Its a great movie that can be interpeted any old way. It's one of the best adaptations of a classic SF novel ever made.
I am glad someone explained to me the beauty of the new "War of the Worlds". I thought the movie just sucked.
Weird aliens blow up stuff, but we survive after they catch colds, the end.
"We saw in the blackened distance a group of three people running down a side street towards the river, but otherwise it seemed deserted. Up the hill Richmond town was burning briskly; outside the town of Richmond there was no trace of the Black Smoke.
"Then suddenly, as we approached Kew, came a number of people running, and the upperworks of a Martian fighting-machine loomed in sight over the housetops, not a hundred yards away from us. We stood aghast at our danger, and had the Martian looked down we must immediately have perished. We were so terrified that we dared not go on, but turned aside and hid in a shed in a garden. There the curate crouched, weeping silently and refused to stir again.
"That second start was the most foolhardy thing I ever did. For it was manifest the Martians were about us. No sooner had the curate overtaken me than we saw either the fighting-machine we had seen before or another, far away across the meadows in the direction of Kew Lodge. Four or five little black figures hurried before it across the green-grey of the field, and in a moment it was evident this Martian pursued them. In three strides he was among them, and they ran radiating from his feet in all directions. He used no Heat-Ray to destroy them, but picked them up one by one. Apparently he tossed them into the great metallic carrier which projected behind him, much as a workman's basket hangs over his shoulder.
"It was the first time I realised that the Martians might have any other purpose than destruction with defeated humanity. We stood for a moment petrified, then turned and fled through a gate behind us into a walled garden, fell into, rather than found, a fortunate ditch, and lay there scarce daring to whisper to each other until the stars were out." -- from The War Of The Worlds, by H. G. Wells, first published in 1898.
THE GIANT OF HOLLYWOOD AND THE GIANT OF SCIENCE FICTION
First introduced in the United States on June 23rd, at a New York City premiere, Steven Spielberg's rendition of the H.G. Wells classic novel, The War Of The Worlds was released simultaneously from Argentina to the United Arab Emirates on June 29, 2005. News reports in the mainstream media pegged the film's overall budget at more than $ 200 million with another $ 40 million being spent on advertising and promotion. The ambitious release plan also speaks of an almost superhuman effort to get this film from Paramount and Dreamworks SKG out to the largest potential audience on the same day. Moviegoers in Japan were treated to an early release ( June 13th ), as were selected premieres in Germany, France, the Netherlands and the Republic of Macedonia on separate days following.
Bearing in mind that Mr. Spielberg has directed some of the most extraordinary movies ever to come out of Hollywood -- including "The Sugarland Express," ( 1974 ), "Jaws" ( 1975 ), "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" ( 1981 ), and "Saving Private Ryan" ( 1998 ), anyone thinking of going to see "The War Of The Worlds" might be forgiven for expecting to see dramatic action on a grand scale with a cast of unforgettable characters. His choices of Tom Cruise for the leading role of Ray Ferrier and Dakota Fanning as his lovable, quirky, high-strung daughter, might also seem to be consistent with the Spielberg legend. The pre-release promotion for this movie was, itself, something of a spectacular event as Tom Cruise bubbled and gurgled about his new love-interest, Katie Holmes, to anyone who would listen.
Steven Spielberg was assisted in the making of "The War Of The Worlds" by screenwriters David Koepp and Josh Friedman. The original novel by H.G. Wells is easily available in any used book store and in numerous editions. It remains a classic in the literature of the English language and is essentially the first of the truly great science-fiction novels.
In the new version of "The War Of The Worlds," just about the only recognizable element of Wells' ingenious story occurs when the alien fighting-machines begin to pick up the humans who scatter before them in their onslaught. As in the passage quoted above, the giant machines use octopus-like mechanical arms to peer into structures and to snatch people as they run.
In every other respect, this movie is simply dreadful.
WHEN THERE IS NOTHING MUCH TO SAY, BE SURE TO SAY IT VERY LOUD
The new movie version of The War Of The Worlds, for reasons unknown, has taken a giant leap into the realm of science fiction for Know-nothings. In the 1953 version of Wells' tale of two planets, the heroic scientist Clayton Forrester is the leading man, played with panache and style by Gene Barry. He's the fly-fishing bachelor who is on holiday with other scientists in the mountains of California, when the first Martian cylinders land nearby. Naturally, as was mandatory in the science-fiction of the early '50s, his love-interest is a bright, beautiful, and appropriately demure young lady. Sylvia Van Buren ( played by Ann Robinson ), was the midwestern girl from a large family who went west to live with her uncle, a gentle preacher with a generous heart.
