What follows is a review of the film as screened at the LA premiere on June 27. I have tried to avoid all major story spoilers so not to ruin your own discovery of the film.

WAR OF THE WORLDS Film Review ::  JUNE 28 2005 ::

The war is finally on. Director Steven Spielberg, screenwriter David Koepp (by way of classic novelist H.G. Wells) and star Tom Cruise have unleashed a taut, gripping assault on audiences who likely do not expect this well-conceived surprise attack.

For Spielberg fans and cinemaphiles, WAR OF THE WORLDS resounds across his career path, harkening back to the feel of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the tight and nearly relentless pacing of Jaws, yet seamlessly conversant with the battlefield generalship of Saving Private Ryan. His new alien epic offers the “best of Spielberg” in many ways, yet his direction and storytelling skills also stand very definitely alone to service this modern drama of destruction and redemption at hand.

Tom Cruise gives one of his most measured and mature performances, even though his character often acts quite the opposite early in the story; it’s the believable transition between these two extremes in failed father Ray Ferrier that is Cruise’s greatest success in the film. I can’t tell if playing a character so definitely not in control of his world was an acting challenge for Cruise, but it certainly exposed skills and patience not seen in a good portion of his previous work. Part of this result may well be Cruise’s actual, inevitable maturation as an actor and individual; but whatever the cause, the timing of this role in his career could not have been better matched.

Despite a massive alien invasion of Earth, WAR OF THE WORLDS is as much a battle between a parent and his children — how they work against and with each other mirrors the monstrous devastation surrounding them, and in the final endgame, Ray must save his family before he can successfully make his small contribution to saving the world for their sake. Yet wisely, the story does not follow the arc of growth in Ray alone: his fate and future are immovably intertwined with his children, and theirs with him. If nothing else, WAR OF THE WORLDS embodies the themes of interdependence, co-existence, and especially family in both its most specific and broadest terms. Accordingly, kudos are due to actor Justin Chatwin portraying Ray’s teen son Robbie, and highest praise to young Dakota Fanning, whose naturalistic excellence as Ray’s young daughter Rachel truly shows her skill and power as a child actor with the brightest of futures.

Both Miranda Otto’s and Tim Robbins’ brief roles are nevertheless linchpins on which keys to the story hinge. As Mary Ann, Ray’s disappointed and remarried ex-wife, Miranda Otto sets up the central plot by exposing Ray’s weaknesses as a parent as she drops off their children for the weekend in his care. Mary Ann’s disaffection for her ex-husband is enacted as a ship that’s long since sailed (or sunk), but she offers a glimpse of her deeply stoked ember of hope that Ray still could salvage himself as a father during such an obligatory weekend-with-Dad. In the end, Ray proves her right, especially when directly challenged on that count later in the film by war-shaken survivor, Harlan Ogilvy. Tim Robbins invests Ogilvy with a façade of survivalist strength, braced up by a hidden foundation of blind fear and mad obsession. Robbins’ work plays more subtly than expected, likely to the betterment of his basement set-piece scenes: going over the top would deflate rather than heighten the psychological war between Ogilvy and Ray. However, the end result of his scenes mostly serve the story’s goal of developing Ray into the father he should and could be, rather than impressing Ogilvy as a central character next to him. Still, crucial and well-acted supporting roles by both performers.

Steve Spielberg and David Koepp are quite faithful in adapting H.G. Wells watershed of science fiction literature, but only and skillfully to the point that it feeds their own tale to be told. Sure, WAR OF THE WORLDS delivers plenty of eye-popping, jaw-dropping special effects to dazzle audiences into amazement, and often stun them into grim silence. But unlike many such sci-fi spectaculars, these disquietingly real images all grow directly out of the story’s spine, instead of becoming frame stuffers of an empty film. The cumulative impact of these sequences and war action battles deepen and darken the story and its characters: just as Ray Ferrier, his distant son and fragile daughter change, adapt or retreat from every new horror they see, so too does the audience follow their psychological and emotional decent.

I can’t think of a recent film that resonates so clearly as a cinematic landmark of post-9/11 era, yet it never directly refers to that specific, historic event. Evidence abounds that these characters and this small New Jersey slice of the world exist after the World Trade Center calamity: once the alien war machines are officially in business dealing death at will, teenage Robbie can only add together the social disruption, human panic and his own father’s terror to sum up that it’s a terrorist attack. His young memory has no other context in which to put such widespread, devastating events. But both Ray and the audience know, in fact, that it’s much worse than that, which brings up perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the film’s reliance on our shared post-9/11 consciousness. While September 11th is a permanent benchmark of national tragedy with individual doses of personal horror included, Spielberg and Cruise offer a subtly stunning moment in the mask of fear Ray wears as he frantically drives his children away from danger — how quickly the dark milestone of the WTC attack could be eclipsed by a greater nightmare in the lives of these characters. It can and will get much worse for Ray and his family, not to mention the entire world’s population, and Spielberg delivers the brutal war of worlds as promised.

War it definitely is, and unlike Spielberg’s happier alien visitation sagas, this time he pulls no punches whatsoever in exposing the harsh reality and human tragedy in an alien encounter of the worst kind. Gone are the special effects eye-candy found in featherweight films like Independence Day and such summer spectacles; replaced with a realistic, pseudo-documentary style of filming battle much more akin to the hyper-reality of Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg designs moments in various attack scenes simply to shock or startle you out of complacency, so his audience does not, cannot settle back in comfort to enjoy the pyrotechnics of alien tripods stampeding and dissolving humanity before them. A salute to the director and his wizards of ILM for tempering the use of CG effects to emphasize the dramatic reality of the story, rather than rise above it for sheer visual virtuosity. Spielberg’s realistic approach deepens the human story being told, and therefore makes the otherwise fantastic alien assault seem quite believable, reinvesting that energy back into the palpable plight of our main characters.

Fans of John Williams’ seemingly countless scores for Steven Spielberg films will no doubt enjoy his WAR OF THE WORLDS score as well. Like the film, Williams harkens back to the styles and spare boldness of his work from the 1970s while remaining entirely compatible with his modern works. Whether it’s the compositional forcefulness reminiscent of Close Encounters, or the relentless high-energy menace of Jaws, these new pieces blend with and support the visual saga with brash power and moments of purely emotional expression. Williams never attempts to direct audience reaction with his score, which skillfully avoids competing with the film it serves; his orchestrations meet each moment and strengthen them. In this sense, WAR may be one of Williams’ least commercial soundtracks — no heroic Star Wars theme or Raiders march to walk out humming — but this likely makes it one of his stronger pure film scores for that fact.

Overall, the key to WAR OF THE WORLDS’ stunning success as a science fiction/horror tale is Spielberg and Koepp’s choice to limit the invasion to a personal level of perception. Happily discarding the obligatory shots of world landmarks being detonated by heat-ray blasts, and abandoning the hackneyed, hollow scenes of generals barking tactical orders to faceless, lifeless soldier stand-ins, this film rivets itself to the failures and victories of a lost family wading through an epic war. Humanity is destroyed, incinerated, and crushed by the alien warriors, but never forsaken by the filmmakers at the helm of this tense drama. WAR OF THE WORLDS is, on many levels, so much more than a popcorn-puffed summer blockbuster, and perhaps this trait alone will ensure its success and appeal at this season’s box office.

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