Unstoppable alien invaders attack Earth in giant tripod war machines. Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), a divorced man and uninvolved father, attempts to keep his two children Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and Rachel (Dakota Fanning), safe, and take them to their mother.
Steven Spielberg sucks all of the meaning out of H.G. Wells’s classic novel, leaving a pointless, special effects non-extravaganza. Gone is not only the social criticism, but also the plot and characters. He does keep the title.
To go with that title he gives us three new, unpleasant characters, but not unpleasant in any kind of interesting way. There’s blue collar dad, Ray, played with a remarkable lack of depth by Cruise. That’s a bit unfair as Cruise is given nothing to work with, but for the bucks he’s paid, I’d hope he could invent some personality. To go with him there’s rebellious son Robbie. He’s stupid. Yup, that’s his single personality trait. He puts all his effort into running straight at the alien war machines. Why? Did I mention he was stupid? Then there is Rachel. She isn’t a character. She’s a combination of unrelated “cute” lines. One moment she speaks like a thirty-year-old pop psychologist, the next she’s a slobbering Margaret O’Brien from Meet Me in Saint Louis, and then a mentally unbalanced college freshman. She’s also Jamie Lee Curtis, finding far too many opportunities to scream. But as she’s a young girl in a Hollywood film, it’s a given that she’s going to get threatened and kidnapped at least twice per act.
Now, to build tension, the audience needs to care about the characters. We have to want them not to get zapped, drained of their blood, or stepped on by a giant mental foot. And Spielberg, who really should know better, appears to believe that everyone’s going to love these folks. He’s put in every heart-tugging, overwrought scene in his arsenal. Of course they don’t even rise to the level of sentimental mush if you hate the people involved. And I do. I just wanted to see one of those war machines turn them into human flakes. If within the first half hour, Ray had been microwaved out of existence when he decided to stick around and watch the earth crack open, and Robbie and Rachel had been trampled, this could have been a bearable film, and I wouldn’t have had to listen to mindless bickering for an hour and a half. Ah, what might have been.
It is even worse in that this is an escape picture. Ray cannot fight the aliens in any way. He’s way out of his league. So, once the tripods start walking, all he can do is run. Period. It is a film about running (and driving and swimming). That makes it doubly important that these are people I want to spend time with.
There are plenty of small-scale failings as well. The aliens have the most moronic attack plan ever put on film. They buried their crafts on Earth millions of years ago, and then just waited for humanity to evolve and build cities so they could show up (in lightning bolts), start the out of date equipment, and destroy us. Is there any sense to that? But as the script is saddled with a conclusion that requires a spacefaring race to have no understanding of the importance of quarantines, it’s silly to worry about all the other myriad nonsensical items. Besides, it is the poor characters, slow pacing, and lack of excitement that sink the film.
This War of the Worlds owes more to 1996’s Independence Day than it does to either its namesake book or the 1953 film (which also paid little attention to the novel). It even duplicates the scene where Will Smith goes outside to find the neighbors looking over the local buildings to see some pretty odd weather. Both films are mind-numbing fodder, customized for two steps below the lowest common denominator. But the makers of Independence Day understood how to construct fun froth, with flawed, unrealistic characters that I could care about.
With so very little of value in the script and acting, some surprisingly drab cinematography, and the raping of an important book, it would seem that War of the Worlds was a fine candidate for my 
award. But, I have to withhold that purely on the basis of special effects. The film does a poor job of showcasing its immense extraterrestrial walkers, but they are still pretty cool to watch. And I enjoyed the gun that left only shredded cloths blowing in the wind when a person was shot. I didn’t enjoy it enough to ever watch this movie again, but such little things are what separate a miserable film from a crime against humanity.