War of the Worlds

Rating

Director

Steven Spielberg

Screenplay

Josh Friedman, David Koepp (Novel: H.G. Wells)

Length

116 min.

Starring

Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Justin Chatwin, Miranda Otto, Tim Robbins

MPAA Rating

PG-13 (For frightening sequences of sci-fi violence and disturbing images)

Review

The novel War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells was the source for one of radio history’s most important broadcast. A young Orson Welles brought his Mercury players together in an adaptation of the book made to sound like a news program. 67 years later, another adaptation of the classic Victorian novel pits a modern family against the alien horde.

Tom Cruise stars as Ray Ferrier, a union crane operator who has agreed to take his son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) off his ex-wife Mary Ann’s (Miranda Otto) hands for the weekend. Not long after Mary Ann departs with her new boyfriend, an electrical storm draws neighbors from their homes to see a spectacular phenomenon.

They soon discover that this bizarre weather is the precursor to a world-wide invasion of the planet earth by aliens from another world. The audience knows that the invading planet is Mars but the film’s characters don’t have any idea. Ray takes his family on the run escaping into the countryside attempting to find their way back to Mary Ann and hopefully to safety.

The trouble is that everywhere they turn, the large tripod alien crafts begin to menace them anew forcing them to eventually seek shelter in the basement of a militiaman (Tim Robbins) who nearly gets them killed a number of different times.

Steven Spielberg took on a difficult challenge adapting the Wells novel to the screen. The largest failures, however, fall to the screenwriters. Josh Friedman (Chain Reaction”) and David Koepp (Bad Influence ) never seem to realize the difficulty of taking a novel set in the modern past and pulling it into the modern present. They leave a great deal of unanswered questions, silly omissions and gargantuan plot holes.