Produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Colin Wilson

Cast: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto, Tim Robbins, Justin Chatwin, Anne Robinson, Gene Barry.

Apocalyptic films generally echo a societal fear. When H.G.Wells’ The War of the Worlds was first published in 1898, England was looking askance at Germany’s Kaiser William II’s anti-British stance and naval expansion. In 1953 when the first film version of The War of the Worlds, directed by Byron Haskin, was released, America had just emerged from the Korean War, and McCarthyism and fear of communism were still rife. This War of the Worlds directed by Steven Spielberg is reminiscent of 9/11, mainly in the scenes of terrified crowds running through streets from toppled buildings and a shocked Tom Cruise covered with white dust. The first questions, when the streets start to rip up from underneath and buildings split, concern the possibility of terrorist attack. The attack, however, is everywhere at once. It’s unstoppable and devastating. “These things,” says Tim Robbins’ creepy character Harlan Ogilvy, “were here before there were people. It’s not a war. It’s an extermination.”

The film has an impressive impact. Concentrating mainly on the survival efforts of one family and successfully avoiding many of the hackneyed disaster shots of other end-of-the-world epics, the movie allows us to experience the alien attack at a personal level. And the aliens themselves are frighteningly strange, as well as their huge tripod war-machines, the design of which recalls Wells’ original illustrations for his book. There’s something logical yet incomprehensibly ‘other’ for us as bipeds that these creatures have three appendages they use as both legs and arms, where we have two legs and two arms; and three fingers on each hand where we have five.  Their skin looks unappealingly slimy, their digits like a gecko’s, their spines curved and bony like a chameleon’s, their eyes and heads triangular like a giant insect’s. Convincingly nasty and apparently literally blood-thirsty, they could not be less like ET, or the friendly little aliens of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Spielberg has tremendous skill in extending the ordinary and everyday into fantasy or terror. Soon after the divorced Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), inadequate father of teenage Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and 10-year-old Rachel (Dakota Fanning), takes his kids for an infrequent weekend visit, violent electrical storms descend on their city. At first everyone comes out to look. The winds are fierce and blowing weirdly towards the storm. And the lightning, which everyone knows is not supposed to hit more than once in the same spot, persists repeatedly in pulsing electricity (and something else) into the Earth’s surface. Then the sounds: thunderous bass booming of gigantic motors, grinding metal screaming which fills the air. The alien ships are buried below the roads and buildings of civilisation and burst out in volcanic, earthquake fashion, rippling streets and cleaving building apart.

Ray has promised his ex-wife Mary Ann (Miranda Otto), pregnant to her new husband, that he will take care of their kids: something he has not proved he can do before this. The cataclysmic events are a test of his determination to save his family, shocking him out of his immature selfishness into responsibility. He’s no hero, and anyway, the better part of valour here appears to be flight, although it’s not clear where they can flee to. Teenage Robbie is both resentful and judgmental of his father’s inadequacy, arguing furiously over every decision. Ray, who has neither the children’s love nor their respect, must urgently get both in order to get them to safety. Rachel is simply utterly shocked and perpetually terrified, screaming the high-pitched, hysterical scream of a child scared out of her wits, as well she may be. It’s something we haven’t seen the extraordinarily mature and nuanced Dakota Fanning do much before, act like a helpless child. Here with Tom Cruise she runs the gamut between wise-child and hysteria and even to a brief catatonia, eliciting more emotion in his role than we are used to seeing in him.

Tim Robbins plays Harlan Ogilvy, a man deranged by the loss of his entire family, who gives Rachel and Ray shelter in his basement for a time. Robbins gives Ogilvy an alarming, barely contained intensity, his sanity on the edge. One of the most spine-chilling sequences occurs here, with the alien ship’s probing eye on its telescoping mechanical arm scoping out the basement, where the humans must stay stock still and barely breathing. Then the aliens, slimily weird, sometimes looking larger than humans and sometimes smaller, come down to forage. Ogilvy and Ray wrestle silently with gritted teeth over the shotgun Ogilvy want to use to blast the aliens away.

Morgan Freeman narrates both the beginning preamble “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own...” and the post-script in sepulchral, portentous tones that give an old-fashioned feel which the movie doesn’t need, even as a tribute to Wells. However, for the most part the significant amount of ‘tribute’ to the original segues in well with the new elements. It was fun to see original actors Gene Barry and Ann Robinson cameo as Mary Ann’s parents.

The ending has always been an anti-climax, and by adhering to the original story not even Spielberg could save it. Perhaps in 1898 the randomness and subtlety of the ironic twist at the end was sufficient. I suspect today’s audiences might want something more decisive, indicating, however illusorily, that in the end we are more dominantly in control. The Tripods have this in common with terrorists: it is impossible to predict where and when they will exactly strike, and it is apparently impossible to prevent or stop them. The irony rests in that the Tripods are undone by what they themselves have not been able to predict. The randomness of the resolution is actually one of the scariest elements of the story because, like being watched from outer space by hostile forces, we have no control over it.

For me the impact of the movie is always tested outside, on the way home. The deep bass rumbling of the Mercedes bus motors in the street outside the theatre echoed the sonorous booming of the thunderous Tripods, as the amplified screech and sigh of air-brakes echoed the scream of grinding metal in the movie. A heightened audio sense was matched by a sense of how tiny I was looking up at tall buildings in the city, over which, in the movie, the Tripods soared, crashing their enormous three toed ‘feet’ down onto cars, people and buildings. Memories of scores of running, tiny, ant-like people seen from the Tripods’ lofty viewpoint juxtaposed with the terrifying view from beneath them. And the black clouded sky with a tinge of red (it’s winter in Sydney at the moment) reminded me of the ominous sky in the movie. When my perceptions are altered and my awareness deepened like this after a movie it’s great fun, even if I can’t quite feel the same threat in my world as the movie carried.

© Avril Carruthers                              27^th June 2005