War
of the Worlds Review
Cast:-
Camillia Sanes
as News Producer
Dakota Fanning
as Rachel Ferrier
David Alan
Basche as Tim
James DuMont
as ?
Johnny Kastl
as Soldier
Lenny Venito
as Manny
Tim Robbins
as Ogilvy
Tom Cruise
as Ray Ferrier
Tommy Guiffre
as National Guardsman
Travis Aaron
as Soldier
Ty Keegan Simpkins
as 3 year old boy
Yul Vazquez
as Julio
Synopsis:-
This summer, the earth goes
to war. From Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures
comes the motion picture event of the year: Steven Spielberg’s
War of the Worlds, starring international superstar
Tom Cruise. A contemporary retelling of H.G. Wells’s
seminal classic, the sci-fi adventure thriller reveals
the extraordinary battle for the future of humankind
through the eyes of one American family fighting to
survive it.
Plot:-
Ray Ferrier ( Tom Cruise )
is a working class man living in New Jersey. He's estranged
from his family, his life isn't in order, and he's too
caught up with himself. But the unthinkable and, ultimately,
the unexpected happens to him in an extraordinary sense.
His small town life is shaken violently by the arrival
of destructive intruders: Aliens which have come en
masse to destroy Earth. As they plow through the country
in a wave of mass destruction and violence, Ray must
come to the defense of his children. As the world must
fend for itself by a new and very advanced enemy not
of this world, it's inhabitants must save humanity from
a far greater force that threatens to destroy it.
What the critics
say:-
"War of the Worlds,"
Steven Spielberg's reasonably entertaining rendering
of the 1898 H. G. Wells novel that also inspired the
other Welles, makes a gesture toward reversing that
trend. Mr. Spielberg's extraterrestrials, who rampage
across New Jersey in metal death-ray-shooting tripods
are - I'm looking for the precise critical term here
- wicked scary. And the terror they spread as they incinerate
buildings and vaporize people cannot help recalling
more immediate and painful scenes.
"Is it the terrorists?"
shrieks 10-year-old Rachel Ferrier (Dakota Fanning)
to her stressed-out father, Ray (Tom Cruise), as they
flee Bayonne in a stolen minivan. He is perhaps too
preoccupied to give the honest answer, which is: "Well,
sort of, sweetheart. In a metaphorical sense, that is."
(Morgan Freeman's voice-over narration, taken pretty
much verbatim from the Wells novel, helps to underscore
this point.)
It is tempting, and not altogether
out of place, to take "War of the Worlds"
and last summer's Spielberg movie, "The Terminal,"
as the director's responses to the Sept. 11 attacks.
"The Terminal" is a soothingly utopian post-9/11
movie, proposing decency, solidarity and good humor
as antidotes to fear and anxiety, while "War of
the Worlds" is nerve-rackingly apocalyptic, offering
an occasional reprieve but not much solace. It is, in
other words, a horror movie, and one that does not,
for the most part, insist too heavily on its own topicality.
As such, it takes Mr. Spielberg back to his early days
as a maker of lean, sadistic, effective thrillers. Although
the special effects are elaborate and expensive, "War
of the Worlds" has some of the stripped-down ingenuity
of "Jaws" and "Duel." Like those
pictures, it is an elemental story of predator and prey.
Unlike Mr. Spielberg's more recent films, in which he
has used his unparalleled skill as a visual storyteller
to create a complex tapestry of emotions, this one follows
the thread of a single human reflex: fight or flight.
Mostly flight. Ray is a divorced
longshoreman with weekend custody of his two children,
Rachel and her uncommunicative teenage brother, Robbie
(Justin Chatwin). Ray is not exactly a candidate for
father of the year; he keeps a V-8 engine on his kitchen
table and little besides half-empty condiment bottles
in his refrigerator, and bonds with his son mainly by
browbeating him. Once the aliens start vaporizing the
neighborhood, Ray's reaction is less than exemplary,
but he does manage to keep his family together and on
the run, and thus buys a chance at the redemption you
know is coming his way. Millions of deaths and incalculable
property damage seem like pretty expensive family therapy,
but it's heartening to know that even an alien invasion
can provide an opportunity for learning and growth.
In any case, the psychological
drama occupies as narrow a compartment in Josh Friedman
and David Koepp's script as the current-events allegory.
Mr. Cruise has lately proven himself to be much more
interesting and unpredictable as a talk show guest than
as an actor, but he remains adept at playing - either
with or against type, depending on how you look at it
- a jerk brought low by circumstances beyond his control.
Ms. Fanning, Hollywood's favorite
endangered child, screams her head off, an appropriate
enough response. The only other noteworthy piece of
acting comes from Tim Robbins as a possibly deranged
survivor hiding from the invaders in an abandoned barn.
After a few minutes in his company, you can only wish
that the Martians - or maybe the bloodthirsty puppets
from "Team America" - would hurry up and do
their job.
But acting is not really the
point of this movie, which seems to arise above all
from Mr. Spielberg's desire to reaffirm that he is,
along with everything else, a master of pure action
filmmaking. Think of "War of the Worlds" as
a riposte to his competitors - Michael Bay, Wolfgang
Petersen, Roland Emmerich and their profit-turning ilk
- and as a primer on how to mix computer-generated imagery
with the techniques of classic, large-scale cinema.
The visual atmosphere of "War
of the Worlds" is the work of a team - including
the cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, the costume designer
Joanna Johnston, the editor Michael Kahn and the production
designer Rick Carter - who all have worked with Mr.
Spielberg many times, and their collective expertise
gives the picture a crisp, seamless texture. Another
longtime Spielberg collaborator is John Williams, whose
score is striking partly as a result of how sparingly
it is used. For long stretches of the movie, you hear
no music at all, which deepens both the realism and
the dread, and immerses you more fully in what you are
seeing.
Which is, all in all, fairly
spectacular. There are scenes and images in "War
of the Worlds" that are especially stunning for
seeming completely effortless. The first alien attack,
in which a lightning storm from above is followed by
the emergence of the tripod vessels from underground;
a panicked crowd scene at a Hudson River ferry landing;
a devastated suburban subdivision into which a plane
has crashed - all of these are reminders of how sublime,
how aesthetically complete, a few moments of film can
be.
"War of the Worlds"
is perhaps best appreciated as an anthology of such
moments, bound together by a serviceable, if familiar,
conceit. The film also allows Mr. Spielberg to indulge
in the minor vice of self-quotation. An alien thoughtfully
fingers a bicycle wheel, perhaps thinking of his benevolent
kinsman E.T. The ear-splitting signal that the attack
vessels emit sounds a bit like the first two notes of
the "Close Encounters" siren song. An alien
probe has the long, twisty neck of a "Jurassic
Park" dinosaur and the eyeball of the surveillance
spiders in "Minority Report." All of which
serves as a reminder - perhaps superfluous - that this
is only a movie, and a lesser Spielberg movie at that.
But "War of the Worlds" also succeeds in reminding
us that while Mr. Spielberg doesn't always make great
movies, he seems almost constitutionally incapable of
bad moviemaking. It's not much to think about, but it's
certainly something to see.
By
A. O. SCOTT (
The New York Times )
