In this movie, Cruise plays a divorced father with two teenage children trying to evade an alien invasion.

Rating: 2/10 (30 June 2005)

In this movie, Cruise plays a divorced father with two teenage children. Working as a container crane operator, with an obsession of V8 muscle cars, shows up late to meet his ex-family and his wife's new beau. Cruise was to take care of the kids, which he hardly knows, for the weekend as his ex-wife visits her parents in Boston. Later in the evening dark clouds with continuous intense lightning concentrating on the same spot at a distant from his backyard as strong winds rushes towards the area. These lightning are actually aliens sending their bodies down to their tripod all terrain vehicles buried millions of years ago before even humans ever walk on the earth. In the morning, all electrical appliances are dead. The tripods then started to surface and started killing everyone around with their giant laser beams. Disintegrating anything it passes through to dust. As whole movies goes on, more movie extras gets disintegrated, Cruise and his family got moving to Boston. Somehow they managed to find a car that is working. Kind of ridiculous as nobody else in the whole town has another working car. Being the only people with a car naturally they were car hijack by swarms of homeless people. Somewhere in the middle of the movie he got separated from his teenage problem child son who wanted to help the army fight aliens. Cruise and daughter manage to encounter with Tripods in the open as well as inside a basement. There is only two scenes where you can really see the aliens, in the basement scouting at people's photographs and at the end where an alien pop out of his tripod dead. In the end, it is our bacteria that killed the aliens.
Somehow the movie has a rather stale kind of plot. If compared to another recent alien invasion movie like Independence Day. Independence Day has a much better grasps of the alien invading planet earth. Not much of action in this one, a lot of running around. There are only two scenes with aliens shown. Maybe they paid too much money for the Cruise and Spielberg collaboration that they have to compromise on the effects and action scenes. The old series on television was much better don't waste your money.