War of the Worlds (2005)
H. G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1898, and the story has never quite left us alone since. Orson Welles sent radio listeners into a panic with his 1938 broadcast adaptation, Byron Haskin put it on screen in 1953, and Jeff Wayne turned it into a prog-rock concept album that still fills arenas. By the time Steven Spielberg came to it in 2005, the source material was already one of the most adapted properties in popular fiction, which meant the challenge was not simply to tell the story but to find a reason to tell it again. The answer Spielberg and his screenwriters David Koepp and Josh Friedman settled on was to strip it of grandeur and make it personal: no generals, no presidents, no global overview, just one unexceptional man, Ray Ferrier, trying to keep his children alive. The result, produced through a collaboration between Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks, Amblin Entertainment and Cruise/Wagner Productions, arrived that summer on a reported budget of around 132 million dollars and took well over six hundred million worldwide.
Spielberg is, of course, one of the defining figures of American popular cinema, and this film sits in an interesting part of his catalogue. It comes after a run of more sombre, prestige-minded work and shares a certain tonal anxiety with those pictures, even as it operates in the disaster-movie register he more or less invented with Jaws. His early television film Duel is worth keeping in mind here too: that stripped-down story of a man hunted by an unseen, implacable force anticipates almost everything War of the Worlds is doing at its best. What is different in 2005 is the scale, the post-September 11 atmosphere (the ash, the missing-persons posters, the crowds moving in dazed columns), and the weight of expectation that comes with Tom Cruise above the title. Koepp and Friedman's script is faithful to the spirit of Wells while relocating everything to the American east coast and giving Ray a domestic backstory, an estranged son played by Justin Chatwin and a young daughter played by Dakota Fanning, which grounds the invasion in something recognisably human before the sky falls in.
Spielberg's regular cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, who has shot every Spielberg feature since Saving Private Ryan, brings a particular texture to the film: blown-out skies, desaturated colour in the chaos sequences, a handheld restlessness during the attack scenes that contrasts with steadier, more classical framing in the quieter passages. The imagery has a scorched, almost documentary quality at times, which suits the film's ambition to make the alien invasion feel less like spectacle and more like catastrophe. John Williams provides the score, and it is worth noting that his approach here is notably less melodic than his work on, say, Close Encounters of the Third Kind: where that film reaches for the transcendent, this one settles into dread, the music functioning more as texture and atmosphere than as theme. Editor Michael Kahn, another long-standing Spielberg collaborator, keeps the cutting tight and purposeful through the action passages, though the pacing in the film's second half has been a point of discussion since release.
Miranda Otto and Tim Robbins round out the principal cast in roles of varying size, and Cruise, for his part, is working in a register he does not always choose: reactive, frightened, morally ambiguous. Whether that choice pays off is, I think, something worth sitting with before you reach the review below. I also covered the Cruise machine at a rather different pitch in my write-up of The Last Samurai, if a comparison is useful.
Twenty years on, the thing that stays with me about War of the Worlds is not the story, which builds and builds and then simply gives up, but the craft.
I caught it on release and remembered almost none of it, so when my wife, who loves the original Orson Welles story, suggested a rewatch, we sat down to it again. What struck me this time was how much of Spielberg's technical mastery still holds up, and how badly the film around it lets that mastery down.
The effects, for 2005, are extraordinary, and they have aged far better than they had any right to. The sound is better still. Those alien tripods make a noise so deep and dread-inducing that I have no doubt whatsoever it was the main inspiration for the Reapers in Mass Effect, and it is comfortably the best thing in the film. The creature and machine design, meanwhile, kept putting me in mind of Independence Day, which I rated a couple of notches lower, almost as though Hollywood spent those years rehearsing us for the real thing.
The performances mostly do their job. Tom Cruise is reliably committed, a young Dakota Fanning is excellent as his terrified daughter, and Tim Robbins makes a strong impression when he turns up in the back half. The exception, and it is a glaring one, is Justin Chatwin as the teenage son, who never once convinced me and tipped over into being actively irritating every time the film leaned on him.
Which leaves the story, and the story is where it comes undone. It winds the tension tighter and tighter and then, at the very point it should pay off, it just stops. As I have said before, it is the deep breath before a sneeze, without the sneeze. Nor does it help that the resolution, faithful though it is to Wells, asks me to accept that a species clever enough to watch us across the cosmos for millions of years never once reckoned with the smallest living things on the planet it came to take. That is a hard sell. And yet the sheer quality of the film-making keeps it afloat regardless. Three and a half stars: a technical marvel wrapped around a story that runs out of road.
War of the Worlds remains a genuinely odd artefact in Spielberg's filmography: polished but frustrated, technically assured in ways that still impress two decades later, yet tethered to a structure that struggles to deliver on what the first hour promises. It is the kind of film that generates more conversation in the car home than it does sitting in front of it, which is perhaps fitting for a story that has always been less about alien invasion and more about what catastrophe reveals in the people it sweeps up. The craft is not in question. Whether the film earns it is another matter entirely.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2005 | Watched: 2026-09-12
Trailer
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