Word of the worlds movie

War of the Worlds
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Steven Spielberg
Screenplay by	Josh Friedman David Koepp
Based on	The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
Produced by	Kathleen Kennedy Colin Wilson
Starring	Tom Cruise Dakota Fanning Miranda Otto Tim Robbins
Cinematography	Janusz Kamiński
Edited by	Michael Kahn
Music by	John Williams
Production companies	Paramount Pictures DreamWorks Pictures Amblin Entertainment Cruise/Wagner Productions
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures[a]
Release dates	June 23, 2005 (Ziegfeld Theatre) June 29, 2005 (United States)
Running time	116 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$132 million[1]
Box office	$603.9 million[1]

War of the Worlds is a 2005 American science fiction action thriller film^[2] directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, based on H. G. Wells’ 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds. It stars Tom Cruise in the main role, Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto and Tim Robbins, with narration by Morgan Freeman. It follows an American dock worker who must look after his children, from whom he lives separately, as he struggles to protect them and reunite them with their mother when extraterrestrials invade Earth and devastate cities with giant war machines.

The film was shot in 73 days, using five different sound stages as well as locations in California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia. It was surrounded by a secrecy campaign so few details would be leaked before its release. Tie-in promotions were made with several companies, including Hitachi.

War of the Worlds was released theatrically by Paramount Pictures on June 29, 2005 and received generally positive reviews, with many praising the performances (particularly those of Cruise and Fanning), Spielberg’s direction, its screenplay, dark and realistic tone, action sequences, sound design, and visual effects. It was massively successful, grossing over $603 million worldwide, making it the fourth most successful film of 2005. It also earned Academy Awards nominations for Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing.

Plot[edit]

A narrator opens the film stating that extraterrestrials with immense intelligence have grown envious of humanity’s dominion of Earth, and are plotting against them.

Divorced longshoreman Ray Ferrier works as a crane operator at a dock in Brooklyn, New York, and is estranged from his children: 10-year-old daughter Rachel, and teenage son Robbie. Ray’s pregnant former wife, Mary Ann, drops the two off at his house in Bayonne, New Jersey on her way to visit her parents in Boston. Later, a strange storm occurs during which lightning strikes multiple times into the middle of a nearby intersection, causing an EMP that instantly fries almost all electronic devices. Ray joins the crowd at the scene of the impacts, where a massive «tripod» war machine emerges from the ground and uses powerful energy weapons to destroy the area, disintegrating most of the witnesses into gray ash.

Ray collects his children, steals the only working van, and drives to Mary Ann’s empty home in suburban New Jersey to take refuge. That night, they take shelter in the basement, but they soon hear a strange roaring noise followed by an explosion that destroys the house. At daybreak, they discover that a Boeing 747 had crashed into the neighborhood. Ray meets a wandering TV news team scavenging the wreckage for food, wherein a correspondent reveals that tripods have attacked major cities around the world, and that they have force shields that protect them from humanity’s defenses. She adds that the tripods’ pilots traveled to Earth within the lightning storms to enter their machines, which were apparently buried underground for thousands of years.

Ray decides to drive the kids to Boston to be with their mother, but a desperate mob swarms their vehicle, forcing them to abandon it. They eventually get to a Hudson River ferry, only to be surrounded by tripods, which either massacre or abduct many of the refugees, but Ray’s family manages to escape. They witness US Marines engaging in a battle with some tripods. Much to Ray’s dismay, Robbie joins the futile fight against the aliens out of hatred for the invaders, while Ray and Rachel quickly flee. The Marines are obliterated, with Robbie presumed to have been killed with them. Shortly afterward, the pair are offered shelter in a nearby house by a deranged former ambulance driver named Harlan Ogilvy.

The three remain undetected for several hours, even as a tripod’s camera drone and a group of aliens explore the basement. They soon discover that the aliens have started cultivating a red-colored vegetation across the landscape that is quickly spreading. A few hours later, Harlan suffers a mental breakdown after witnessing the tripods harvesting human blood and tissue to fertilize the alien vegetation. Fearing his mad shouting will alert the aliens, Ray reluctantly kills him. A second tripod camera then catches the Ferriers sleeping, causing Rachel to flee outside and be abducted by the tripod. Chasing after the tripod, Ray grabs a belt of grenades from a destroyed military truck, then intentionally attracts the aliens’ attention and is pulled into the tripod. With the other abductees’ help, Ray destroys the tripod from within with the grenades.

A few days later, Ray and Rachel arrive in Boston, where they find the alien vegetation withering and the tripods inexplicably collapsing. When an active tripod appears, Ray notices birds landing on it, indicating that its force shields have been disabled. He alerts the soldiers escorting the fleeing crowd, who shoot it down with anti-tank missiles. As the soldiers advance on the downed tripod, a hatch opens and a pale, sickly alien struggles halfway out before dying. Ray and Rachel finally reach Mary Ann’s parents’ house, where they are reunited with Mary Ann and Robbie, who have somehow survived.

In closing, the narrator explains that the aliens died because they were vulnerable to the countless microbes that inhabit the Earth, which «God in His wisdom» placed on the planet.

Cast[edit]

Production[edit]

Development[edit]

After collaborating in 2002’s Minority Report, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise were interested in working together again. Spielberg stated about Cruise, «He’s such an intelligent, creative partner, and brings such great ideas to the set that we just spark each other. I love working with Tom Cruise.»^[3] Cruise met with Spielberg during the filming of Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002) and gave three options of films to create together, one of them being an adaptation of The War of the Worlds.^[3] Spielberg chose The War of the Worlds and stated, «We looked at each other and the lights went on. As soon as I heard it, I said ‘Oh my God! War of the Worlds – absolutely.’ That was it.»^[3]

The film is Spielberg’s third on the subject of alien visitation, along with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Producer and longtime collaborator Kathleen Kennedy notes that with War of the Worlds, Spielberg had the opportunity to explore the antithesis of the characters brought to life in E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. «When we first started developing E.T., it was a much edgier, darker story and it actually evolved into something that was more benign. I think that the edgier, darker story has always been somewhere inside him. Now, he’s telling that story.»^[3] Spielberg stated that he just thought it would be fun to make a «really scary film with really scary aliens», something which he had never done before.^[3][4] Spielberg was intent on telling a contemporary story, with Kennedy stating the story was created as a fantasy, but depicted in a hyper-realistic way.^[3]

«For the first time in my life I’m making an alien picture where there is no love and no attempt at communication.»

– Steven Spielberg[5]

J. J. Abrams was asked by Spielberg and Cruise to write the script but had to turn down the film as he was working on the pilot for his television series Lost.^[6] Josh Friedman delivered a screenplay, which was then rewritten by David Koepp.^[7][8] After re-reading the novel, Koepp decided to do the script following a single narrator, «a very limited point of view, from someone on the very periphery of events rather than someone involved in events», and created a list of elements he would not use due to being «cliché», such as the destruction of landmark buildings. Some aspects of the book were heavily adapted and condensed: Tim Robbins’ character was an amalgam of two characters in the book, with the name borrowed from a third. While changing the setting from 19th century to present day, Koepp also tried to «take the modern world back to the 1800s», with the characters being devoid of electricity and modern techniques of communication.^[9]

Spielberg accepted the script after finding it had several similarities to his personal life, including the divorce of his parents (Ray and Mary Ann’s divorce), and because the plight of the fictional survivors reflects his own uncertainty after the devastation of the September 11 attacks.^[4] For Spielberg, the characters’ stories of survival needed to be the main focus, as they featured the American mindset of never giving up.^[4] Spielberg described War of the Worlds as «a polar opposite» to Close Encounters, with that movie featuring a man leaving family to travel with aliens, while War of the Worlds focused on keeping the family together.^[4] At the same time, the aliens and their motivations would not be much explored, as «we just experience the results of these nefarious plans to replace us with themselves».^[10]

Although accepting the script, Spielberg asked for several changes. Spielberg had been against the idea of the aliens arriving in spaceships, since every alien invasion movie used such a vehicle.^[8] The original Martian cylinders were discarded, where Spielberg replaced the origins of the tripods with stating they were buried underground in the Earth long ago.^[5][8]

Spielberg had Miranda Otto in mind for the part of Mary Ann, but at the time he called her she was pregnant and thought the opportunity would be missed. Spielberg then decided to incorporate Otto’s pregnancy into the film, changing the part for her.

Filming[edit]

Filming took place in Virginia, Connecticut, New Jersey, California, and New York. The film shooting lasted an estimated 73 days.^[11] Spielberg originally intended to shoot War of the Worlds after Munich, but Tom Cruise liked David Koepp’s script so much that he suggested Spielberg postpone the former while he would do the same with Mission: Impossible III. Most of Munich’s crew was brought in to work on War of the Worlds as well.^[5] In 2004, the production crews quickly were set up on both coasts to prepare for the start date, scouting locations up and down the Eastern Seaboard and preparing stages and sets which would be used when the company returned to Los Angeles after the winter holiday. Pre-production took place in only three months, essentially half the amount of time normally allotted for a film of similar size and scope. Spielberg notes, however, «This wasn’t a cram course for War of the Worlds. This was my longest schedule in about 12 years. We took our time.»^[3] Spielberg collaborated with crews at the beginning of pre-production with the use of previsualization, considering the tight schedule.^[11]

The scene depicting the first appearance of the Tripods was filmed at the intersection of Ferry Street, Merchant Street, and Wilson Avenue, in Newark, New Jersey.^[12] Later, Spielberg filmed several scenes in Virginia.^[13] The continuous scene^[which?] was filmed in California.^[14]

The ferry scene was filmed in the New York town of Athens, and Mary Ann’s parents’ house was located in Brooklyn (but was featured in the film in Boston).^[3] For the neighborhood plane crash scene, the production crew bought a retired Boeing 747 formerly operated by All Nippon Airways as JA8147, with transportation costs of $2 million,^[15] dismantled it into several pieces, and built houses around them.^[3] The destroyed plane was kept for the Universal Studios back-lot tour.^[15] Ray’s house was filmed in Bayonne, New Jersey (with a soundstage doubling the interior); meanwhile, the valley war sequence was filmed in Lexington, Virginia and Mystery Mesa in California. The scene where the tripod is shot down and crashes through a factory was filmed in Naugatuck, Connecticut at an abandoned chemical plant. The scene of the bodies floating down the river was filmed on the Farmington River in Windsor, Connecticut by a second unit using a stand in for Dakota Fanning shot from behind with the portion showing the faces of the credited actors cut in later. Some filming was shot on the Korean War Veterans Parkway in Staten Island, New York.^[3][16] The film used six sound stages, spread over three studio lots.^[3]

Principal photography began on November 8, 2004 and wrapped on March 7, 2005.

