Whatever themes Spielberg was supposedly trying to communicate, they didn't make it. Cruise as some kind of working class hero? His character was very dislikeable for most of the movie. Selfish, and with no ambition, as demonstrated by his turning down extra work on "union" grounds.
Then the part about the "wealthy capitalists" sitting out the war? Gee, he must have missed the wealthy suburban neighborhood and its huge homes that were completely trashed. And whatever imagery Wells may have intended with the destruction of a church didn't get communicated very well either. The only message I took from that is that not even God was going to save us from these aliens.
It was a special effects popcorn movie. Whatever themes or messages you find in it are the ones you put there as a viewer. Everything else was simply to tangential to come across with any degree of clarity.
The guy was pretty close to the mark (but not precisely so) when analyzing what Wells, Spielberg, and the lead screenwriter all ADMITTED publicly they intended to be the "relevance" and allegories behind the original work and film. Whether Spielberg and the screenwriter really understood what Wells was getting at on the tripod issue (by Wells own history and commentaries) is another question -- the net result is a co-mingling. There were also substantial differences between this film and the 1953 version, part of the reasoning is detailed below, with Spielberg indicating publicly he wanted to bring it closer to the original work -- except for the ending. Those changes are informative.
Check out the link to the SCREENWRITER's comments in the prior post -- the screenwriter appears to concede an Iraq allegory and anti-imperialist allegory, but claims no 9/11 allegory (except that Spielberg here says there was).
Tin-foil? Try reading Wells first, and the following...
EXCERPTS
http://www.latinoreview.com/films_2005/paramount/wotw/setvisit.html
Spielberg: …There's been others out there very successful and others maybe less successful, but we've seen the sci-fi Victorian period done before, we've all seen the contemporary sci-fi film done before. I feel more at home today, in today's world. And I think, in the shadow of 9/11, there is a little relevance with how we are all so unsettled in our feelings about our collective futures. And that's why I think, when I reconsidered War of the Worlds, post 9/11, it began to make more sense to me, that it could be a tremendous emotional story as well as very entertaining one, and have some kind of current relevance
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Spielberg: Was it just afterwards? But it really made me feel that this event was actually happening. When you look at it today and you measure it against everything that just came before, everything in contemporary science fiction that came before, sure there are things that are corny - you know, when they walk toward the cylinder holding the cross and there's three cultures; there's Irish, there's Latino and...(laughter). It's a different mind-set then.
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What did attract you to it, Tom?
Cruise: The story? The same things. I mean, for me, War of the Worlds was always a book that I really enjoyed and I felt that the story could be relevant………………..
Spielberg: ...the sense of blithe adventure of Independence Day. It's not a wonderful kind of gung-ho...it's not Starship Troopers and it's certainly not Independence Day, you know? We take it much more seriously than that. The film is ultra-realistic, as ultra-realistic as I've ever attempted to make a movie, in terms of its documentary style. But at the same time, it's full of the kind of Hollywood production values that the audience is demanding these days. And I think it's the combination, the blend, of these huge events visually and this kind of documentary story, personal story at the center of it, that gives it this very unique-
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NEW...Nothing to do with the above...
TRINITY AND TRIPODS (Written by CaptIsaacDavis)
BY the way, the importance of waging war on Christianity to Wells has been lost to all except those who actually bother to read most of his works, and not just WOTW. It was a near life-long obsession, because he saw the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as the singular example, representation or symbol, of a purportedly “autocratic” nature of Christianity – that was spread to every far reaching corner of the British empire (or any “Western” “empire” by allegory – as a radical socialist). It is many decades past when even public school-educated drones would have comprehended how integral the history of the Church was to the history of Western civilizations and the spread of empire (especially the British, which Wells was critiquing in WOTW). WELLS: "The idea of stamping out all controversy and division, stamping out of all thought, by imposing one dogmatic creed upon all believers, is an altogether autocratic idea." That's STAMPING out..."A second great autocrat who presently contributed to the stamping upon Catholic Christianity of a distinctly authoritative character was Theodosius I. (Theodosius the Great (379-395). He forbade the unorthodox [non-Nicaeans] to hold meetings, and handed over all Churches to the Trinitarians" H. G. Wells, Outline of History, 1920 Edition, pp. 523, 524
The author of the review actually missed the point that the 1953 film, released when most middle class Americans were actually literate in things like the works of H.G. Wells and Christian doctrine, instead of porno and sports stats, knew they had a problem with this issue so they: eliminated the tripods (except for a fuzzy electromagnetic signature in homage in one scene), had a priest in a saintly act to stop the war, had masses of crowds singing “Amen” and had a Church as a sanctuary at the end (implying clearly it was the hand of God that saved the day, and spinning it as a theological one not a Darwinian one as Wells intended). They had to in order to get past the censor boards. I know this because my grandmother was actually on one of those boards and she explains the subject was a topic of controversy when the film came out – Wells was a socialist (who had praised Lenin at one point and accused Christianity of being a source of tyrannical evil), and it was 1953 after all.
Spielberg himself in the excerpt above calls it a "different mindset then" about a scene with a cross. Here, the Church is the source of the creatures, and there is no positive spiritual or faith element at all -- only Cruise's character crying to save his daughter, and for a while not giving a damn about anyone else but himself (a very humanistic theme that the handful of Libertarian degenerates who post on this site must haved loved).