For reasons which are just as obscure as the appalling dialogue in Spielberg's "The War Of The Worlds," both Gene Barry and Ann Robinson have cameo appearances in this new movie. They play the maternal grandparents of Ray Ferrier's children, who live well in Boston, in a nice neighborhood which the alien invaders conveniently forget to destroy. Neither Barry, who was superb in the 1953 movie, nor Ann Robinson ( who was simply beautiful in '53 ), contribute anything of consequence to this hackneyed running-from-the-aliens extravaganza.
It is truly a dreadful movie with a deafening soundtrack. It might be worthwhile to sit through something so darned loud if there was ANYTHING AT ALL TO LEARN FROM THE CHARACTERS. Usually, when a movie fan thinks of seeing a film where a lot of beautiful people wander around with nothing much to say, they think of Woody Allen ( after "Bananas" of course ). But to say the name of Spielberg as director, is to bring up the unforgettable Indiana Jones, the tragic Oskar Schindler, or Captain John Miller, Ranger, on the beach on D-Day.
Talented, magnetic, clever, and experienced, Thomas Cruise Mapother IV has worked with Steven Spielberg before and they've done very well. "Minority Report" from 2002 proves that. Remember, this is the actor who brought class to "Top Gun" and style to "Mission Impossible" and romantic dash to "Jerry Maguire" !! He is badly cheated in this anti-human, anti-masculine, anti-family cinematic catastrophe.
The script puts Tom Cruise into the position of being a character who is an arrogant lower-middle class unionized Cad. It is, in fact, a kind of parody of your basic NASCAR afficionado as seen from the tall spires of the upper West Side of Manhattan. There is flat-out nothing at all to like about this guy, this Ray Ferrier. He's not violent, or vicious, or opinionated, he's just clueless in a world where clues abound. Maybe it comes from living in New Jersey.
He's divorced, his ex-wife ( who is pregnant ), has custody of their teen-aged boy and their young girl, both of whom are being spoiled by their new step-father. The forsaken Dad has nothing going on, apparently no girl-friend, no real hobbies, and only a few friends in the neighborhood. He's not clever, he is not really resourceful and he's not a forward-thinking survivor except for being a good swimmer.
There is ... in fact ... almost no science in the film at all. The alien forces have buried their war machines all over the world, and apparently a long time before the present civilization rose to electronic glory. After the 'lightning storm' which is a cover for the introduction of their pilot warriors ... who literally shoot down on cold lightning, into the ground ... the aliens fire up their bizarre looking Tripods and begin killing and destroying.
As noted, Ray Ferrier ( Cruise ), is very nearly clueless.
The one really exciting part of this Demonstration of Wretched Excess In Hollywood comes at the beginning, when a peculiar lightning storm begins to disrupt communications around the world, beginning in Ukraine. The sequence where the lightning storm arrives over New Jersey is exceptionally well-done and the audience is drawn right into the mystery ( even though we all know it something created by the aliens ). Tom Cruise reacts beautifully to the violent lightning strikes and at that moment he seems like Everyman. Soon enough, however, he becomes Mr. Nobody Home and that really doesn't compute ....
The character Tom Cruise plays is qualified to operate a vertical crane for loading and unloading container ships. It is a very highly skilled job, requiring a deft touch and a thorough knowledge of how giant machinery works. These facts are established in the very beginning of Spielberg's "The War Of The Worlds" and then relinquished. His obvious talents and physical dexterity mean nothing in the rest of the movie. He's clueless.
However Ray Ferrier does realize that he has to get his estranged son and finicky daughter out of their New Jersey row-house neighborhood and fast. This is the result of witnessing one of the alien invaders' giant machines rising up and erupting from the center of a street in that New Jersey town. The special effects employed are superb, so not all of that money was wasted: but special effects and violent deaths of innocent people ( being incinerated by the alien's particle beam weapon ), do not constitute a plot with human elements.