Design and visual effects[edit]

Industrial Light & Magic was the main special effects company for the movie.^[17] While Spielberg had used computers to help visualize sequences in pre-production before, Spielberg said, «This is the first film I really tackled using the computer to animate all the storyboards.»^[3] He decided to employ the technique extensively after a visit to his friend George Lucas.^[3][17] In order to keep the realism, the usage of computer-generated imagery shots and bluescreen was limited, with most of the digital effects being blended with miniature and live-action footage.^[18]

The design of the Tripods was described by Spielberg as «graceful,» with artist Doug Chiang replicating aquatic life forms.^[18] At the same time, the director wanted a design that would be iconic while still providing a tribute to the original Tripods, as well as intimidating so the audience would not be more interested about the aliens inside than on the vehicle itself.^[10] The visual effects crew tried to blend organic and mechanical elements in the Tripods depiction, and made extensive studies for the movements of the vehicle to be believable, considering the «contradiction» of having a large tank-like head being carried by thin and flexible legs.^[19] Animator Randal M. Dutra considered the movements themselves to have a «terrestrial buoyance», in that they were walking on land but had an aquatic flow, and Spielberg described the Tripods as moving like «scary ballet dancers». Most of the alien elements revolved around the number three – the Tripod had three eyes, and both the vehicle and the aliens had three main limbs with three fingers each.^[10]

Visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman considered depicting the scale of the Tripod as challenging, considering «Steven wanted to make sure that these creatures were 150 feet tall»,^[18] as it was the height described by Wells in the novel.^[10] The aliens themselves had designs based on jellyfish, with movements inspired by red-eyed tree frogs,^[19] and an amphibian quality particularly on the wet skin. A styrofoam alien was used as a stand-in to guide the actors in the basement scene.^[10] Spielberg did not want any blood or gore during the Heat-Ray deaths; in the words of Helman, «this was going to be a horror movie for kids». So the effects crew came up with the vaporization of the bodies, and considering it could not be fully digital due to both the complexity of the effect and the schedule, live-action dust was used alongside the CGI ray assimilation and particles.^[18] Digital birds followed the Tripods in most scenes to symbolize the presence of death, which Chiang compared to vultures and added that «you don’t know if these birds are going to the danger or away from it, if you should follow them or run away.»^[10]

During the scene where Ray’s stolen minivan is attacked by a mob, Janusz Kaminski and Spielberg wanted a lot of interactive lights, so they added different kinds of lights, including Coleman lamps, oil lanterns, flashlights and Maglights.^[3] The IL&M crew admitted that the destruction of the Bayonne Bridge was the toughest scene to be made with heavy usage mix of CGI effects and live action elements,^[20] and a four-week deadline so the shot could be used in a Super Bowl trailer.^[18] The scene originally had only a gas station exploding, but then Spielberg suggested blowing up the bridge as well.^[18] The scene involved Tripods shooting a Heat-Ray toward the minivan; the minivan’s escape involved a lot of CGI layers to work out. Over 500 CGI effects were used in the film.^[21]

Costume designer Joanna Johnston created 60 different versions of Ray’s leather jacket, to illustrate the degrees to which he is weathered from the beginning of the journey to the end. «He begins with the jacket, a hoodie, and two t-shirts,» explains Johnston. One piece of Dakota Fanning’s costume that takes on a special importance is her lavender horse purse: «I wanted her to have something that made her feel safe, some little thing that she could sleep with and put over her face,» Johnston notes. «That was the lavender horse purse. We tied it up on a ribbon and Dakota hung it on her body, so it was with her at all times.» Johnston dressed Robbie for an unconscious emulation of his father, «They’re more alike than they realize, with great tension on the surface,» Johnston says.^[3]

Music[edit]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[22]
Filmtracks
ScoreNotes	C+
SoundtrackNet

Longtime Spielberg collaborator John Williams composed the score. It was the first time he had to compose with an incomplete Spielberg film, as only the first six reels, totalling 60 minutes, were ready for him to use as reference.^[23] He considered the score «a very serious piece,» which had to combine «necessary frightening atmosphere» with «propulsively rhythmic drive for the action scenes»–^[24]the music would be symbolically «pulling forward» vehicles in chase scenes, such as Ray driving out of Bayonne, or the Tripod attacking the Hudson ferry. Williams added small nods to classic monster movie scores by having orchestras doing a «grand gesture» in scenes overlooking Tripods. To increase the scariness of the Tripod attacks, Williams added a female chorus with a crescendo resembling a shriek, representing «victims that go out without saying an ‘ouch’—they’re gone before they can say that». He added a nearly inaudible male choir—which he compared to «Tibetan monks, the lowest known pitch our bodies can make», for the aliens exploring the basement. The only deviation from orchestras were electronic sounds for the opening and closing narrations.^[23]

A soundtrack album was released by Decca Records featuring the film’s music and Morgan Freeman’s opening and closing narrations.^[25][26] The songs «Little Deuce Coupe» and «Hushabye Mountain» are also featured in the movie, the former sung by Tom Cruise, and the latter by Dakota Fanning.^[27][28] An expanded «limited edition» soundtrack was released in 2020 through Intrada Records, with the full film score, a remaster of the 2005 album, and alternate cues as bonus material.

Themes[edit]

The film was described as an anti-war film, as civilians run and only try to save themselves and their family instead of fighting back against the alien Tripods.^[29] Debra J. Saunders of San Francisco Chronicle described the film as «If aliens invade, don’t fight back. Run.» Saunders compared the film to Independence Day, where the civilians do run, but they support the military efforts.^[29] Many reviewers felt that the film tried to recreate the atmosphere of the September 11 attacks, with bystanders struggling to survive and the usage of missing-persons displays.^[30] Spielberg declared to Reader’s Digest that beside the work being a fantasy, the threat represented was real: «They are a wake-up call to face our fears as we confront a force intent on destroying our way of life.»^[31] Screenwriter David Koepp stated that he tried not to put explicit references to September 11 or the Iraq War, but said that the inspiration for the scene where Robbie joins the Marines was teenagers fighting in the Gaza Strip – «I was thinking of teenagers in Gaza throwing bottles and rocks at tanks, and I think that when you’re that age you don’t fully consider the ramifications of what you’re doing and you’re very much caught up in the moment and passion, whether that’s a good idea or not.»^[9] Retained from the novel is the aliens being defeated, not by men’s weapons, but the planet’s smallest creatures, bacteria, which Koepp described as «nature, in a way, knowing a whole lot more than we do».^[10]

Release[edit]

War of the Worlds premiered at the Ziegfeld Theatre on June 23, 2005. There, Tom Cruise revealed his relationship with Katie Holmes.^[32] Six days later, on June 29, the film was released in approximately 3,908 theaters across America.^[1] The home video was released on November 22, 2005.

Secrecy[edit]

Spielberg kept most of the parts secret in the filmmaking, as the cast and crew were left confused about how the aliens looked.^[33] When asked about the secrecy of the screenplay, David Koepp answered, «[Spielberg] wouldn’t give [the screenplay] to anybody«. Koepp explained he would e-mail it to him, and he would give a section of the script that was relating to whatever somebody was doing.^[33] Miranda Otto thought of not even discussing the story with her family and friends. Otto said, «I know some people who always say, ‘Oh, everything’s so secret.’ I think it’s good. In the old days people didn’t get to know much about movies before they came out and nowadays there’s just so much information. I think a bit of mystery is always really good. You don’t want to blow all of your cards beforehand.»^[34]

Spielberg admitted after keeping things secret for so long, there is in the end the temptation to reveal too much to the detriment of the story at the press conference of War of the Worlds. So, Spielberg only revealed the hill scene, where Ray tries to stop his son from leaving, stating «to say more would reveal too much.»^[35] The actual budget of the film was $132 million.^[1][36]

According to Vanity Fair, Spielberg’s relations with Cruise were «poor» during the film’s release because Spielberg believed Cruise’s «antics» at the time (such as an erratic appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show) had «hurt» the film and after a doctor whose name Spielberg had given to Cruise was picketed by Scientologists.^[37]

Marketing and home media releases[edit]

Paramount Pictures Interactive Marketing debuted a human survival online game on its official website Archived June 21, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, on April 14 to promote the film.^[38] Hitachi collaborated with Paramount Pictures for a worldwide promotional campaign, under the title of «The Ultimate Visual Experience». The agreement was announced by Kazuhiro Tachibana, general manager of Hitachi’s Consumer Business Group.^[39] Kazuhiro stated, «Our ‘The Ultimate Visual Experience’ campaign is a perfect match between Spielberg and Cruise’s pursuit of the world’s best in film entertainment and Hitachi’s commitment to the highest picture quality through its digital consumer electronic products.»^[39]

The film was released on VHS and DVD on November 22, 2005, with both a single-disc edition and a two-disc special edition which included production featurettes, documentaries and various trailers.^[40] The film grossed $113,000,000 in DVD sales, bringing its total film gross to $704,745,540, ranking tenth place in the 2005 DVD sales chart.^[41] Paramount released the film on Blu-ray Disc on June 1, 2010.

