War of the Worlds



When H.G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds in 1898 it was a novel concept. No one had ever portrayed a realistic alien invasion before. The book is basically just a tour of England under attack, with the unnamed narrator a passive witness to what’s going on. That was fine for the first portrayal of the concept, but in all the alien invasion stories made since we understandably expect the main characters to take a more active role. It isn’t very surprising that the 1953 film version used the same set-up but made the main character he-man scientist Dr. Clayton Forrester, who was at least trying to find a way to defeat the aliens.


I'm glad movies are working day and night to come up with new ways public transit will kill me.

Now comes Steven Spielberg’s big-budget version of the story. The new movie is, of course, set in the present day. Some people are moaning about this, complaining that they want to see a version set in Wells’ time, but they are missing the point. The power of this story comes from the fact that it could happen; if you set it 100 years in the past it becomes something that we know didn’t happen. Beyond the setting, Spielberg’s movie is remarkably faithful to the premise of Wells’ novel.

Mental health historian Tom Cruise plays Ray Ferrier, a normal guy living in New Jersey just trying to get by when giant alien tripods dig out of the ground and start destroying everything in their path. Ray takes his children, Rachel (Dakota Fanning) and Robbie, and tries to get to Boston, which is the last place he knew his ex-wife to be. As they traverse the Eastern Seaboard they must contend with riots, plane crashes, and the constant presence of the tripods torching the landscape.


Tom Cruise practices his dating technique.

Let's start off with what's good. As you would expect, the special effects are great. The tripods have a certain look and feel to them that suggests the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind gone bad. Many sequences are genuinely suspenseful.

And here's what's not so good. I kinda wish that the filmmakers had vetted the science in the film better. The key to this story is plausibility, and there were some silly science errors that pulled me out of the movie. In the novel the tripods fell in meteors, but in the movie they are buried (and have been buried for millennia, apparently), which really wouldn't be a problem except the only one we see come out of the ground does so in an urban area. I could believe them being buried a lot of places, but under a busy street? Even the public works department in New Jersey couldn't miss that. The underground tripods power up in lightning strikes, which is fine, but for some reason it's established there is no thunder (huh?), and the powering up of the tripod causes an EMP event, but the filmmakers don't seem to know which devices would be effected by EMP and which wouldn't. I'm also not sure why when the tripods start disintegrating people the only thing left of the zapees is their pants -- not their shirts, not their coats, just pants. "Nice pants," indeed.


"You don't know the history of Pennzoil. I do!"

Odd side note: There is a little moment in the movie where Ray is at the site of the lightning strikes, and he touches a piece of something in the little crater and comments that it is not only not hot, but freezing cold. Ray then pockets the piece, and nothing more comes from it.

I usually don't let star off screen antics get to me, but Cruise's bizarre behavior recently has really made it tough for me to see him as the regular guy he's supposed to be in this movie. Maybe there's just a touch of manic instability that comes across in his performance. He used it really well in Collateral last year, but in War of the Worlds it was distracting.

Towards the end the strain of having the main character of the film not do anything heroic against the aliens begins to show, and Ray engineers the destruction of two tripods. I guess I can see dramatically why it was necessary; by that point in the movie Ray was beginning to seem really ineffectual.

It's not a bad movie, and it's well worth seeing just for the very impressive tripods. I just wish the details of the film had been better thought out.

Posted: Mon - July 11, 2005 at      

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