This Steven Spielberg Movie About An Alien Invasion Is Underrated
War of the Worlds is a 2005 science fiction film directed by Steven Spielberg based on the fiction novel The War of the Worlds by author H. G. Wells originally published in 1898. Most of the people who have seen this film would say that it is a pretty average movie. It's got some fun moments, some cool concepts, and great action scenes. And other than that, there's not much to this film. But War of the Worlds is actually a really good movie with suspenseful scenes and a unique premise. The characters have each got their own stories, and there aren't any dull moments.
The War of The Worlds film starts by introducing all of the characters. We learn very quickly that this is a dysfunctional family that are all estranged from one another because of divorce. But Ray (played by Tom Cruise) and his children (played by Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin) are forced to become a family when the alien invasion begins and they have to survive together. During a freak lightning storm, aliens are teleported into machines—or spaceships—that have been underground for thousands of years.
Then, they rise from the ground to destroy all humans, most likely for the purpose of claiming the earth for themselves. Much like movies about space travel made by humans, one of the most used conflicts in storytelling is when a group travels to an unexplored planet to test if it is habitable, only to find out that the atmosphere causes them harm. And so, the alien invasion ends almost as quickly as it begins because the creatures cannot breathe with the bacteria in the air, which makes them sick.
One of the most terrifying aspects of this story (although not explicitly mentioned in the movie) is the fact that the aliens were only interested in humans as food. Many years ago, when the human population was not as large, the aliens decided to wait to invade earth until there were more people. So they buried their tripod ships. Now that there are plenty of people, the creatures decided to begin. There are fighting tripods to use against military forces, but there are also harvesting tripods used to capture humans. The humans are then ground into a pulp and either consumed directly, or sprayed onto crops (the red veins) so they can grow.
Steven Spielberg kept a bit of mystery in the movie by not addressing this directly, opting to save the reveal of what the aliens were spraying until later when the characters noticed it was blood. Not only did Spielberg give his film mystery and suspense through withholding information from the audience, but also through the sound design. When the invasion starts, and throughout the movie when an attack starts, the tripods will sound a horn. Because of their massive size, the horns are loud and echo across the distance. It creates a feeling of fear and dread. And seeing this all from the perspective of one family put viewers into the film by whichever character they identify with most.
When the harvest tripods are collecting humans, the machines sound just like sounds one would hear in a factory or on a farm. It adds to the feeling of panic and despair one would feel in a situation where humans are no longer at the top of the food chain and are slaughtered like cattle. Going hand in hand with good sound design is the perfectly envisioned and realized creature design of the tripods. The visual effects team's decision to create a tripod that had a similar design to a stereotypical alien head (so they were instantly recognizable to an audience) and then fill that tripod with creatures with the same head shape as their ships was ingenious.
In profile, the tripods look like aliens with very large heads, a small body with a thorax of some kind, and long tentacle-like legs. Facing the tripod directly, the large face looks like it has three glowing eyes. All of this makes them look so inhuman that they inspire true fear in anyone who looks at them. And the actors in Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds do a convincing job of displaying the terror they would certainly be feeling. Tom Cruise is a wonderful lead—his role as a distant father who was a little immature and lazy is believable. But when the invasion begins, he convinces the audience that what is happening is frightening.
And when Tom Cruise's character Ray starts to show just how much he really does care about his children, his love for them is transparent. There are so many terrifying scenes in Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, and the family dynamic that is present in many Spielberg movies is done well. The creature and sound designs were crafted beautifully. The acting is believable. That scene at the ferry is one of the scariest sequences ever seen in any alien movie, alongside the scene in the basement. And that plane crash set-piece was absolutely tremendous. Though there does seem to be a disconnect between the first and second half of the movie with a strange plotline of Robbie wanting to join the fight with no experience, this movie is definitely a classic and worth remembering fondly.
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