Reception[edit]

Box office[edit]

On June 29, 2005, the film grossed approximately US$81 million worldwide,^[42] and earned the 38th-biggest opening week by grossing $98,826,764 in 3,908 theatres, an average of $25,288 at each theater.^[43] On Independence Day weekend, it grossed $64,878,725 in 3,908 theatres, an average of $16,601, and gave Tom Cruise his biggest opening weekend until the release of Top Gun: Maverick in May 2022.^[44] It was the second-biggest film opening on Independence Day weekend, after Spider-Man 2.^[45] During its first five days of release, it made $100.2 million, breaking The Lost World: Jurassic Park‘s record to become the fastest Steven Spielberg film to reach $100 million.^[46] It earned $200 million in 24 days, ranking 37th in the list of fastest films to gross $200 million.^[47] It has grossed $704,745,540 including DVD sales,^[1] making it the fourth highest-grossing film of 2005 and the 66th highest-grossing film worldwide.^[48][49]

Critical reaction[edit]

On Rotten Tomatoes, War of the Worlds holds a 75% approval rating based on 264 reviews and an average rating of 7/10. The critical consensus states: «Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of War of the Worlds delivers on the thrill and paranoia of H.G. Wells’ classic novel while impressively updating the action and effects for modern audiences.»^[50] Review aggregator website Metacritic gave the film an average score of 73 out of 100 based on 40 reviews, indicating «generally favorable reviews».^[51] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of «B+» on an A+ to F scale.^[52]

James Berardinelli praised the acting and considered that focusing the narrative on the struggle of one character made the film more effective, but described the ending as weak, even though Spielberg «does the best he can to make it cinematically dramatic».^[53] Total Film’s review gave War of the Worlds four out of five stars, considering that «Spielberg finds fresh juice in a tale already adapted for film, TV, stage, radio and record», and describing the film as having many «startling images», comparing the first Tripod attack to the Omaha Beach landing from Saving Private Ryan.^[54]

Los Angeles Times‘ Kenneth Turan, who commended the film’s special effects, stated that Spielberg may actually have done his job in War of the Worlds «better than he realizes». Turan claimed that, by «showing us how fragile our world is», Spielberg raises a provocative question: «Is the ultimate fantasy an invasion from outer space, or is it the survival of the human race?»^[55] However, Broomfield Enterprise’s Dan Marcucci and Nancy Serougi did not share Berardinelli and Turan’s opinion. They felt that Morgan Freeman’s narration was unnecessary, and that the first half was «great» but the second half «became filled with clichés, riddled with holes, and tainted by Tim Robbins».^[56]

Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four, writing «War of the Worlds definitely wins its battle, but not the war.» Wilmington stated that the film «takes [viewers] on a wild journey through two sides of [Spielberg]: the dark and the light.» He also said the film contained a core sentiment similar to that of Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.^[57] About.com’s Rebecca Murray gave a positive review, stating, «Spielberg almost succeeds in creating the perfect alien movie», with criticism only for the ending.^[58]

Jonathan Rosenbaum of Chicago Reader praised the special effects and Cruise’s performance.^[59] Roger Ebert criticized the «retro design» and considered that despite the big budget, the alien invasion was «rudimentary» and «not very interesting», regarding the best scenes as Ray walking among the airliner wreckage and a train running in flames, declaring that «such scenes seem to come from a kind of reality different from that of the tripods.»^[60]

The French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma ranked the film as 8th place in its list of best films of the 2000s.^[61] Japanese film director Kiyoshi Kurosawa listed the film as the best film of 2000–2009.^[62]

Lawrence Brown wrote: «Spielberg’s decision to present the invaders’ fighting machines as having been there all along, buried deep under the Earth, raises questions which did not exist in the original Wells book. In Spielberg’s version, these invaders had been here before, long ago, in prehistoric times. They had set up their machines deep underground, and departed. Why? Why not take over the Earth right there and then? Spielberg does not provide an answer, and the characters are too busy surviving to wonder about this. An answer suggests itself – a very chilling answer. The invaders were interested in humans as food animals. When they came here before, humans were very scarce. The aliens left their hidden machines and departed, patiently observing the Earth until humans would multiply to the requisite numbers – and then they came back, to take over. Under this interpretation, all of us – all humans over the whole of history – have been livestock living in an alien food farm, destined to be ‘harvested'».^[63]

Accolades[edit]

War of the Worlds was nominated for three Academy Awards: Sound Editing, Sound Mixing (Andy Nelson, Anna Behlmer and Ron Judkins) and Visual Effects (Pablo Helman); it lost them all to King Kong.^[64] It was nominated for six Saturn Awards,^[65] and won Best Performance by a Younger Actor (Dakota Fanning).^[66] It won a Golden Reel Award for Sound Effects & Foley,^[67] a World Soundtrack Award for Best Original Soundtrack,^[68] and three VES Awards for its special effects,^[69] and was nominated for three Empire Awards, three Satellite Awards, and an MTV Movie Award.^{[citation needed]} It was also nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actor for Tom Cruise.^{[citation needed]}

See also[edit]

• The War of the Worlds: A 1953 film adaptation of the source material.

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• War of the Worlds at IMDb
• War of the Worlds at Rotten Tomatoes

Note: This is about the 2005 adaptation. For the 1953 one, see The War of the Worlds (1953).

A 2005 science fiction disaster film directed by Steven Spielberg, written for the screen by David Koepp and Josh Friedman, and starring Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Justin Chatwin, Tim Robbins and Miranda Otto, narrated by Morgan Freeman and very loosely based on the classic H. G. Wells novel of that name.

Ray Ferrier (Cruise), a dockworker living in New Jersey, is gearing up to spend some time with his estranged kids, teenage Robbie (Chatwin) and 10-year old Rachel (Fanning), while their mother and her boyfriend visit her parents in Boston. After about twenty minutes or so showing the rather strained relationship between them, metal tripods start rising up from underground annihilating everything in their path and strange red weeds begin to grow in abundance on the Earth’s surface. Soon, a war between mysterious alien lifeforms and humanity breaks out, and Ray does everything he can to keep his kids and himself safe while they head to Boston in the hopes of regrouping with their family.

The film is the second collaboration between Spielberg and Cruise after Minority Report. Not to be confused with two separate films released the same year, both titled H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Directed by Timothy Hines and David Michael Latt, both were released directly to video and were overshadowed by Spielberg’s production. The David Michael Latt film even received a sequel, named War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave.

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War of the Worlds provides examples of:

• Action Survivor: Ray Ferrier is a New Jersey dock worker with no military experience and no other skills that might possibly be applicable in a crisis. All he really has to go on are Papa Wolf tendencies, sheer determination to stay alive, and the ability to pitch a baseball fairly well (which later works admirably for the purposes of distracting a Tripod).
• Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene: Action, mayhem and chaos ensue between attempted moments of heartwarming and tearjerking.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • In the book, the narrator shows some sympathy for the aliens, saying their world was dying and they needed a new place to live. The film omits this, simply portraying them as monsters that want to exterminate humans out of envy and hatred.
  • Harlan Ogilvy shares the name of Ogilvy the astronomer in the book, who isn’t around for long but is portrayed as a more sympathetic and amiable character. This is because the character was combined with those of the artillery soldier (who rambles about an underground resistance but is inept and lazy) and the curate (who acts as The Load and goes insane, after which he is killed by the aliens).
  • In the book, the narrator only knocks the curate unconscious, and he’s then dragged off by the aliens. In the film, Ray intentionally kills Ogilvy to silence him.
• Adaptation Inspiration: As with all of the movie adaptations of the book, this one updates the setting and time period, and frames it in the tensions of the day. It also draws down the focus to a single family and takes on something of a war documentary feel. An allegory of the original 1898 novel was imperialism and colonialism (the Martians representing the British Empire), while the 1953 film paralleled the Cold War and the Red Scare and the 2005 version comments on 9/11 and the War on Terror.
• Adaptation Title Change: Unlike the novel and the 1953 film, it dropped the article to be only War of the Worlds.
• Admiring the Abomination: When the aliens are looking around the basement, Rachel seems intrigued by them and spends several moments watching what they’re up to.
• Affectionate Nickname: Ray calls Rachel «Rach» at times.
• All Girls Like Ponies: Rachel likes horses, and has a ribbon from a recent horse show, where she won third place.
• Aliens Are Bastards: The Aliens simply show up one rainy day and begin blasting Humans to ash, before going on a planet-wide genocide. They also suck our blood for nutrition, and spray what’s left over the Earth to create an Alien Landmass. Fortunately, we have germs…
• Alien Abduction: Humans are captured by the Invaders and their Blood is sucked from their body to be consumed. It’s also assumed they use it to create the infamous ‘Red Weed’.
• Alien Invasion: A fairly faithful adaptation of what is likely the Trope Maker. In this version, aliens travel from some unknown (but likely very distant) planet, drop off their war machines, and then return years later to rise up and conquer the planet.
• Alien Kudzu: The Red Weed, a spreading vine (or at least something that looks a lot like one) that the Invaders bring with them. Ray leaves the farmhouse looking for his daughter and finds that a large portion of the surrounding countryside has been rendered red and unrecognizable by the Invader’s terraforming abilities. The aliens seem to be spreading it intentionally, since they drain and spray human blood specifically to help it grow.
• Alien Sky: Ray ventures out looking for Rachel, he observes how the sky has been turned blood red by the Aliens, matching the landscape infested by their red weed.
• Alone with the Psycho: Ray starts to have this reaction as he realizes how unstable Ogilvy is.
• Always Chaotic Evil: The aliens are all portrayed as malicious creatures intent on the genocide of humanity, with no humanizing traits.
• Amicably Divorced: Ray and his ex seem on fairly good terms, despite things obviously not working out between them.
• A Million is a Statistic: Notably averted. The film frequently draws attention to background characters, many of them young children, to show how many people are being affected by the invasion.
• Ancient Evil: The Invaders first came here many Millennia ago, possibly long before mankind had evolved. They buried their war machines deep beneath the Earth, and when they perceived the time to be right, they return for the attack. If they truly had buried them «before there were any people here» then it can be believed that they were possibly put there for insurance, in case any dominant species evolved on Earth.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: A familial version. When Robbie is trying to run away to fight the aliens, Ray pins him to the ground and desperately tells his son that he loves him, to try and stop him from running to his possible death.
• Apocalypse How: On the lower end of the scale, but still an example. According to the ending narration, at least a billion people died in the invasion.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Ogilvy is antagonistic to Ray and repeatedly endangers his and Rachel’s lives, even wishing death on them, which can make it hard to feel bad when Ray kills him.
  • It’s hard to muster much sympathy when the guy who takes Ray’s van at gunpoint, almost kidnapping Rachel at the same time, is himself shot by someone else in the crowd and the van stolen in turn.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Two examples, one overt, one (slightly) less so:
  • This is the track on infinite replay in Robbie’s head. Whether it’s being confrontational with everybody but his sister, rebelling against authority, or wanting to attack the aliens head-on with no consideration for feasibility, risk, effectiveness, or what it might mean for anybody else, Robbie’s entire motivation at all times seems to be to go on the attack.
  • Invoked practically verbatim by a Marine lieutenant, ordering the forces under his command to hit an (offsceen) tripod at the battle at the hill. In this case, though, it’s not due to one of the usual underlying causes of the trope, but as a Heroic Sacrifice to try and buy any time he can for the refugees trying to get clear of the aliens.
• Ax-Crazy: Ogilvy descends into this, and Ray has to kill him to prevent him from attracting the aliens’ attention.
• Badass Bystander: The soldier who saves Ray’s life by grabbing his hand when the tripod is sucking him up and yells at everyone else in the cage to pull with him to bring Ray back down.
• Berserk Button: Don’t threaten Ray’s kids, especially Rachel. Ogilvy learns this the hard way.
• Beyond Redemption: When Ogilvy endangers Ray and Rachel due to the noise he’s making, Ray keeps trying to reason with him, but when Ogilvy hits him with a shovel in response, Ray decides he’s too far gone and has to be killed. For good measure, he can also be heard screaming that the aliens can take Ray and Rachel for all he cares.
• Bittersweet Ending: Ray and his family survive and the aliens are finally defeated, but millions of people have died, the Earth is in ruins, Rachel is traumatized by everything she’s been through, and Ray will have to live with the fact that he murdered a man in order to survive.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: The aliens are made three-legged, suggesting that they built their machines in their own image.
• Bizarre Alien Limbs: The tripedal aliens from the film provide the image for the trope page. On top of having three legs, which they use both to get around and to interact with the world, they also have two small arms that stick our from their underside and can be used when they require a bit more finesse.
• Broken Glass Penalty: Ray Farrier is playing catch with his son Robbie. In a heated moment of tension between the two, Ray throws the ball especially hard. Robbie, in an act of spite, allows the ball to zip past his head and break the window behind him.
• Book Ends: The film begins where it zooms out of some microbes being shown on a leaf, then it ends zooming in those same microbes, the ones that are responsible for the aliens’ defeat. Morgan Freeman’s narration is provided at both times.
• Break the Cutie: Rachel starts out as a sweet, innocent girl who likes horses. Then the invasion starts, and the poor girl becomes more and more traumatized by it all.
• Calling Parents by Their Name: Even in a time of crisis, Ray does not like being called «Ray» by Robbie, so he makes him choose between either Dad or Mr. Ferrier. Rachel, on the other hand, always calls him «Dad.»
• Calling the Old Man Out: From Robbie just before he tries to run off with the soldiers (first time around); he calls Ray out on the fact that he’s probably only taking the kids to Boston so they’ll be with their mother…and less of a worry for him. This basically sums up their relationship for most of the movie; neither of the kids pays any attention to what he tells them to do, he knows barely anything about them and he clearly has hardly any real relationship with either of them.
• Can’t Get Away with Nuthin’: Rachel disobeys her father by straying out of sight during a bathroom break, and comes across a river full of corpses, which traumatizes her. When Ray covers her eyes, Rachel tearfully apologizes for not listening.
• Censored Child Death:
  • Before the invasion starts, we see several children on Ray’s street watching the lightning storm, including a woman with a baby. While Ray gets his children to safety, we don’t see anyone else on his street evacuating, so it’s likely that all of them died in the attack.
  • There are multiple children in the crowd at the ferry, which is soon capsized while the rest of the crowd is massacred. Regardless of whether they got aboard or not, their odds of survival don’t look good.
  • Ogilvy also mentions he had a daughter Rachel’s age who was killed by the aliens.
• Character Development: Ray becomes less self-absorbed as the film progresses, Rachel learns to rely more on her dad, and Robbie learns to regain trust towards him.
• Chekhov’s Gun: Rachel asking Ray to sing her «Hushabye Mountain.» Ray tells Rachel to sing it to herself while he goes to kill Ogilvy.
• Chekhov’s Skill: Early in the film, Ray is shown to be a baseball fan and plays catch with his son. Later in the movie, after Ray’s daughter is abducted by aliens, his throwing skills allow him to toss a frag grenade a long distance at the tripod, grabbing its attention and abducting him so he can bring it down from within.
• Combat Tentacles: The Tripods, like their counterparts in Wells’ novel, mostly use their heat rays to fight. However, the tentacles that they use to capture human beings are more than capable of being weaponized. We see them used to scour the countryside for survivors, then to pick up and throw a truck with a person inside.
• Composite Character: Harlan Ogilvy is the artilleryman combined with the curate. And, for some reason, he is given the name of a third completely unrelated character (the astronomer).
• Contrived Coincidence: It’s a good thing the tripods repeatedly vaporize the several dozen people running next to Ray instead of aiming a few inches to the left, or there wouldn’t be a movie.
• Cover Innocent Eyes and Ears: Ray blindfolds Rachel, claps her hands over her ears, and has her sing her favorite lullaby to herself so she won’t see or hear as he kills Ogilvy.
  • Earlier, after a plane crashes into the house where they were staying, Ray directs Rachel to keep her eyes on him as he carries her out.
  • When Rachel sees a river full of dead bodies, Ray covers her eyes and gets her out of there, but only after she sees it.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Robbie starts out as your typical lazy and delinquent teenager, but when aliens invade Earth, he fearlessly (or stupidly, depending on your view) insists on fighting them rather than escaping.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: The aliens seem to favor only two methods of extermination, simply vaporizing the humans into dust, and harvesting the survivors of their blood.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: When Ogilvy goes mad, one of the things he says when Ray is about to kill him is that the aliens won’t be able to survive on Earth, because «they weren’t built for it.» Ray ignores this, since he has no reason to believe it, but it turns out to be true at the end.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Simply put, the US military (probably like all armed forces throughout the world) is absolutely helpless to stop the aliens even as they fire damn near everything they have at them. So much so that it becomes a matter of simply getting the survivors away from the creatures until a weakness presents itself. But that doesn’t stop them from fighting to the death to stop them.
  • When Ray decides to kill Ogilvy, the latter doesn’t stand much of a chance. It’s over by the time Rachel finishes her song, and Ray only has a cut on his cheek.
• Cute, but Cacophonic: Rachel. Also on a meta-level, Dakota Fanning’s scream when she sees the alien probe reportedly forced several sound technicians to rip off their headphones.
• Cyborg: The tripods are a very unusual example, being machines with living parts (that even need to be fed). This turns out to be a heavy disadvantage, as they get sick right alongside their alien pilots.
• Daddy’s Girl: For all the early tension between them, Ray loves Rachel more than anything, and will do anything to protect her.
• Daylight Horror: The first tripod attack, Rachel’s discovery of a river full of corpses, and Ray’s murder of Ogilvy all take place during the day.
• The Dead Have Names: In one scene, we see signs listing the names of those who were killed by the aliens, or are missing and presumed dead.
• Deadline News: While rummaging for food in the destroyed jetliner, the newscaster tells Ray she and her TV crew were barely able to escape when a tripod wiped out the National Guard unit they were following.

  Reporter: Once the tripods start to move, no more news comes out of that area.

• Death Ray: In a film based on the novel that popularized Alien Invasions and Death Rays, this is to be expected. The Invaders use a special kind of Heat Ray that targets the water in our body and microwaves a Human, instantly turning them into ash, while leaving anything else near intact. Don’t worry, they have a sort of Wave-Motion Gun to destroy everything else.
• Deer in the Headlights:
  • When Rachel runs off to find a place to use the bathroom, she comes across a river with countless dead bodies floating downstream. At the sight of this, she completely forgets what she was doing and just stares.
  • When the tripods appear at the ferry, Ray and family freeze and stare. The other people around them have a similarly delayed reaction, taking at least a few seconds to start running.
  • A more literal example comes when Rachel is stuck out in the open under the search light of a Tripod. Not that there’s anywhere to flee to in that scenario. She spends the next few minutes nearly catatonic in the Tripod’s basket, until Ray finally snaps her out of it.
• Deflector Shields: Although without them, the tripods will go down to hand grenades and LAWs.
• Despair Event Horizon: Rachel hits this when she’s captured in the tripod basket. When Ray finds her, she’s just sitting in shock, clearly thinking she’s about to die.
• Deus ex Machina: Unlike the novel, the aliens’ vulnerability to terrestrial microbes isn’t mentioned until the closing narration, though Ogilvy does state that he doesn’t think they can survive on Earth.
• Disney Death: We are led to believe Robbie dies during one of the alien attacks, but hooray, he resurfaces for a happy ending.
• Disintegrator Ray: As mentioned in Death Ray above, the Aliens possess powerful Heat based weaponry that instantly turns Humans into ash.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The alien invasion has many deliberate similarities to 9/11. The shot of the vaporized victims’ clothes floating down recalls the paper falling from the sky after the towers went down, the shot of Ray covered head-to-toe in grey ash after escaping the first tripod, and there’s a pretty deliberate shot of a wall covered by pictures of missing people. When she sees the heat ray, Rachel even asks «Is it the terrorists?»
• Dysfunctional Family: The Ferrier family get hit with this pretty hard, with Ray coming off as more a crappy babysitter than the kids father, who seem to do their best to ignore or straight up disobey Ray most times, Robbie stands out for constantly trying to jump into the fight against the aliens, despite having neither weapons nor training in weapon use which would make him a risk to soldiers having to pull him out of the fire, Rachel gets mostly a pass because she is a young girl, but makes several mistakes that do cost them some breathing room, Ray himself seems to have been a poor father to the kids, with it taking a full blown alien invasion for him to even try to step up, and while things with his ex seem amicble enough, it seems they don’t fully get along.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Miraculously, the whole family is reunited at the end, against a backdrop of dead and dying Tripods.

• Emergency Broadcast: Subverted. While Ray is driving through the countryside, the radio plays the EBS tone, but then there is an announcement that it’s only a test and not «an actual emergency.» The tripods are evidently wiping out communications so quickly that no one has been able to tie the system into actual announcements.
• EMP: The aliens subject urban areas to a terrifying EMP weapon disguised as a lightning storm. It is designed to wreck our technological society before the tripod assault: an instrument of total war. It works, but cars can be repaired with the right know-how.
• Empty Fridge, Empty Life: Divorcee Ray Ferrier’s fridge is this.
• Empty Piles of Clothing: The tripods’ weapons vaporize humans, leaving only clothing behind.
• Fanservice: Tom Cruise takes his shirt off when going to bed.
• Failed a Spot Check: Manny, the mechanic who orders Ray and his family to get out of their stolen car does not notice a tripod destroying everything and ultimately gets vaporized.

