The War of the Worlds (2005)

When I first saw Steven Spielberg's adaptation of The War of the Worlds, it was late at night at a drive-in theater on a sort of awkward double date (back in high school). The first of the double feature was Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which I remember liking quite a bit at the time. The War of the Worlds wound up being the movie in which everyone except me fell asleep during.

My feelings about both of those movies have essentially swapped! After watching Tom Cruise in Oblivion and having spent the greater part of the past five years playing Mass Effect, I figured it was time to give The War of the Worlds another shot.

To begin with, I haven't actually read the book,  despite my love of science fiction. I just don't care that much about the book. It was innovative and important (and Wells seemed to predict with disturbing foresight that there would soon be total warfare with no regard toward human life); it just doesn't quite do it for me as an epic adventure story.

See, here's my thing: you have this incredibly epic backdrop, right? Earth is being invaded by Martians. The entire world is screwed. No place is safe. It's this huge, all-encompassing event. And yet we don't hear about these events unfolding from people actively trying to understand and counter the attack. We hear about it from relative nobodies. They take this huge, event and use it to frame their small, intimate story. I can't help but feel that this "Tom Cruise is a crappy dad who just wants to reconnect with his children" story is not the story that I want to be watching. It constantly feels like the story I really want keeps happening off screen.

Of course, it's this way in the book and the classic 1953 version too. My complaint extends to all of those, too. It just seemed especially noticeable here with the giant action sequences.

Though there were several things I grumbled at (the look of the aliens themselves, the return of Robbie at the end, the tripods rising from underground), there were a surprising amount of things that I thought were cool. It was clever how Ray figured they had no shields left when he noticed birds landing on the tripods. And earlier when the attack started, he got home covered in the dust of disintegrated people. Though the smaller sized story of Ray and his children didn't much appeal to me (especially in the foreground of a large-scale alien invasion of Earth), I did appreciate that they made Tom Cruise's character kind of unlikeable. He's not a very good father and you can see it. He's actually not all that likeable throughout the trip up to Boston. As he's trying to be responsible and take care of his kids amongst all the chaos, he still is quick to frustration. He shouts at his kids and gets visibly angry to the point of throwing things (baseballs, peanut butter sandwiches, et cetera). Still, that was not the story that felt like it needed to be told. (I guess - and I know this is going to sound blasphemous - I want The War of the Worlds to be just a little bit more like Independence Day where you get to see the story of the people who are trying to save the planet.)

The special effects look a bit dated, which seems kind of strange to say for a movie that is barely ten years old yet. Still, you can't help but notice some rough edges to them as you watch it today. It's a little unfortunate too that they seemed to forgo practical effects, just to do everything in post with CGI. In the same sequence of events, they do an homage to the 1953 feature with the long, alien periscope searching through the house, but then proceed to drag it out too long for its own good. As soon as the anxiety from the periscope disappears, they send in two actual aliens on foot to try and bring that anxiety back for a few more minutes. It was a little overkill (and a little disappointing that they couldn't use a cool looking practical effect for the periscope). They do lift a shot straight up from 28 Days Later (they confuse the alien periscope by hiding behind a mirror - straight copy of the scene when Hannah hides from the infected soldier behind the mirror), but overall it was pretty well done.

If you really liked any version of The War of the Worlds, I don't see any reason why you wouldn't also enjoy Spielberg's version. Perhaps you won't necessarily like the ties to the war on terror that they also kind of beat you over the head with, but this story was always sort of political.

My only other complaint is also one that just generally ties to every version of this, but is especially noticeable in the 2005 adaptation: the bacteria cause of death never really made much sense to me. Spielberg's take on it is that the tripods must have been buried deep underground a very, very long time ago (as suggested by the opening narration and a couple of people throughout the movie). Ok, so, these aliens have been so intelligent and so scientifically advanced for so long that they not only could travel in space ages before we could, but they also produced these incredible pieces of technology. And yet, they didn't know bacteria was a thing? Even more, they were already on Earth! Shouldn't the bacteria have killed them already, or, they became immune to it?

I know the point was that sometimes we seem to overvalue our intelligence, but c'mon. When you really think about it and reflect on human history, doesn't it make a little more sense for it to be the other way around? Shouldn't the Martians have brought alien diseases into our ecosystem that killed us? Hasn't that usually been the case in human history when a more advanced society invades another country? Additionally, look at natural history. When do you really see foreign things introduced to an established ecosystem and find that that foreign thing is what gets wiped out? Isn't it more often that that foreign object infects and begins to change the established ecosystem?


Overall, I still prefer the 1953 adaptation, but Spielberg's The War of the Worlds is on par with it. Definitely worth a rewatch if you haven't seen it in a while. It's probably better than you remember it being.