In the Flesh: War of the Worlds (2005)

The best part of War of the Worlds is something we’ve seen before. In a dank and dripping basement strewn with the detritus of the life of one Harlan Ogilvy (Tim Robbins), a serpentine alien probe hunts father Ray (Tom Cruise) and daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) through a labyrinth of crumbling walls. It’s a good scene, tense and imaginative, but it’s impossible not to think of Jurassic Park’s kitchen sequence, a much tighter and more gripping nightmare. The sole improvement here is the addition of Harlan, whose PTSD flashback triggers an impulse to attack, leading to a grueling silent struggle between the Vietnam vet and a terrified Ray. The split in action between the probe and the alien invaders which follow its inspection effectively kills the scene’s tension, especially given the aliens’ lackluster design. Replacing a cold, menacing predatory presence with a trio of vaguely unsettling monkey-squids is the kind of more-is-more mistake you see directors make when they start working with heavy CGI, and War is Spielberg’s first foray into the post-Star Wars prequels and Lord of the Rings cinematic landscape.

The rest of the film is a decidedly mixed bag. The CGI devastation is some of the best and most impactful in disaster cinema, from the spectacle of the Brooklyn Bridge heaving and flapping like a sheet in the wind to the jaw-dropping horror of the Hudson River Ferry overturning mid-transit. Cars plunge into the water like diving birds. The effects, however, aren’t all there, and strike an unconvincing tone in scenes of military engagement with the tripods and long-distance shots of the great machines at work. Fanning is note-perfect as a slightly spoiled and anxious child of divorce, and Cruise works as a detached and listless father watching his relationship to his children evaporate. When it comes to Robbins’ role, and to Justin Chatwin’s as the teenage Robbie, though, Josh Friedman and David Koepp’s script really starts to show its weakness. Take Robbie’s rebellious desire to abandon his father and sister and join the military. Until the moment he first expresses the need, the only characterization we’ve had from him is that he dislikes his dad and is a loving older brother to his sister. Suddenly he wants to leave her with a man he knows is ill-equipped to take care of her so he can go off and die fighting? It’s thin, and it detracts from the familial elements Spielberg clearly intends to serve as the film’s backbone.

And Harlan? Robbins does game work as the disturbed army veteran, but his breakdown is full of belabored writing. The way he rants about the aliens mulching human prisoners and misting the ground with their blood to nourish their xenoforming efforts feels like exposition in a shitty video game. To boot, the script preserves Welles’ original ending and “twist”, which to modern ears plays as overwhelmingly quaint. I’m not one to pick nits, but you can’t show us a civilization capable of transmitting matter through lightning and transforming a planet virtually overnight and then expect us to believe they didn’t know about germs. The stuff around mass hysteria and mob behavior is probably the script’s strongest material. The scene in which the Ferrier family’s stolen van is in turn stolen from them by an armed mob really sells that feeling of unreasoning terror that comes over a group when everyone realizes as one that there isn’t enough of a vital resource to go around. The twist with Ray;’s abandoned gun is perfectly timed, too. War of the Worlds is fundamentally flawed and overly simplistic, but they sure don’t make ‘em like this anymore.