• Five Rounds Rapid: «No effect!» «Keep firing!»
• Foil:
  • Ray is selfish at first but becomes motivated to become a better father to protect his family, while Ogilvy has already lost his family, and becomes more hostile and self-absorbed.
  • Rachel reacts to the invasion with fear and horror, and she wants to be spared from having to see what’s happening, while Robbie gets angry and wants to fight the aliens in revenge, even insisting that he be allowed to see the fighting.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Rachel gets a splinter in her finger early in the movie, and she explains to Ray that her body will eventually push it out on its own. At the end of the movie, the aliens are defeated by Earth’s own organisms infecting them with diseases.
  • When Ogilvy is ranting while Ray gets ready to kill him, he states that the aliens can’t survive for long on Earth, because «they weren’t built for it.»
• Freudian Trio: Ray, Rachel and Robbie. Ray being the adult is the most mature and is the Superego, Rachel being an easily frightened girl always screaming and panicking is the Id, while Robbie being the bravest and most eager to join the war against the aliens is the Ego. When Robbie decides to go help out the US Army at the same time a couple tries to save Rachel, Ray is forced to choose between which one of his two children and so he chooses Rachel. Thus, Oglivy takes Robbie’s place then as the Ego.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Ogilvy isn’t that sane to begin with, but he really loses it when he finds out about the tripods harvesting humans.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Used to frightening effect with the blood harvesting scene. A flailing man is pinned down behind a tractor by one of a tripod’s tendrils as a second spiked one lunges down and drains his blood just out of sight enough that you can tell what’s happening. Ray’s horrified reaction tells us all we need to know.
• Harmful to Minors:
  • Rachel is horrified when she stumbles across a river full of corpses, and starts to have a panic attack before Ray gets her out of there.
  • In the basement, Ray quickly cleans his hands of the blood being sprayed by the tripods when he sees Rachel looking.
  • Many of the fleeing refugees are shown to be children. Rachel takes particular note of a girl about her age who is walking with her horse.
• Held Gaze: Ray and Rachel do this when he sings her to sleep.
• Hell Is That Noise: In-Universe. The loud, foghorn-like cry that the tripods occasionally give out makes them sound as much like a living creature as a machine (and it’s obvious they do have a biological component to them). It’s immediately terrifying and a signal that something really bad thing is happening or going to happen if you hear one in the distance. Think of it as a combination Oh, Crap! in one convenient package.
  • The arrhythmic, alien whirring sound the tripods’ huge servos make once they go on the move. It sounds like nothing remotely human, and if you’re close enough to hear them, nothing good is about to happen.
• Hero Antagonist: The woman who tries to take Rachel during the hilltop battle is well-intentioned, thinking she’s saving an abandoned child’s life.
• Heroic BSoD: A lot. Ray has a severe one after seeing the attack start, to the point that he collapses on the floor in front of his children, and takes a minute to shake himself out of it.
  • Ray briefly has one when he realizes Ogilvy is beyond reason. He quickly gets over it when he realizes he has to kill him.
  • Rachel has a lot of these, such as when she sees the dead bodies in the river and when she’s captured in the tripod basket.
• Heroic Sacrifice: The military attempts to defend the civilian refugees, which include Ray and the kids, by throwing everything they’ve got at the aliens. When that doesn’t work, they throw themselves directly at the enemy in a last-ditch effort to buy time and save as many lives as possible.
  • The sacrifice is largely in vain since the IDPs decide to stick around and gawk rather than get the heck out of there.
• Hollywood Tactics: The military’s straight-on charge against the already-proven-to-be-invulnerable-to-conventional-weaponry alien machines in order to save the civilian refugees.
• Hope Spot: For a while, Ray and Ogilvy seem to be bonding. Then Ray slowly starts to realize how unhinged he is, and ultimately has to kill him to keep him from drawing the aliens to them.
• Human Resources: The aliens use ground-up human pulp as seed fertilizer/germination agent for their homeworld’s fauna (the red weed). Before the movie is over, a good portion of New England is covered in it.
• Humans Are Bastards: Subverted and Invoked. People do some very desperate things in the face of an incomprehensible disaster, like the mob that forces Ray and his kids out of the car, but it’s made clear they’re just scared and doing everything they can to survive, and occasionally, humanity steps up to the plate, like when Ray gets grabbed by the tentacle inside the «people cage» and every single person overcomes their fear of the alien tentacle and grabs on to pull him out of its grasp.
  • Played straight with Oglivy, who is a Jerkass from the start and couldn’t care less if Ray and Rachel become victims of the aliens because of him loudly drawing their attention. Subverted in the same scene with Ray himself who murders Oglivy to shut him up and keep himself and Rachel safe.
• Humongous Mecha: The aliens’ tripods are modeled after their own body structure (3 legs, 3 fingers on each leg, wide-plated head), just like any Mecha humans would build would be humanoid.
• Idiot Ball:
  • After witnessing the start of the attack, Robbie asks if the tripods come from Europe, not seeming to realize that this kind of technology is well beyond what humans are capable of creating.
  • An armed civilian forces Ray at gunpoint to drop his gun and hand over his car. You’d expect that gunman to force Ray to give him the gun, not simply drop it onto the ground. When that gunman commandeers the car, another civilian picks up Ray’s gun and a gunfight ensues.
• In Love with Your Carnage: An innocent, non-villainous example. Rachel gives Ray a look of pure awe when he saves her life by blowing up the tripod that abducted her.
• Intrepid Reporter: The journalist Ray speaks to by the crashed plane. Not only is she already so well-informed to be Miss Exposition, but stops to ask Ray if he was on the crashed plane because «It would have been a great story.»
• Ironic Nursery Tune: Rachel singing «Hushabye Mountain.»
• It’s All About Me:
  • A mob of civilians without any power or working transportation all fight amongst each other over Ray’s car.
  • Ogilvy casually tells Rachel that he’ll take care of her if Ray dies, despite this being very inappropriate to bring up. He’s also so obsessed with beating the aliens that he keeps endangering Ray and Rachel’s lives, and even says the aliens can take them for all he cares.
• I Want My Mommy!: Rachel screams for her mother as the alien invasion begins.
• Jump Scare: When Rachel wakes up in the basement to find an alien probe right in front of her face.
• Kick the Dog:
  • The aliens’ first scene has them massacre a crowd of defenseless civilians. Then there’s the reveal of them harvesting humans for their blood.
  • When the news reporter hears a tripod coming, she promptly abandons Ray upon hearing he wasn’t on the plane and can’t give her a scoop.
  • When Ray is blindfolding Rachel before he kills Ogilvy, Ogilvy can be heard ranting in the background that he doesn’t care if Ray and Rachel are killed by the aliens. Ray would have killed him anyway, but it certainly makes the deed even more sympathetic.
• Kid Amid the Chaos: Played with when Ray is distracted by an argument with Robbie and doesn’t realize that a couple is trying to take Rachel with them, assuming her parents are dead. Fortunately, Ray realizes what’s happening and stops them in time.
• The Kindnapper: Though not a fully kind example. When Ray tries pulling Robbie out of the battlefield, Ray stations Rachel by a tree and orders her to stay there. A couple spots Rachel and the wife insists on pulling Rachel to safety ignoring both Rachel and her husband’s pleas to let Rachel be. Ray spots Rachel being dragged away against her will quickly making up his mind to abandon Robbie and get Rachel back from that woman.
• Lack of Empathy: Ogilvy telling Rachel that he’ll take care of her if Ray dies, given how terrified she must be of something happening to her father. Ray is understandably furious when he overhears this. Later, when Ogilvy snaps, he says during his rant that he doesn’t care if the aliens kill Ray and his daughter.
• Large Ham: Tim Robbins, usually a pretty understated actor, as Ogilvy.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Robbie’s attempts to join the military to fight the aliens tends to come across as this.
• Literal-Minded:
  • When Ray says that they need to sleep in the basement, he compares it to what they would do if there was a tornado warning. Rachel takes this to mean that there’s actually going to be a tornado.
  • When a man attacks their car, and Ray says that he wants a ride, Rachel innocently asks, «Can we give him one?»
• Little Miss Snarker: 10-year old Rachel has quite a few snarky lines (it helps that she’s played by Dakota Fanning).
• Living Emotional Crutch: Rachel becomes this to Ray after Robbie leaves. It’s clear at that point that protecting her is the only thing keeping him going.
• Living Ship: The Tripods have an organic component, seen when Ray is taken by one and almost consumed.
• The Load: Rachel is this for the most part- granted, she’s a helpless 10-year old child. However, there are times where she’s the first one to notice signs of danger. In the ferry scene, she’s the only one who realizes an attack is coming and manages to alert everyone else to this.
• Lower-Deck Episode: Unlike the 1953 movie, it follows the book in centering around an Action Survivor, instead of the military and cutting to other places where the aliens are invading.
• Lying to Protect Your Feelings: After Robbie’s apparent death, Ray tells Rachel that he’s going to meet them in Boston with her mother, which he clearly doesn’t believe. It turns out they did survive.
• Made of Iron: Even without the shields up, it still takes no less than FIVE Javelin Missiles, and 2-3 Carl Gustav shots to bring down just ONE Tripod.
• Made of Plasticine: Funnily enough, the tripods turn out to be this. Without their nigh-unbreakable Deflector Shields they can be brought down by anti-tank launchers, or even a few grenades if they’re deposited into the feeding port.
• Madness Mantra: «Not my blood!»
• Magic Pants: The heat ray disintegrates people in an instant, but doesn’t work as well on their pants and jackets.^note  The heat ray was an explicitly antipersonnel/terror weapon. For structures and armored targets, they use a Wave-Motion Gun, which shreds everything in front of it.
• Men of Sherwood: The U.S. military only appears in a few scenes, but when they do, they’re brave and effective without getting wiped out. This is most notable in the final scene, when several soldiers on foot bring down a tripod using missiles.
• Militaries Are Useless: In addition to being outnumbered and the technology gap, the U.S. Army’s weapons cannot break through the aliens’ energy barrier that deflects whatever is thrown at them.
• Monumental Damage: Mostly averted, thanks to a conscious decision (described in a later interview) to avoid the sort of huge, flashy destruction this tropes revels in. The Bayonne Bridge is still torn to ribbons on camera by the aliens’ wave motion guns, and we can assume New York City didn’t fare much better.
• Mood Whiplash: One of the few moments of levity after the film’s first act, a scene where Rachel argues with her father about where she’s going to use the bathroom during a short rest-stop, immediately precedes Rachel’s discovery of a river full of corpses.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The military’s Curb-Stomp Battle against the invaders is called ‘Operation Thunderchild’.
  • Ray and Rachel meet a deranged survivor living in a farmhouse basement; His name is Ogilvy.
  • «Once the tripods start to move, no more news comes out of that area».
  • The scene where the invaders use a probe to explore the house (and the protagonists subsequently hack it apart after being discovered) mirrors the 1953 version of the movie.
  • The aliens’ rampage abruptly halted in front of a church in the 1953 film. Here, their rampage commences in front of one.
  • The arriving roar of the tripods seems to be a reference to the triumphant «Aloo! aloo!» sound the Martian fighting machines make in the original novel. It could also be a nod to the «ULLA!» sound the tripods make in Jeff Wayne’s musical adaptation of the novel.
  • When Ray blows up the alien tripod, there can be heard a faint, electronic «Ulla!» in the same fashion described towards the end of the original novel, as the Martians die of Earth diseases.
  • The film starts in Bayonne, New Jersey, which is only about 50 miles from the setting of the 1938 radio play of Grover’s Mill.
  • A dying alien comes out of the hatch of a tripod, similar to the end of the 1953 film where the arm of a dying alien came out of the open hatch.
  • Additionally, the alien moans «Ulla, ulla…», a reference to the sound Martians make as they die in the original novel.
  • The film’s poster image of an alien’s hand symbolically grasping planet Earth is like the title and credit sequences from the 1988-90 television series.
  • Ogilvy’s hoodie. A nod to where the Martians are described to be in their tripods.
  • A panicked mob rampages to take possession of a working vehicle as in the 1953 film.
• No Time to Explain: Ray says this to the mechanic who’s asking him to get out of the car.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • Whenever you hear the ‘horn’ of a tripod, it means you need to get the hell out of there!
  • We don’t see how Ray kills Ogilvy. We just hear a few grunts while Rachel sings to herself so she won’t hear anything.
  • When Ray and Ogilvy witness a Tripod harvesting blood from one of its human captives, the scene is mostly blocked by a tractor. All they or the audience ever see is the man being lowered to the ground and pinned, his legs flailing, and finally the massive war machine stabbing him with a needle and siphoning his blood through a hose. It’s more likely than not that the man was killed almost instantly from the needle piercing his heart or some other vital organ, given that his legs stop moving immediately. The Gory Discretion Shot, though, leaves open the possibility that the Invaders drain people alive.
• Not So Invincible After All: Throughout most of the movie, the tripods are assumed to be untouchable. However, once their shields are down, they fall easily to grenades and the like.
• Not Using the «Z» Word: Spielberg says the aliens are never referred to onscreen as Martians due to Science Marching On and proving that Mars has no intelligent life. However they are never referred to simply as «aliens», either.
• Oh, Crap!: There’s a very emotive close-up of Rachel with this expression when witnessing the start of the aliens’ attack.
  • Ray when he realizes there’s more than one tripod, and that the first attack wasn’t an isolated incident.
  • Ray briefly has this expression when he realizes Ogilvy isn’t going to quiet down, and realizes that he’s going to have to kill him.
  • The soldier who rallies the other prisoners in the cage has a brief look of this on his face when he sees the man he just rescued spit out the pins of two hand grenades.
• Only Sane Man: Ray, especially in his interactions with Robbie.
  • Quite a comedic example occurs for anyone eagle-eyed enough to spot it; just after the first tripod appears, one guy in the crowd turns tail and runs away, instead of standing around to watch.
• P�do Hunt: Implied. Ogilvy has an unsettling interest in Rachel, and Ray clearly sees it as predatory, as he forbids Ogilvy from interacting with her. It’s unclear if it’s really this or if Ray was misreading the situation, but it does give Ray an additional reason to kill him.
• Parental Neglect: Ray is a divorced crane operator in New Jersey, who hardly sees his two kids; the eldest doesn’t respect him or even call him ‘Dad’ and the younger clearly loves her mother more. However, it becomes obvious that Ray loves his two children very much and will go to great lengths to protect them.
• Papa Wolf: Ray pulls a gun on a mob of crazed people after Robbie disappears. He also hurls a grenade at a Tripod that’s just captured Rachel.
  • And don’t forget he’s willing to kill Ogilvy rather than let him endanger Rachel’s safety.
• Pineapple Surprise: Ray somehow managing to pull some pins out of the grenades while he was being sucked into one of the tripods.
• Pin-Pulling Teeth: Ray spits out the pins of a couple of M67 grenades he uses to destroy a tripod. Of course, this was his only option.
• Playing Catch with the Old Man: Ray has a catch with Robbie. Inverted in that Ray acts like an immature jerk by throwing it harder and harder to his son, causing Robbie to intentionally let a ball pass so Ray shatters his own window, priming the audience to know they are in conflict and Ray’s not a great dad at the start of the film.
• Post-Defeat Explosion Chain: Ray sticks a grenade into a tripod. The tripod then explodes repeatedly and falls over.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: The movie follows the plot of the novel, only updating the setting from late 19th-century England to early 21st-century New Jersey (but one of the screenwriters decided to «take the modern world back to the 1800s» with the EMP frying most technology), and having the protagonist accompanied by his children (the unnamed one from the book only had a wife, which he drops with her relatives).
• Promotion to Parent: Robbie seems to have become a semi-father-figure to Rachel, since Ray knows nothing about being a father to them both (at least before the events of the movie). By the end, Ray finally is cordially accepted by his children on the account that he helped them survive the alien invasion.
• Reduced to Dust: In this version, the alien rays blast people into clouds of dust with their clothes torn off.
• Remake Cameo: Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, who played the lead roles in the 1953 film, appear as Robbie’s and Rachel’s grandparents.
• Ride the Lightning: The aliens ride lightning into their tripods which are buried beneath the ground.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Rachel’s first reaction to the heat ray is «Is it the terrorists?»
  • Ogilvy’s line about how «Occupations never work,» a less-than-subtle Take That! at the situation in Iraq at the time.
• Rule of Symbolism: At first, Rachel is wearing three layers of clothing, which she gradually loses as the film goes on, until she’s just wearing her shirt. Word of God is that this was meant to reflect how she’s opening up more to her father throughout the film.
• Sanity Has Advantages: The reason Ray wins his fight with Ogilvy. He also has greater motivation, as he’s fighting for his daughter’s life.
• Sanity Slippage: Ogilvy after allegedly seeing his family killed by the Invaders a while before he meets Ray and Rachel.

