War of the Worlds

Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, released in 2005, is a loose modern-day adaptation of H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel. Tom Cruise plays Ray Ferrier, a divorced dockworker in Bayonne, New Jersey, whose strained relationship with his children becomes the film’s emotional center. Dakota Fanning portrays Rachel, Ray’s frightened young daughter, while Justin Chatwin plays Robbie, his angry teenage son. When Ray’s former wife, Mary Ann, and her new husband leave the children with him, an extraordinary lightning storm begins over the neighborhood. The storm is not merely weather: it precedes the emergence of enormous alien tripods from beneath the ground. The machines immediately turn Bayonne into a killing zone, using heat rays that disintegrate people and leave drifting ash. Ray takes a car and tries to reach Mary Ann’s family home in Boston, traveling with Rachel and Robbie through roads clogged by panicked refugees. Spielberg stages one of the film’s best-known sequences when Ray steers through a crowd in which desperate people seize the vehicle. Later, after finding a crashed Boeing 747 in a suburban neighborhood, Ray enters the house of Harlan Ogilvy, played by Tim Robbins. Ogilvy believes he can fight the invaders, but his unstable behavior forces Ray to act. The film departs from Wells’s Victorian England by locating its catastrophe in contemporary American spaces: container docks, highways, a ferry, suburban basements, and Boston’s streets. Its tripods possess force fields that initially make human weapons useless, and they capture people with mechanical tentacles. A major visual image is the red weed the aliens spread across buildings and trees, echoing Wells’s description of Martian vegetation. The invaders also harvest humans for their blood, a detail reflected in red fluid sprayed over the landscape. Ray eventually separates from Robbie after the teenager insists on joining soldiers confronting a tripod near a burning hill. Rachel and Ray continue on foot, then shelter in Ogilvy’s basement as a tripod’s probing eye searches the rooms. Ray destroys the eye with an axe after it enters the cellar. He later kills Ogilvy offscreen when Ogilvy’s shouting threatens to reveal them. Near Boston, Rachel notices birds standing safely on a tripod, showing that its shield has failed. Soldiers attack it, and it collapses. The ending identifies Earth’s microbes as the aliens’ undoing: having no immunity to terrestrial bacteria, they die after conquering machines and cities. Ray returns Rachel to Mary Ann, and Robbie is unexpectedly alive at his grandparents’ home.