As it happens, all of the cars and all of the electronics which are on when the lightning storm begins over New Jersey are EMP fried. Nothing will work, no lights, no automobiles, only a van which is under repair when the aliens arrive with their lightning can be driven. And some guy's digital video camera ( yes, go figure, every techie and Nerd from Nerdistan knows that Electro-Magnetic Pulses can fry circuit boards too ). Ferrier hijacks the van from the mechanic who's working on it, a guy who has even less of a clue than he does. The escape sequence is dynamic. Cruise pilots this old van through a maze of stalled out cars and trucks with thousands of people milling about in confusion. Again, the staging is superb, just what the fans of Spielberg have come to expect from his films.
The rest of "The War Of The Worlds" consists of confusing and disagreeable episodes of shouting and Dakota Fanning screeching. There really is no science at all in this landmark of science-fiction. Ferrier's son Robbie ( played by Justin Chatwin ), is an annoyance. A spoiled rotten Generation Reject kid who is nearly as selfish as his estranged father.
He -- Ray Ferrier -- is simply a terrible caricature of a modern American father. He's not a druggie nor an alcoholic but he is so selfish and so strident that you want to hate him right off. The shock of seeing people massacreed by the aliens doesn't generate any sympathy either, either in the character Cruise plays or on the part of the audience for his character.
Ferrier is a mechanic as well as a union crane operator. He is rebuilding an engine in his kitchen/dining room. He doesn't have any food on hand even though he knows ( as is presented in the first moments of the film ), that his two kids are coming to stay with him for a week-end. He's presented as being a selfish dolt. It is truly insulting to both union guys and divorced fathers, but that's consistent with the way that Hollywood views NASCAR-land, even in urban New Jersey.
Towards the end of the middle of this cinematic disaster, Cruise and his daughter -- having been separated from Robbie -- take refuge in a farmhouse owned by a survivalist ( Tim Robbins ). Mr. Robbins must need the work because this character is just about the most loathsome loner ever imagined.
In another sequence borrowed from Wells' book, an alien war machine crashes into the farmhouse and settles near-by. In a matter of a few hours Robbins' character ( Ogilvy, another sop to the Wells story ), goes from semi-deranged to completely mad and unable to control himself or keep quiet. Then, in a totally anti-human sequence, Ferrier separates from his daughter and apparently beats Oglivy to death to keep him from making any more noises. It's grotesque.
After the initial excitement and scene-setting introductions in Spielberg's "The War Of The Worlds," the entire movie degenerates and fast. The massive alien war machines rampage at will and nothing much seems to work against them. The panic which ensues shows that Americans will not help each other, much, in such times. Common sense is the first thing to disappear and Ray Ferrier is unable to think ahead, unable to relate to his son in this brutal crisis, unable to comfort him, or lead him, and unable to do anything of consequence except hug his daughter. There is one exception to that indictment, but the audience has to sit through more than 2/3rds of the wretchedness in this movie to see Cruise-as-Ferrier finally getting smart. That's a lot to ask.
At the end, in this movie as in the 1953 version, bacteria takes its toll on the mighty alien invaders. For Wells, the aliens were Martians who came with giant machines piloted down from outer space. For Spielberg, the aliens are something entirely different and their war-machines have been buried here for centuries if not longer. They're not Martians and Mars is never mentioned. Being that this is a Hollywood movie, it has a happy Hollywood ending, which is somewhat consistent with the original novel. Gone, however, are soaring and lyrical phrases that Wells used, that Wells packed into almost every paragraph on every page of his 1898 novel.
"I stood staring into the pit, and my heart lightened gloriously, even as the rising sun struck the world to fire about me with his rays. The pit was still in darkness; the mighty engines, so great and wonderful in their power and complexity, so unearthly in their torturous forms, rose weird and vague and strange out of the shadows towards the light.
"A multitude of dogs, I could hear, fought over the bodies that lay darkly in the depth of the pit, far below me. Across the pit on its farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the great flying-machine with which they had been experimenting upon our denser atmosphere when decay and death arrested them.
"Death had come not a day too soon. At the sound of a cawing overhead I looked up at the huge fighting-machine that would fight no more for ever, at the tattered red shreds of flesh that dripped down upon the overturned seats on the summit of Primrose Hill.
"For a moment I believed that the destruction of Sennacherib had been repeated, that God had repented, that the Angel of Death had slain [the Martians] in the night.
