Imperfect, but it has a lot of good moments

Rating: 8/10 (3 July 2005)

I mention some spoilers here in my review. I enjoyed Spielberg's War of the Worlds, but I have problems with it. The movie from the start till the first tripod's rise was quite good.
Then when the Martian tripod started firing on people I experienced my first discontinuity. The people were turning to ash but their clothes were being left behind. It may seem to be a quibble, but it distracts from what should have been a thrilling moment. Maybe the idea was invented so that it could pay off in a scene several nights later, when the clothes of incinerated people would flutter down from the sky, but why make something complicated or a mystery for no significant reason?
Then the next portion of the film depicted moments that are horrendous, not because of the Martians themselves, who seem to serve as a plot device to drive humans into panic, but because of desperate people doing unto each other what they would never imagine doing under saner circumstances. These are the moments neither Orson Welles in his famous radio broadcast nor George Pal in his beloved film version had imagined. The Martians are the herders, causing masses of people to panic, which leads to holocaust-like moments from "Schindler's List". This is my favorite part of the movie.
Shortly before this portion ends, I'm rewarded by a glorious image, of a tripod engulfed in flames, then rising above the flames, impervious to it, invincible, implacable.
Then the film goes underground and the story focuses on a group of three people. It has a nice symmetry to it- tripods, three-legged Martians, three people in a closed-room drama like in Sartre's "No Exit". However, this is a threesome with one wobbly leg: Tim Robbins. I imagine Spielberg had cast him because he would be a helpful, decent fellow at first who later descends into craziness because of the pressure of being cooped up while hiding from Martians. Robbins the actor bothers me in this part. He seems to have mistaken unhinged with goofy. At times, he still thinks he's "Nuke" Laloosh in Bull Durham, especially with that bug-eyed doofus look he gives when he's "acting".
When they go above ground, there is a nice tense moment in the alien "basket", but it seems a little abbreviated. We spent a long time during the set-up, some time on masses of people acting in panic, and an almost interminable time with Tim Robbins, but the basket seems like a sketch more than a scene. Tom Cruise's means of escape, well, it's not exactly a cliché, but once he grabbed those grenades, I could see that shot of pull rings in his fingers immediately.
Now for some complaints. There's that ending, which is faithful to the George Pal Movie, the radio broadcast and the original novel. I think the ending suits Welles' novel which was written at a time when it was discovered germs were causing diseases. Today, such an error on the Martians' part would be unbelievable. We go to our moon taking every possible precaution to make sure our explorers survive, it's hard to imagine the Martians wouldn't do the same.
Two more minor nitpicks: first, the aliens have binocular vision, making them cute and E.T.-like. Having two eyes seems unlikely when the Martian tripods have three legs. The Martians themselves have three legs. They have this obsession with doing everything in threes, and their bodies have trilateral symmetry. So why suddenly have only two eyes?
Lastly, I don't like Morgan Freeman's voice to read from the novel, starting the movie and ending it. His voice has too much dignity, like God was reading it. However, in the movie's trailers, I think the actor Peter Coyote (or someone who sounds like him) read the lines from H. G. Welles, and the results are much better. I think the difference between Coyote and Freeman is Coyote can (and truly does) read like it's a documentary.