Spielberg's (attempted) homage to 50's sci-fi

Rating: 6/10 (25 July 2005)

With all the remakes that are taking place in Hollywood you would think that a great filmmaker like Steven Spielberg would either be too busy for remakes or at least add something special to familiar material but this latest effort comes off (at best) as passable summer fare. This updated H.G. Wells story starts out with a divorced crane operator named Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) who has his children for the weekend while their mother Mary Ann (Miranda Otto) heads to Boston to see her grandparents.
*****SPOILER ALERT***** Ray's children are Rachel (Dakota Fanning) and Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and they naturally have a problem being with their immature father but all that changes with what appears to be the start of a lightening storm and lightening hitting key areas on the ground. To everyone's shock alien spacecraft has been buried underground for an unknown amount of time and now they've come to the surface and started to disintegrate everyone (and everything) in their path! Ray and his kids head out of town in what may be the only working car (for the time being) and soon figure out that the planet Earth is under attack. Ray is trying to head to Boston to find his ex-wife but along the way he loses the car to rioters and also meets a strange survivalist named Harlan Ogilvy (Tim Robbins) who ends up being more of a threat than actual help.
Spielberg grew up in the 1950's and like many others has fond memories of not only the numerous sci-fi movies that were made but of the "scare" films involving "duck and cover" that young students were forced to view. Spielberg uses many elements of both the original film and Wells own story in the script such as the look of the tripod ships and the red weed. Like many other of his efforts Spielberg incorporates the theme of a troubled home into the story and when Cruise isn't trying to stay alive from an alien invasion he's desperately attempting to keep some sort of semblance of a family unit together. For the most part I was entertained by what I viewed on screen and both Cruise and Fanning give pretty good performances but I have to be honest and say that I wasn't overwhelmed by anything I saw. There were a few things that irked me (to some degree) and the first has to do with what the aliens intentions are concerning humans. They disintegrate people but they also use them for their blood...can't they make up their alien minds on what they want us for? Before I even went to the theater I instinctively knew I would be disappointed by the appearance of the actual aliens and I was but I did feel a chill whenever the giant tripods made that mechanical bellowing sound. I also had to laugh when I saw how much terror and trauma Cruise's character goes through in this film because regardless of what he has been saying in the media about prescription drugs and psychiatry I thought his character definitely needed to be put on anti-depressants and to see a good shrink! Fanning's character looks so shaken that I expect her to spend the rest of her life in a rubber room in the hospital sucking her thumb in the fetal position. But jokes aside, this is an entertaining effort that hits enough good notes to give it a recommendation and though it's more in line with "Independence Day" than something classic like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" this is still (generally) a fun film to view.