Considering the hype and cost, just an OK remake.

Rating: Null/10 (25 December 2005)

As we all tend to do when a movie is built up for months, even years, through advertising, press releases, and TV spots, I have been eagerly anticipating "War of the Worlds" for a long time. Last night, Christmas Eve, the family watched it at home on DVD with a THX sound system, replete with powered subwoofer and widescreen HDTV. It was a fun movie. But somehow, overall, it seemed a bit silly. The most intriguing part was when Cruise, Fanning, and Robbins (well, their respective characters) were in the dark, wet basement trying to figure out how to elude the aliens.
Tom Cruise is Ray Ferrier, blue collar worker, divorced, taking his two kids from mom for a long weekend. The daughter (Fanning) is normal, the teenage son, of course, is rebellious and calls his dad "Ray". Then all hell breaks loose as a strange storm with lightning arrives, then giant machines, apparently buried all over perhaps millions of years earlier, are activated. It seems all they want to do is exterminate humans from the Earth, and claim it for their own. But who are these people??
(As I think about this movie, I also recall older Sci-Fi movies, like "The Day The Earth Stood Still", where we experience terror by the thought of what might happen. Today's blockbuster, like "War of the Worlds", attempts to instill that fear via giant monsters and heavy CGI action, but it simply doesn't work as well, maybe because we the audience fully realize we are seeing big, artificial monsters.)
SPOILERS. The giant machines are tripod robots, and strange tripod aliens are inside them, operating them. (They had come down on the bolts of lightning to occupy the hidden machines.) We see several of them explore the dark basement, very well designed and executed. And as happens all the time, all over, Mother Nature ends up winning the battle. A few days after the aliens come to Earth, they begin dying and machines begin crashing to the ground everywhere, amid the destruction. The human species had become resistant to all the microorganisms all over the Earth, but the aliens of course were not, and they soon all died off. The irony, the smallest Earthlings defeated the powerful enemy.