This version of War of the Worlds (2005) is not the classic version, but the remake starring Tom Cruise. It is, in some ways, similar to the earlier version, but it also differs in a key way.
They are similar in the special effects department, in that both, for their era, is excellent. The solution to the problem of something destroying humanity is the same, the attack of our pathogens on hosts with no defenses, and thus they appear to share the same religious orientation, although this version’s touch of religion is far lighter, perhaps even superfluous.
But there’s a key difference. In the original, science is brought to bear upon the problem, and is one of the foci of that version; its bitter and complete failure, and the scientists’ desperation, vs the smallest of the small’s success in defending our planet becomes the epilogue of the movie.
In this new version, science never enters into it. This is a classic It Came, We Saw, We Ran Like Hell plot, and we follow the flying heels of Cruise’s character, a longshoreman with virtually no concept of science, as he gathers up his children and gets out of town with the monsters hot on his trail. Once in the countryside, he must play dodge-ems with the monster’s monstrous machines, all the while trying to ride herd on a daughter with a scream like a train whistle, and a son with a ridiculous urge to prove himself.
But while the science and military of the first version barely lay a finger on the monsters (they manage to chop up a mechanical eye, as I recall, and bring it back for study), when Cruise finally gets scooped up by one of the machines, he goes up with a grenade belt, and, through a brave ploy, he halts its macabre rampage.
1 for the regular guys, 0 for the experts. While the first version addressed the classic rivalry between religion and science, this new version addresses a less conventional rivalry – that between the experts and the guy who fixes his own cars. It’s not stressed – we never even see a scientist labor and fail – but the theme lingers in the background, encouraging the audience to believe it can do anything it wants, if it runs fast enough and happens to be clever.
In the end, the monsters meet their doom due to the aforementioned pathogens, so the theme of the superiority of the regular guys is diluted, even attenuated; and, in fact, that’s a general problem with this movie: it can’t really decide what it wants to say, beyond the classic Put a putz in a pressure situation and he may grow up. It attempts to follow the original’s lesson in faith, but does it poorly, since it adheres to the single viewpoint of the longshoreman, who shows no sense of religion from beginning to end.
All that said, if you’re a visual person, this is a fun movie to watch. Director Spielberg springs a number of dramatic tableaus, from a hunt of Cruise’s family in an abandoned farm house, to a burning train, still flying along despite the monsters’ attack, to a car ferry attempting to save refugees, but instead becoming a death trap. These are carried off in grand style, but rather than being the cherries on the top of a great plot, they are the distractions from the rather muddled mess it becomes. The transition from the destruction of monster to the march on Boston is particularly problematic, because by now there’s no mechanized transport, except for the military – so how did they get to Boston so quick? And why murder that one guy, driven mad by the loss of his family? It seems … excessive.
All in all, it’s an OK movie, certainly if you have a head cold like I do, but it’s not going to stick to you. Better seen in the cinema than on the TV, it’ll be 20 years old in about 8 years – it may be worth waiting for it to show up as a “classic” at a local nostalgia cinema.