"The torment was over." -- from "Dead London", in H.G. Wells' The War Of The Worlds.
There is no such lyricism in the new version of Wells' story, no lofty sentiments or emotionally-charged confessions of feeling fear, abject terror, or the hopelessness of being trapped in a ruined house with a man of the cloth for two long weeks. A man so traumatized by the death and disorder of alien fighting-machines killing hundreds of people at a time, with their heat-rays or their poisonous Black Smoke, that he cannot even speak. The narrator of Wells' novel believes that his wife has been killed and is ready to give himself up to death, too, when the bacteria begin to kill the Martians.
Spielberg's Ray Ferrier comes to the end of this loud, brutal and desolating journey in Boston. That is where he hands over the children he's saved from horrible death, to the ex-wife and her parents and to their step-father. Yes, his son now calls him "Dad" and is glad to be alive but that's all the 'victory' there is for Ray in this disturbing, dark fantasy. The film reduces his evident masculinity from fatherhood to the role of being a chauffeur with a blood kinship to his daughter and son. He's not any smarter, not any stronger, not any more understanding or less self-centered than when the story began.
MILLIONS FOR SPECIAL EFFECTS ! FARTHINGS FOR A BELIEVABLE SCRIPT
This movie is worse than a waste of time. It's poisonous. It is insulting to the spirit of a father's love for his children, which is supposed to be a pillar of American society. It is as if Gloria Steinem was the ghost-writer here. "The War Of The Worlds", 2005, is nihilistic. It's disagreeable and demeaning and somebody needs to ask Mr. Steven Spielberg the seminal question of the Twentieth Century, now passed, concerning his version of "The War Of The Worlds" --
"Was This Trip Really Necessary ?"
RG
Saw it today in Corsicana, Texas, where any ticket before 6PM is $2.
Gad! Was I overcharged for this POS!
Why didn't Spielberg just do it as written by Wells set in the years just before World War One? That could have been a great film, but no... We get this phony photoplay of Tom Cruise and his three emotions of the week.
Puleeeeze. I know Hollywood is as anti-Christian at times as you can get but this seems majorly hyperbolic.
I liked the movie. It certainly kept one's attention.
(Although I thought they could have edited out 4 or 5 of the young girl's screams.)
Why can't they make a decent movie based on one of the books by Rober Heinlein? Starship Troopers doesn't count: it wasn't based on the book, and it was a lousy movie.
On a related note, comparing War of the Worlds and Starship Troopers: Why is it that when hollywood makes a movie based on a work of a libertarian like R.A. Heinlein, they allow a hacky scriptwriter to butcher it, but when they base a movie off a work of a socialist like H.G. Wells, nothing is so important as "staying true to the book"?
Um...no it isn't. The film is clearly set in the fall. Is the author confusing this movie with Independence Day?
This essay is simply awful.
I thought the movie was ok. I live in the UK. My girlfriend is Swiss/Italian. We saw the film together.
One line in the movie had Tom Cruise explaining to his son that the tripod had come from 'somewhere else'. His son replies with his own question- 'Somewhere else- like Europe?' We both thought that was hilarious.
Is this guy serious? He's reading waaaaay too much into the film. This is why I've really had to back away from politics. Because you turn into people like the author, looking for political meaning in everything. Enjoy the damn film for what it is.
So Spielberg thinks aliens would have more respect for the homes of the rich than they would for the homes of the poor?
How utterly moronic.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, most of th eattempts I've seen to find a deep political subtext in this film have been unconvincing. Van Buren?
Boy, that article tells us a lot more about the author than it does about War of the Worlds. I saw WOW on Sunday and it was exactly what I expected - a popcorn flick. It was pretty much on par with Independence Day but had better special effects and worse acting. Both WOW and ID had plot holes big enough to drive a truck through, but, so what? These movies are just to entertain you for a couple of hours and then be forgotten. (by the way, does Tim Robbins have any acting style other than mumbling and shuffling? Robbins is without a doubt the most overrated actor in Hollywood)
This review is whacked.
Funny, I read a different review that stressed the reviewer's assessment that Spielberg had gone well out of his way to AVOID making a political statement (and I largely concur). I guess people with axes to grind will always find something to pick at.
I thought it was a terrific film.
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.