Intergalatic Conflict Strikes Home

These days, blowing up monuments in big-budget action movies has lost the visceral thrill it once offered audiences.

Luckily, Steven Spielberg’s sparkling new version of H. G. Wells’ anti-colonialist sci-fi bonanza, “The War of the Worlds,” avoids the cliché pratfalls that have been the peril of many an ambitious epic. As he destroys Planet Earth, Spielberg spares us images of the White House splintering to pieces or blustery generals ordering tanks and fighter jets into battle; instead, we see the horrors through the eyes of Spielberg’s everyman hero, Ray Ferreira (Tom Cruise).

To give a more intimate sense of the global destruction, Spielberg and his screenwriters David Koepp (“Jurassic Park”) and Josh Friedman (“Chain Reaction”) set the action in a small New Jersey town. We can identify with an inhabitant of this anonymous location, finding redemption in the midst of an alien invasion, much more than we could with a suave New Yorker. That explains why Spielberg introduces us to Ferreira, a barely involved father of two.

He certainly is no super-parent: his children, the detached teenager Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and the snarky Rachel (Dakota Fanning) both seem to resent and distrust him, even as airplanes fall from the sky and neighbors get vaporized with lasers. Apparently it’s hard to appease the wrath of bratty children. “War of the Worlds” ultimately becomes the story of the reconciliation between parent and children; everything else is just trappings.

While the Ferreira children cope with the ordeal of spending a weekend with their father (Ray is divorced), the earth suddenly faces the somewhat more daunting ordeal of death-dealing tripod machines rising from the ground and massacring innocent bystanders. Apparently, the tripods were buried by malevolent aliens centuries earlier, and have now been activated by the evil extraterrestials. Cruise’s character appears to possess no special powers that equip him to survive an alien attack, other than being able to unload shipyard cargo very fast and having the skills of an excellent auto mechanic. (There’s a V-8 engine sitting near his kitchen table.) I’m guessing his character was product placement by the UAW.

Despite his odd off-screen romance with starlet Katie Holmes, it’s impossible to dislike Cruise, and his character’s shortcomings as a parent are quickly forgiven once people start dying. His children continue to oppose him in the movie, though, and you frequently wish that he’d just ditch them, or at least put a muzzle on Fanning to stop the shrieking.

There aren’t many chances for the acting in the film to impress audiences. The character development is satisfactory but not great: actors spend the vast majority of the movie running, swimming, stumbling, and hiding away from the deadly tripod machines. But the brief development and Cruise’s natural charisma are enough to keep the audience’s sympathy—and attention.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many scenes in the movie are similar to Spielberg’s other films in the action genre. A digital eye on a metallic stalk that tracks the characters around a decrepit basement acts very much like one of Jurassic Park’s velociraptors in one scene. The aliens are two shades darker than E.T.

Spielberg makes a visual argument for the ugliness of the human character under pressure. The theft of a minivan; thousands of people left behind to die as tripods approach the ferry; and the descent into apparent madness by Ogilvy (Tim Robbins), one of Ferreira’s acquaintances during his flight from the aliens, all show how the instinct to survive can generate repulsive behavior.

The anti-colonialist message of the original novel is present, if diminished, in Spielberg’s rendition. A more evident comparison, though, is Spielberg’s portrayals of scenes of panic, reminding Americans of the real-life public crisis on Sept. 11, 2001.

The “unsympathetic intellects” are initially terrifying but, in many ways, seem quite stupid. It is never made clear why a species that traveled millions of miles to reach earth would decide to drink water from a festering pool in an abandoned basement—or even why it would travel to earth in the first place. Nor is it made entirely clear why, after the aliens spent the first half of the movie vaporizing people into ashes, they suddenly decide to harvest humans as fertilizer for crops that resemble dried viscera.

The missteps and mysteries are not enough to distract from the overall effect of the film, however. “War of the Worlds” has all the makings of a summer blockbuster. It’s less than two hours long, visually stunning, and will satisfy everyone who really wants to see things blow up.

—Staff writer Joshua P. Rogers can be reached at jprogers@fas.harvard.edu.