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War of the Worlds Our rating: Rate this movie   MPAA rating: PG-13 (for frightening sequences of sci-fi violence and disturbing images) Theater release: June 29, 2005 by Paramount Pictures Directed by: Steven Spielberg Runtime: 1 hour 57 minutes Cast: Tom Cruise (Ray Ferrier), Mirando Otto (Mary Ann Ferrier), Dakota Fanning (Rachel Ferrier), Justin Chatwin (Robbie Ferrier), Tim Robbins (Ogilvy) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

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Has it really been two centuries since H.G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds? Well, no, not quite, but he did write it in the late 19th century, and in it, he criticized the European and especially British imperialism of his time; just as the world's colonial superpowers had wiped out the dodo, the bison, the aboriginal tribes of Tasmania, and others, so too they would now feel what it was like to live under the brutal domination of an advanced civilization, albeit one from Mars.

But if the novel encouraged self-reflection and invited its readers to consider how they had mistreated the world, the story's film and radio dramatizations have tended to confirm their audiences' fear and suspicion of the other. Orson Welles's 1938 radio play, which caused panic when some listeners mistook it for a genuine news broadcast, was produced less than a year before the Nazis launched the Second World War; George Pal's 1953 film came out during the Cold War, and presented Americans as the heroic, God-fearing victims of an unwarranted and presumably Soviet-style attack; and now, in the first decade of the 21st century, Steven Spielberg's film presents the alien invaders as stand-ins for the terrorists who attacked on September 11, 2001.

This time, the aliens do not come from Mars but from some other, unspecified world; and it turns out their fighting machines have been buried under the surface of the Earth, waiting for pilots to come and use them, for possibly millions of years—the alien equivalent of sleeper cells, perhaps. The pilots come down in lightning storms that send out an electromagnetic pulse that knocks out all the local machines; and when their machines rise up from the ground, they proceed to shatter the buildings and evaporate the people. The survivors are coated in the dust of their fellow citizens, an image that recalls photos of the people who emerged from the cloud of debris after the World Trade Center towers fell.

One of these survivors, a dockworker named Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), is a divorced father of two who happens to be looking after the kids for the weekend when the aliens hit. (One of his children is supposed to be working on a school paper on the French occupation of Algeria; this is the film's only explicit nod to the novel's anti-colonialist subtext, and, tellingly, it directs the criticism somewhere else.) Like many other Tom Cruise characters, Ray is glib and irresponsible when we first meet him—he jokes about his troubles with women, his vintage Mustang skids loudly as it turns through the intersection near his house, and he shows up half-an-hour late for a meeting with his ex-wife (Miranda Otto), who is dropping off their teenaged son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and ten-year-old daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) so that she and her new husband can visit her parents on their own—but circumstances force him to become more focused and purposeful by the story's end.

Ray's first instinct is to steal a mini-van that a local mechanic fixed with his help, and to take the children back to their home. But the house is deserted, and—shades of the plane that fell in the Rockaway neighborhood of Queens, two months after the terrorist attacks—it is soon destroyed by a falling airplane. He then heads for his ex-wife's parents' home in Boston, but he encounters a series of obstacles along the way. And to make matters worse, the children don't respond very well to his feeble assertions of authority over them.

Those expecting a conventional war movie, whether of the fantasy Star Wars variety or the realistic Saving Private Ryan variety, may be in for a shock. Spielberg shows little interest in the military, except to show how even it is powerless against the alien attack; and as the panicked humans begin to fight amongst themselves, while the aliens start harvesting humans for their blood, the film takes on the bleaker and more apocalyptic tones of A.I. Artificial Intelligence and even Schindler's List. As Ogilvy (Tim Robbins), a delusional survivalist with whom Ray and his daughter hide for a spell, puts it, "This is not a war, any more than there's a war between men and maggots. This is an extermination."

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