• Sensory Tentacles: A mechanical tentacle probes the basement where Ray and his daughter are hiding in advance of the aliens who are investigating the area.
• Setting Update: From the original novel’s late 19th-century England to the early 21st-century New Jersey.
• Shoot the Dog: Ray has to kill Ogilvy to stop him from attracting the aliens’ attention.
• Shout-Out:
  • The probing scene can be seen as one to the more famous (and infamous) scene of the kitchen in Jurassic Park.
  • «Hushabye Mountain» is a song from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
  • Rachel has a poster for The Saddle Club in her room. Robbie also has Dragon Ball Z toys on his shelf.
  • Rachel is flipping through the channels and the first thing you hear is «Moon Gorgeous Meditation!» According to Steven Spielberg, one of his daughters is a huge Sailor Moon fan, so she gave the idea for the reference.
  • «The Secret Box» episode of Spongebob Squarepants is shown on TV.
  • The use of hand grenades may well be one to The Tripods, a trilogy of novels inspired by (and would be considered a sort of Spiritual Successor to) the original novel.
  • Ray’s posture just after Rachel is reunited with her mother at the film’s end, is the posture taken by Ethan Edwards just after he reunites the abducted girl with her family at the end of The Searchers.
  • One of the aliens poking about in the cellar causes a bicycle hanging on the wall to crash to the floor, as a allusion to Spielberg and a subversion of E.T. (and the Amblin logo).
• Shovel Strike: Ogilvy hits Ray in the head with a shovel when he tries to reason with him. It ends fatally for him, as it’s what convinces Ray that he has to kill him.
• Shown Their Work: Ray drives a 1960s Ford Mustang. When the aliens attack and he escapes with his kids, supplies are put into an empty box of 10W-30 motor oil. 10W-30 motor oil is the oil used in 1960s Ford Mustangs for cold climates, like New Jersey where Ray lives.
  • The U.S. Army units seen in the film are largely from the 10th Mountain Division, which is based in New York, near where the film is set. If an alien invasion were to happen in New England, it’s possible one would encounter the 10th Mountain Division out and about.
• Single Tear: Ray when he sings a lullaby (namely, «Little Deuce Coupe») to Rachel.
• Sinister Silhouettes: When Ray is about to kill Ogilvy, he stands in the doorway for a few seconds, seen only in shadow.
• Small Universe After All: In the behind the scenes features in the DVD, Spielberg says the aliens don’t come from Mars and probably come from as far away as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The novelization and movie tagline say that E.T. is 3 million lightyears from home. Well outside our galaxy.
• So Proud of You:
  • Early on, Rachel tries to get Ray to notice an award she won in a horse show. He finally sees it later, and gives her the reaction she was hoping for.
  • In a darker example, Ray tells Rachel, «That’s my girl,» as she sings so she won’t hear him kill Ogilvy.
  • Rachel looks at Ray with awe when he destroys the tripod that abducted her.
• Sound-Only Death: This happens to the driver who takes Ray’s car. A few seconds after Ray surrenders the car and enters a diner with his family, we hear shots fired and the car passing by the window, with one of them shooting inside with Ray’s dropped gun.
  • Ray killing Ogilvy. Rachel sings with her eyes closed so she won’t hear the murder sounds.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Major example. Rachel sings a calming lullaby to herself as Ray murders Ogilvy in another room.
• Spiritual Antithesis: To Spielberg’s own E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. While E.T. had a very innocent tone, featured a friendly alien, and was told from a child’s perspective, this movie is very dark and cynical, features a hostile alien invasion, and is told from an adult perspective.
• Spiritual Successor: Though they’re very different in theme, Spielberg considers this film to be part of a loose «alien trilogy» with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. All of them detail the very different ways that an encounter with extraterrestrials could turn out, and Spielberg has said that he believes that all three species could very well exist in the same universe.
  • Spielberg was quoted behind-the-scenes as saying «For the first time in my life I’m making an alien picture where there is no love and no attempt at communication.»
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: For both the humans AND the invaders. First and foremost, any alien race capable of interstellar travel, coming here to exterminate us before we can have our own Cool Starship, is going to just roll right over us. But, they quickly discover that our planet is actually not suitable for their needs, and they start getting killed by microbes and germs we humans are immune to once the crews start exiting their war machines to explore.
  • Happens again in the span of two minutes towards the end when one Tripod is caught in an urban environment, with its shields down, by infantry packing heavy anti-tank weapons. But while the military is very quick to haul their carcasses away from the tripod the moment one of their missiles delivers the killing blow ^note … several civilians who stay and watch the Curb-Stomp Battle find out that where they are standing is where a 100-ton mech is about to fall like a tree, and get smashed because they couldn’t run away fast enough.
    • Tripods are somewhat analagous to human tanks. In urban environments, tanks require infantry escort otherwise they’re very vulnerable to man-portable anti-tank weaponry, as seen in the film, where the tripods didn’t have any alien troops on foot escorting them and were swiftly dispatched when the shields gave way.
• Sympathetic Murderer: Ray kills Ogilvy for fear that his screams will put his daughter in danger, but it’s treated as justified, and he repeatedly tried to reason with him before doing it.
• Tanks for Nothing: Not even tanks are a match for the aliens at least when their shields are up.
• Tears of Fear: Rachel often cries when something upsetting is happening.
• Tentacled Terror: The Tripods have long tendrils that they can use to seize individual humans, lift and throw objects as large as vehicles, search for humans hidden underground, and drain people of their blood to feed the Red Weed.
• This Is Unforgivable!: Ray makes it clear to Ogilvy that he has crossed a line by endangering Rachel’s life. It ends fatally.

