War Of The Worlds

USA, 2005. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Justin Chatwin, Tim Robbins, Miranda Otto.

Spielberg’s version of the 1898 novel by H. G. Wells updates the original and, despite some spectacular sequences and special effects, is a surprisingly sombre affair which is as much concerned with fractured families as it is with aliens. Tom Cruise stars as Ray, a blue collar father divorced from his wife Mary Ann (Miranda Otto) and separated from his children Rachel and Robbie (Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin). As the film starts they are being dropped off by their mother to spend the weekend with him. We quickly gather he’s not the most diligent of fathers – his place is a bit of a dump and neither of the children show much respect for him. Within a few hours disaster strikes the neighbourhood when alien machines, in the form of gigantic tripods, break out from under the ground and start to create havoc, causing death and destruction as they systematically zap everyone and everything in sight. Ray subsequently grabs his kids and they take off in a stolen car to try to find Mary Ann. The bulk of the film then follows them as they move from one dangerous and terrifying situation to another, with the crisis of the alien invasion forming the backdrop to the domestic crisis of Ray finding himself forced into parental responsibility such as he could never have envisaged. Tim Robbins turns up about half-way through as a crazed survivalist who offers them shelter but who quickly becomes dangerous to them. With this director you expect a highly accomplished movie, and this one is no exception, although its mood is downbeat and is not quite up to the high standard he has set himself. My favourite line, in a film with little humour, comes early on when Robbie asks his dad if the aliens are terrorists. “No, they’re from some place else,” says Ray, to which his son asks: “You mean, like Europe?” Trivia: the stars of the 1953 version, Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, appear in the final scene as the children’s grandparents.