Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on June 29, 2005, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
“Nothing on Earth will prepare you” for War of the Worlds, claim the advance ads—certainly not all the ridiculous hoopla over its star and his love life. All this has served as a distraction from the movie at hand, which may actually prove to be a good thing. Between that and the rep Spielberg has in some circles, there are likely to be a lot of surprised and stunned people once they’ve seen War this weekend. This is the director applying his Saving Private Ryan approach to genre material, which he usually treats with a somewhat lighter hand, and it proves that a movie can be down-to-the-bone frightening even on a gargantuan budget.
Usually, spectacle has a way of overpowering and even negating deep-seated terror, but Spielberg makes War’s big action setpieces personally harrowing by drawing on contemporary real-life fears and keeping his focus on an individual’s reaction to the terrifying threat. Specifically, the protagonist is Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), a New Jersey dockworker who’s not really one for responsibility, particularly that which comes with his children, teenaged Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and preteen Rachel (Dakota Fanning). It’s not long after his ex-wife Mary Ann (Miranda Otto) has dropped them off at his house and headed for a trip to Boston than strange stormlike phenomena begin to darken and disrupt the sky, and electronic equipment and automobiles soon go dead. Heading out to investigate, Ray and his neighbors witness an enormous, three-legged war machine erupt from the ground, mercilessly blasting humans and buildings—and that’s where Spielberg grabs you by the throat and rarely lets go for the next 100 minutes.
We’ve seen alien destruction of human civilization many times in movies before, but never with the immediacy and brute force of this War of the Worlds. Eschewing omniscient “money shots,” Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski keep the point of view in tight with Ray, plunging the audience into the mayhem. No matter how big-scale the action becomes—and it gets very big—the director and his team make the viewer an involved character rather than a detached observer. Compounding the identification is the filmmakers’ use of images resonant of 9/11—Ray returning home from the first attack covered with ash, or glimpses of walls covered with photos of lost loved ones. That’s a daring gambit for a mass-entertainment film, and Spielberg gets away with it because his theme is survival and transcendence of horrible tragedy, embodied in Ray’s struggle to protect his children and get safely to Boston to reunite with Mary Ann.
The director also proves himself, once again, a master of telling detail. There may be no filmmaker today who thinks in pictures as well as he does, and in War of the Worlds he demonstrates his ability to apply that skill to both small, intimate moments and large, overwhelming ones. For all the shock-and-awe terror of the scenes of mass devastation, some of the film’s best suspense is derived from the cat-and-mouse game played by the leads with an invading alien tentacle in a farmhouse basement—a scene reminiscent of, and just as tense as, the velociraptors-in-the-kitchen sequence from Jurassic Park. Then there’s a remarkable moment that could almost be called a throwaway if it wasn’t so large-scale; it involves a train, and that’s all I’ll reveal about that. And one of the film’s most astonishing achievements is a long single take that tracks around a speeding SUV Ray has commandeered to drive his kids to safety; it lasts a long, long time as the vehicle hurtles down a highway, dodging people and abandoned cars, and even if you can pull yourself out of the scene’s drama to try to figure out how the heck it was done, you may quickly decide you can’t, and go back to enjoying the tension.
Josh Friedman and David Koepp’s script for the new War follows the basics of H.G. Wells’ novel, incorporating several of its key events while updating it for modern times. The most notable alteration involves the occupant of that farmhouse basement; instead of the “Curate” the narrator of the book hides out with, the movie creates the character of Ogilvy, a survivalist played by Tim Robbins who is determined to strike back at the attackers once he has a chance. This lends a tense dynamic to this long stretch of the film that has nothing to do with the aliens, though it is here that we finally get a good look at them outside of their war machines. In a great touch that once again reveals how aesthetically well-thought-out the movie is—and here’s a bit of a SPOILER ALERT—we discover that the extraterrestrials have created their weapons of mass destruction in their own image.
The special FX of the creatures, their tripods and the havoc they wreak are stellar and stunning, and 100 percent believable all the way down the line. While the CGI supervised by Industrial Light & Magic’s Dennis Muren and Pablo Helman is exemplary, equal notice should be made of the physical FX coordinated by Daniel Sudick. Buildings and roads crumble, vehicles are blasted and overturned, and it all adds to the realism of the nightmarish scenario. (Some of this may have been created digitally too, in which case its seamlessness is even more impressive.) Anchoring the human element in the midst of all the chaos, Cruise gives an impassioned performance as an ordinary man forced to step beyond himself by extraordinary circumstances, and doesn’t turn the role into a typical star turn. He’s not afraid to show Ray’s weak or selfish sides, and graciously cedes scenes to some of the supporting performers, most notably Camillia Sanes as a newswoman whose footage provides a few clues about the nature of the attack. The accomplished young Fanning matches Cruise beat for beat, and Chatwin makes Robbie’s rebellion against his father convincing, even when the situation dictates they really should stick together.
The squabbling dialogue between the three is occasionally too on-the-nose, and it might stretch plausibility a bit that they consistently manage to make it out of tough scrapes together when all around them are falling victim, but these are minor quibbles in the midst of the overall picture. The only true sour note is struck by a moment during the final sequence, which negates a powerful story turn earlier in the film. Yet as Spielberg wraps up the movie in a manner that stays true to the Wells source and also brings the film full circle visually and conceptually, it’s clear we’re in the hands of a master of the craft—one who once used stories of alien visitation to spark our sense of wonder and hope, and has now decided, with equal conviction, to employ one in the service of scaring the hell out of us.