  Ray: Do you understand what I’m going to have to do? I can’t let my daughter die because of you.

• Thousand-Yard Stare: Rachel has this expression when she’s captured and put in the tripod basket.
• Time Abyss: The Tripods were planted on Earth at some point in the very distant past. Characters speculate that they may have come down before there were any humans at all. At the very least, though, they definitely predate both recorded history and the oral traditions of any civilization that has surviving descendants, setting a minimum age in the tens of thousands of years.
• Tranquil Fury: When Ray overhears Ogilvy telling Rachel that he’ll take care of her in the event of his death, he calmly orders Rachel over to him, then tells Ogilvy in a furious whisper that he’s forbidden from speaking to her. He is also chillingly calm when he decides to kill Ogilvy. As he blindfolds Rachel and tells her to sing, he speaks in a calming whisper, but is clearly preparing himself for what he’s about to do.
• Tripod Terror: Naturally. The aliens attack in tripod machines which efficiently lay waste to much of the world.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • The crowd of people in the first attack just stand there in awe of the tripod when it’s clearly giving some rather ominous signals that it’s about to lay waste to them. However, several people are seen running away a while before the Tripod fires on them.
    • Somewhat justified, since nobody had encountered one of the tripods before that point. However, later in the film, when the military is battling the tripods, the civilians, knowing full well that the aliens are bad and dangerous, decide to stick around and gawk rather than get the heck away from there. Ironically, this goes badly for them because the military, and not the aliens, won, since they were standing too close to where the tripod was going to fall when it was brought down. The military personnel were smart enough to haul ass out of there as soon as it was evident they had scored a killing blow.
  • Robbie has an obsessive interest in going to fight the aliens, despite Ray’s repeated attempts to tell him exactly how stupid this is. Even after seeing the explosions occurring from over the hill and the military forces clearly losing the battle, Robbie is insistent he still wants to go.
  • By all means, everybody, crowd onto a ferry to cross the Hudson, a large and attractive target from which you have no ready means of escape.
  • The aliens themselves. They get out of their tripod in an alien planet, wearing no protective gear, rummaging through dirty stuff in a damp basement, and one of them even drinks water from a broken pipe. No wonder they all got sick.
• Unnervingly Heartwarming:
  • The scene where Ray soothes Rachel to sleep is inter-cut with ominous shots of Ogilvy watching them.
  • When Ray realizes that he has to kill Ovilvy, he goes to Rachel and gives her an emotional hug, while his face is grim over what he has to do. He also tenderly kisses her hands when getting her to sing so she won’t hear the murder sounds.
• Unwanted Assistance: Robbie spots hundreds of US Army soldiers rolling down the road to counteract the Martian invasion. He begs to be let into their ranks so he can fight with them, but they brush him off as being out of his mind.
• Violence Is Disturbing: Rachel covers her ears during the battle on the hilltop, is distressed when Ray is about to kill Ogilvy even though she realizes he’s doing it to protect her, and when the military is fighting the last tripod, she screams at the sound of the gunfire.
• Violence Really Is the Answer: As Ogilvy’s behavior becomes more unstable, Ray keeps trying to reason with him, but finally has no choice but to kill him to protect Rachel’s life.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The tripods have them and use them against artificial structures and against the military, with devastating results.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Perhaps one of the most infamous examples: Germs. Yes, you read that correctly; our planet’s germs are what ultimately kill them. The aliens never evolved on Earth to develop natural immunity to the planet’s bacteria and so they became violently ill and just died off in a rather short period of time. Though many viewers criticized this was a hugely anti-climactic cop-out, this actually is how the original novel ends.
• Wham Line: In-universe, for Rachel: «Get in, Manny, or you’re going to die!»
• Wham Shot: When Ray realizes that Ogilvy’s not going to calm down, Ray slowly backs out of the basement, goes to Rachel, and hugs her tight. We then cut to a shot of Ray wrapping a blindfold around Rachel’s head, which makes it clear to the audience exactly what he’s about to do…
• What You Are in the Dark: When Ray kills Ogilvy in the basement to protect Rachel.
• Would Hurt a Child: It’s clear that the aliens would kill any child in their path, including 10-year old Rachel.
  • Ogilvy as well, albeit indirectly. After learning that the invaders are harvesting blood from their human captives to use as fertilizer for the Red Weed, he makes it clear that he doesn’t care if Ray and Rachel end up suffering this fate, as long as they aren’t using his blood. This is part of what cements Ray’s choice to kill him.

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«From the moment the Invaders arrived, breathed our air, ate and drank, they were doomed. They were undone, destroyed, after all of Man’s weapons and devices had failed, by the tiniest creatures that God in His wisdom put upon this Earth. By the toll of a billion deaths, Man had earned his immunity; his right to survive among this planet’s infinite organisms. And that right is ours against all challenges for neither do men live…nor die…in vain.»

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Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of War of the Worlds delivers on the thrill and paranoia of H.G. Wells’ classic novel while impressively updating the action and effects for modern audiences.
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Critic Reviews for War of the Worlds

Audience Reviews for War of the Worlds

• May 03, 2017

  When one of the greatest filmmakers in history makes a science fiction film, which is one of his biggest strengths, you have no choice but to check it out.

  War of the Worlds is loosely based on the H.G. Wells novel of the same name, about a father and his children trying to cope with a global alien invasion. There have been so many of these alien invasion films over the years, so it’s difficult for any of them to feel fresh and stick out to me. I think the one thing that separates this film from others is that Tom Cruise or any of the other actors aren’t playing characters that fight the aliens, or «tripods» as they call them. It only makes up a matter of a few days following the first attack and the immediate aftermath.

  Because of that, Cruise is given more to do dramatically than per usual. He gets a few stunts and an action scene or two (because why wouldn’t you take advantage of his talent) but it’s much more about family than it is about anything else. In that regard, the film works most of the time. Cruise plays Ray Ferrier, father to both Rachel and Robbie. Not to intentionally quote another Cruise movie, but it’s really (k)night and day with these kids. Dakota Fanning is perfectly cast as Rachel, a pre-teen who is terrified of the apocalyptic world she now lives in. However, I just couldn’t get behind Justin Chatwin’s performance and the character of Robbie. There were too many times in which I either felt the character was entirely unnecessary to the plot, or he kept the plot from moving forward in frustrating ways. Why does he all of a sudden feel the need to leave his family and join the Army’s fight against the tripods? Makes no sense whatsoever.

  Unsurprisingly, Spielberg’s visual flare is probably the film’s biggest asset. Whether it’s the endless amount of long takes, explosive and visceral alien action, or the impressive CGI and green screen work, War of the Worlds is a gorgeous film to look at. If every aspect of the film was as good as the visuals, this could have been quite the adaptation. Bottom line, I like everything visually and some of the performances very much, but the last 20 minutes is a bit of a letdown, as is the constant annoyance of the Robbie character.

  +Visuals

  +Dakota is magnificent

  -Annoying older brother

  7.7/10

  

  Super Reviewer

• Jun 26, 2016

  The special FX were good, the acting is quite okay but still, you can’t go wrong with Spielberg except from Hook.

  

  Super Reviewer

• Apr 12, 2013

  The H.G. Wells classic War of the Worlds is remade yet again, this time by Steven Spielberg. Unfortunately Spielberg brings nothing to the table, offering no new insight or perspective on the material. The special effects and battle sequences are amazing, but the storytelling is weak and does a poor job at capturing the impact and tragedy of this epic tale of survival. The characters are also poorly written, and are rather unsympathetic. Dakota Fanning manages to deliver a strong performance, while Tom Cruise is serviceable. Though the action and special effects are impressive, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is a superficial film with no depth or meaning.

