OK remake

Rating: 6/10 (15 March 2015)

Tom Cruise stars as Ray, a dock worker in NYC who is divorced from his wife and has 2 kids, Rachel (Dakota Fanning) and Robbie (Justin Chatwin). Ray gets custody of the kids over the weekend while his ex and her husband are off to Boston. Then out of nowhere, the aliens start attacking.
Cruise does a decent acting job. I found Dakota Fanning great, though her role was limited to mostly crying, screaming, and looking scared, which she did very well. Robbie is depicted as a son who thinks his father let them down and doesn't care about the kids, which seems to be mostly right. Cruise is playing a complex role trying to show the kids he can be caring, while realizing he's been somewhat of an irresponsible dad to them too.
The movie is all about CGI after that. Endless chases across the landscape, unruly mobs, and the tripod monster ships. The movie gets kind of tedious and slow, especially when they hide out in a basement with Tim Robbins. Spielberg tries to keep up the tension as much as possible, and that mostly succeeds.
Still, you already know the story. So you know how it's going to go. Therefore, really not much of a plot, little room for the characters to grow much, with an interesting twist around blood. It was an OK movie, so I give it an OK score 6/10. Cruise has been better, and so has Spielberg. Even the animators in the special features, while trying to make it seem like they were excited, also seemed to be going thru the motions while paying appropriate tribute to Spielberg. That pretty much summed up this OK movie.