads me to their method. What bothered me was how analog the aliens were in their approach to annihilation: very mechanical, very time and resource intensive. It seemed blunt, coarse and brutal. It lacked sophistication in its approach. I thought the brutality of their consumption of humans (hey wait a minute... consumption of humans. Wasn't that in Matrix?) was well-portrayed but the means by which humans were being destroyed was awfully inefficient for such an advanced species.
The character development was adequate. There wasn't much complexity to the pathos between the father/son/daughter triad so the tension was quickly developed. The children are aware of their father's lack of meaningful involvement in their lives but as the movie progresses and they see that he is not quite the man they thought he was, the loci of trust gradually shifts toward Cruise with each of the kids. With this shift comes a change to calling him Dad instead of Ray.
The acting was okay. You don't expect much from a space aliens disaster movie. The characters are believable. The only character I really believed was the daughter. Cruise was passably believable but not authentic.
The cinematography and production were disappointing. I have higher expectations of Spielberg. His vision for Minority Report was superb as was the composition of his shots, the lighting and the clarity of the image. Similarly, Spielberg went off the scale with Schindler's List in terms of vision, composition, style and clarity. WotW lacks the polished Spielberg production quality. Last week, we saw Batman Begins and its production and cinematography were outstanding. So, between my expectations of Spielberg and my most recent movie experience, WotW was a big let down.
There really was no soundtrack and there was one sole sound effect that stands out: the foreboding rumble of an approaching tripod. The theater shakes viscerally with this sound. It is felt in your body and that brings a sense of reality to the experience.
Finally, the special effects are impressive. This is definitely a movie that needs to be experienced in a high quality theater. Don't wait for the DVD on this one.
It is ultimately the screenplay that undermines this movie. It's still a worthy movie to watch, but don't expect a compelling plot line. Expect a remake of Independence Day with exactly the same viral ending to the invading species.