  

  Super Reviewer

• Nov 30, 2012

  [img]http://images.rottentomatoes.com/images/user/icons/icon14.gif[/img]

  Wow, if there is one director who can deliver an epic scale popcorn movie. It’s Spielberg. I think he is consistently at his best when he’s delivering us these massive, overwhelming blockbusters that genuinely display his intricate skill for the camerawork, lighting and atmospherics, simply the best of Hollywood film making. I believe his adaptation of H.G Well’s deeply profound novel is one of the most under rated film’s of the 2000’s. I dont really need to point out that this version changes a lot from it’s source material. But I think that «War» is a partly unfilmable book. In my opinion, the real genius in what made the book work in literal terms cannot be faithfully replicated onto the screen. There’s a whole lot of underlying politics in the paranoid obsessive book. But there’s an incredible amount of awe inspiring spectacle that touches your imagination too. In the film there’s a lot of the monumentally captivating flare and a little bit of the deeper meanings, the thing that’s made fans of the novel rant on how much they hate this film is the change in setting, among countless other things. For film fans it’s dismissed for the apparant «cop out» ending. But that’s how it’s supposed to end. For cinema, that ending for a lot of people doesn’t work but the focus on action doesn’t work for hardcore fanatics of the source. Now personally, I saw some real darkness in that ending, resultingly, Spielberg delivered a solid, action packed, light hearted popcorn flick but also stayed faithful to the novel in some fashion. He successfully positioned this disaster epic on the fine line of appreciating the complexities of the novel but also gave us a return to sci fi- horror B movie form. For that, hats off to him and his writers. Terrfying aliens, an under stated performance by lead Tom Cruise who is as engaging as ever, a good script, it’s cut to the chase, easy well polished fun. Putting the annoying Hollywood cliches and moments of poor storytelling aside, I am a proud fan of the new War of the Worlds.

  

  Super Reviewer

War of the Worlds
Director	Steven Spielberg
Producer	Kathleen Kennedy Colin Wilson
Screenplay	Josh Friedman David Koepp
Based on	The War of the Worlds 1898 novel by H.G. Wells
Starring	Tom Cruise Dakota Fanning Justin Chatwin Miranda Otto Tim Robbins Morgan Freeman
Composer	John Williams
Production Company	Amblin Entertainment
Distributor	Paramount Pictures Dreamworks Pictures
Release Date	June 29, 2005
Runtime	116 minutes

War of the Worlds is a science fiction action film based on the novel by H.G. Wells. The film was directed by Steven Spielberg, and made its debut in the summer of 2005. This is one of four film adaptations of the novel. This goes down as one of the most well known adaptations of the story, since 1953.

Plot summary[]

The movie begins with a voice narrator (Morgan Freeman) talking about how Earth was being watched jealously by another planet inhabited by highly advanced beings. In New Jersey, a divorced man named Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) takes his weekend custody of his children, Rachel Ferrier (Dakota Fanning) and Robbie Ferrier (Justin Chatwin). The weekend starts out on a rough note as his son Robbie steals Ray’s car and his daughter does nothing but disrespect him, but things only get worse when an electric storm strikes the area surrounding Lincoln Street.

The lightning is followed by electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) which disabled all electronic devices in the surrounding area. Previous sightings of the lighting was reported in Ukraine, a country of some 52 million people that was in total darkness because of the EMP. The EMP was followed by seismic activity the scale of an earthquake, measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale.

Ray investigates the area where the lightning struck, having been directed there by his son Robbie, who had taken his car without permission immediately before the storm hit. Surrounded by many other curious citizens, the people watch the very small hole widen. As they all start to move back the hole widens, resulting in a car falling in. The car is immediately thrown back out by something yet unseen. Taking cover behind nearby vehicles and buildings, the people, including Ray, watch in surprise and fear as a machine rises from the sinkhole.

The machine, later referred to as a Tripod by a CBS reporter, rises high above the surrounding buildings. The machine then lets out an eerie howl, theorized to be its way of communicating with other tripods. As the machine organizes itself, two seperate appendages stretch out from the Tripod. The Tripod then begins to pick-off the humans with it’s deadly Heat-Rays at the ends of its appendages. Ray narrowly avoids death and upon returning to his home, decides that it is not safe to stay there. Ray decides to steal a car that had been repaired and restored to working order shortly after the EMP blast, once again narrowly avoiding death as the Tripod advances on the area. The Tripod quickly destroys the entire area and Ray and his children barely escape as the entire neighborhood is engulfed in fire. Deciding the best place to take shelter is his ex-wife’s house, Ray takes his children there, finding it unaffected by the EMP blast and otherwise empty, as Ray’s ex-wife and her new husband have left for her parents home in Boston. Ray and the children sleep there overnight, taking shelter in the basement. In the middle of the night, they are awakened by a horrible noise and blinding lights, and Ray quickly hurries his children into the boiler room, the most secure spot in the house. In the morning, Ray ventures outside to find that a passenger jet had crashed, demolishing most of the house and the surrounding neighborhood. In the aftermath, Ray encounters a group of news reporters scavenging for food, and they reveal that it is not just one Tripod, but an invading army of hundreds, if not thousands of Tripods slaughtering entire cities unopposed. The reporters also inform Ray that the tripods have an invisible force field that causes weapons to detonate too early. Upon hearing the trumpeting sound of a distant Tripod, the reporters flee the area and Ray and his children quickly do the same.

Some time later, the group happens upon an intact ferry that is surrounded by crowds, and the car is eventually stolen in a tense stand-off between Ray and several other civilians, all possessing firearms. Now on foot, they walk to the Hudson Ferry and suddenly stopped by a railroad track gate. An Amtrak train with all cars including the engine engulfed in flames passes by. When the group is nearing the ferry, a group of Tripods discovers the humans, prompting a mass panic as the enormous crowd rushes the ferry. Ray manages to get himself and his children on, but the ferry is directly attacked by a submerged Tripod and quickly destroyed. The Tripod begins abducting people from the water and Ray and his family barely make it to shore, witnessing the second group of Tripods eradicating survivors on a nearby hillside. Some time later, the group finds themselves caught in the middle of a massive battle between the United States military and the Tripods, as civilian refugees scramble to get away. Robbie demands to be allowed to fight, though Ray forbids this, arguing with his son while Rachel is mistaken as abandoned by two other refugees. Ray is forced to choose between his son and his daughter, and reluctantly lets Robbie go in order to save Rachel. Almost immediately after securing Rachel, an enormous explosion rocks the entire area and nearly all of the military forces are destroyed, leaving Ray to assume that Robbie has been killed.

As the Tripods advance once more and begin eliminating the fleeing survivors, Rachel and Ray find shelter in the nearby home of Harlan Ogilvy. Ogilvy is clearly mentally unstable but offers them shelter in his basement. That night a probe visits the basement and a group of aliens, both of which Ogilvy attempts to attack out of intense fear, though is prevented by Ray. After the probe departs the basement, a small group of aliens enters to investigate, peering at human items with passing interest while Ray and Ogilvy have an intense and silent confrontation over a shotgun mere inches away. Soon after, Ray is forced to murder Ogilvy to keep himself and Rachel safe from discovery, as Ogilvy is being too loud and attracting attention from the martians. Then another probe visits the basement and wakes Ray and Rachel. Ray then hacks the head off it with an axe (like in the 1953 movie) and Rachel runs out of the basement on to the Red Weed covered ground screaming. Ray bushwhacks his way out of the red weed covered house. The enourmous foot of a tripod plunges down in front of him. It attempts to abduct him, but Ray hides in a car. His daughter is taken by the invaders, and Ray sets out after them, antagonizing the departing Tripod by grabbing a nearby satchel of grenades and using one to provoke the Tripod into abducting him. While waiting within the cage full of other abducted humans, Ray watches as one of the victims is pulled into the Tripod’s processing engine and grinding alive into a catalyst for the Red Weed, and is soon pulled into the Tripod himself, though the other prisoners manage to pull him out. Ray reveals that he had kept the grenades and had activated all of them while partially within the Tripod, causing it to violently explode from the inside and collapse to the ground, freeing everyone.

Ray and Rachel finally arrive on the outskirts of Boston, where the remnants of the United States military are still evacuating civilians. Nearby, a Tripod lays dead in the rubble of a building, and upon asking a nearby soldier if they killed it, the soldier responds that the Tripod began acting strangely before collapsing on its own. Shortly after, a second Tripod appears, also behaving erratically. The military begins rushing civilians out of the area, though during the retreat Ray discovers that the Tripod’s shields are down by the presence of birds landing on the Tripod’s hull. After revealing this to the nearby officer, the U.S. army manages to destroy the Tripod with a barrage of Javelin missiles. The Tripod crashes to the ground and the aliens attempt to evacuate the vehicle, though die almost immediately upon exposure to the air. Afterwards, Ray successfully brings Rachel to his wife and her family in Boston, which somehow appeared unscathed from the war, and while Rachel and her mother tearfully embrace, Robbie is seen. The two men share a hug while Ray’s ex-wife silently thanks him for bringing the children home.

During the epilogue, the narrator states that as soon as the Aliens arrived on Earth they had lost, as they had exposed their bodies to the foreign bacteria of Earth. It was only through a billion deaths that mankind had been saved by the smallest organisms on the planet, and that mankind would rebuild.

Cast (Main Characters)[]

• Tom Cruise as Ray Ferrier
• Dakota Fanning as Rachel Ferrier
• Justin Chatwin as Robbie Ferrier
• Miranda Otto as May Ann
• Tim Robbins as Harlan Ogilvy
• Morgan Freeman as Narrator

Reception[]

In terms of box office success, the film earned $234.3 million domestically, $357.1 million overseas — a sum total $591.4 million, making it the 4th highest grossing movie of 2005. In terms of critics, the film was met with predominantly positive reviews. Review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes reports that 73% of critics gave the film a positive review based on 235 reviews with an average rating of 7/10. The critical consensus is: War of the Worlds delivers on the thrill and paranoia of H.G. Wells’ classic novel. At the website Metacritic which utilizes a normalized rating system, the film earned a rating of 73/100 based on 40 reviews by mainstream critics.
It may be noted, however, that a few viewers severely criticized the film, due to intense changes from the plot, and Rachel’s «constant» screaming, which some viewers claimed «nearly ruined the film for them».

Fun Facts[]

• The Mother and Father-in-law are actors Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, the main protagonists of the 1953 adaptation of The War of the Worlds.
• The aliens in the film actually didn’t come from Mars, like all the other adaptations. This is because in real life, NASA’s missions to Mars proved there was no big sources of life on Mars. Therefore, Steven Spielberg changed the home planet of the aliens to an unknown planet, billions of miles from Earth.

Gallery[]

Promotional[]

Stills[]

External links[]

• War of the Worlds (2005 film) at Wikipedia
• War of the Worlds (2005 film) at IMDb