War of the Worlds

Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film War of the Worlds adapts H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel through an American family’s experience of an alien invasion. Tom Cruise plays Ray Ferrier, a divorced dockworker in Bayonne, New Jersey, whose former wife Mary Ann, played by Miranda Otto, leaves their children Robbie and Rachel with him while she travels to Boston. Dakota Fanning plays Rachel, and Justin Chatwin plays Robbie. Ray’s strained relationship with his children is established before the invasion: Robbie resents him, while Rachel is frightened by his unreliability. A strange lightning storm cuts electrical power and signals the arrival of catastrophe.

From beneath a Bayonne intersection, an enormous tripod war machine rises and begins killing civilians with a heat ray. Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp shift Wells’s English setting to the contemporary United States and make Ray’s limited viewpoint central: the audience usually learns about the attackers only as he does. Ray steals a working van and drives the children toward Mary Ann’s house. Along the road, they witness a ferry disaster and a desperate crowd. After reaching the house, Robbie leaves to follow soldiers moving toward the fighting. Ray and Rachel later hide in the cellar of Harlan Ogilvy, played by Tim Robbins.

Ogilvy has survived a passenger-jet crash and believes he can resist the invaders, but his terrifyingly increasing instability threatens both Ray and Rachel. A tripod probe methodically searches the cellar, producing one of the film’s most suspenseful sequences. Ray ultimately kills Ogilvy offscreen after deciding that Ogilvy may expose Rachel. The film’s aliens use three-legged machines, capture humans with cages, and spread red vegetation across the landscape. Their machines also employ a black, dustlike weapon that destroys people. Janusz Kamiński’s cinematography gives the action a desaturated, documentarylike appearance, while John Williams composed the score. Industrial Light & Magic supplied visual effects.

The journey ends in Boston, where Ray finds Mary Ann and the children’s grandparents, portrayed by Gene Barry and Ann Robinson. Robbie is unexpectedly there as well. The invasion collapses because Earth’s microorganisms prove fatal to the extraterrestrials, an ending retained from Wells’s novel and explained by Morgan Freeman’s narration. The film was released by Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures on June 29, 2005. It earned about $606 million worldwide and became one of that year’s highest-grossing films. At the 78th Academy Awards, it was nominated for Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing.