The Newsweek blurb that has graced every physical release of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining calls it “The first epic horror film.” That quote has always stuck with me. Horror films are many things, but epic is usually not one of them. Put simply, a cinematic epic is defined by its sense of scope – telling a human drama against the backdrop of enormous scale.
Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds remake fits the description rather astutely.
It is indeed, an epic horror film.
I still remember my theater experience watching Spielberg’s reimagining of the H.G. Wells literary classic in 2005. The images, sound, and immersive quality of the film sucked me right in. The sound system alone rattled my insides like a tuning fork – the resonating blast of the tripod’s horn a portent of doom.
Now 17 years later, War of the Worlds still packs a visceral punch.
While the film received mostly good notices from critics and decent worldwide box office, it has never been seen as one of Spielberg’s better films – and is often referenced as something of a misfire for the famed filmmaker, which I vehemently disagree with. While the film suffers from a botched ending, it is overall a tight and intimate exercise in unbearable tension, dread, and terror.
War of the Worlds honors the everyman perspective of the Wells novel instead of the typical alien invasion formula of following scientists and military personnel as they battle an otherworldly menace. Unlike the novel, this version takes place in modern day America and follows deadbeat dad Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) as he is left with his two children, Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and Rachel (Dakota Fanning) over the weekend.
Spielberg loves to frame his alien encounters through the lens of family dysfunction and War of the Worlds is no different. Cruise playing a charming but self-centered average Joe is something of a departure from his usual roles, and he does an excellent job of selling Ray as a man who loves his kids, but doesn’t know how to effectively relate to or communicate with them.
The cosmic horror of what the family is experiencing is enough to immediately draw them closer, as Ray has been too absent and too closed off to engender faith and trust in his children needed to see them through.
The beginning of the film is unassuming and low key with no clues or hints we are about to witness a global alien incursion. Spielberg uses this set-up to draw the audience in and place them in the perspective of the family. The way in which he metes out the build-up of the invasion is an absolute clinic in slow-building suspense with bone-chilling payoff.
We see glimpses of what’s to come on news broadcasts reporting on mysterious EMPs around the globe. Then the storm clouds roll in – dark and ominous maelstroms presaging what could be Earth’s final hour.
The wind rises, the skies darken, the lightning strikes – rapid, violent, deafening, and unnatural. All of this is seen from the perspective of Ray and Rachel, giving the audience a sense of immersion in the atmosphere and setting. Spielberg’s sense of geography and space is unparalleled. Grounding the film in a tangible sense of place with authentic location shooting that adds to the intimate nature of the storytelling.
When we see a real place populated with realistic seeming people, it makes the death and destruction feel all the more urgent and affecting.
The emergence of the first alien tripod is nerve-shredding. Spielberg continues to toy with the audience, peeling back layer after layer of what is happening with expert precision. The sense of impending calamity reaches a fever pitch as the massive alien craft fully reveals itself, towering over everything surrounding it. No warning. No greeting.
The tripod begins to annihilate everyone in its path with a beam of energy that reduces flesh and bone to ash. A brilliant handheld one shot puts the audience dead center in the carnage, camera acting as a human’s point of view as we see people disintegrated all around us. John Williams‘s haunting score personifies the shrill screams of absolute terror just before a person is zapped from existence.
This sequence further proves why Spielberg is such a master. Everything from the shot composition, editing, sound design, and visual effects work perfectly. For a film nearing 20 years old, the effects work is still stunning and has not aged in the slightest.
Once the first tripod emerges it’s a fight for survival for Ray and his children.
Spielberg is often criticized for leaning into maudlin sentiment (a criticism this film’s ending sadly validates) but the vast majority of the runtime of War of the Worlds is Spielberg’s bleakest and most dire material on the blockbuster side of his filmography.
The character is Rachel is often front and center in witnessing the horrors of the invasion. So many of the events are seen from her perspective, and throughout the course of the film she becomes increasingly shell-shocked, almost to the point of catatonia.
Spielberg doesn’t go easy on the character just because she’s a child. Dakota Fanning took the world by storm for a reason when she broke onto the scene – she’s a damned good actor. Not a single note of her performance in the film feels out of step.
Spielberg also has no qualms of unmasking humanity for the panicked animals we can truly be when things go south. The aliens aren’t the only threat to humanity’s survival in this film, but so are our fellow humans. The most harrowing scene in the film may not involve the aliens at all, but a mob of scared and desperate people willing to do anything, even kill, to wrest Ray’s car from him.
In light of recent real-world events that have transpired over the past two years, this particular sequence has sadly become more relevant with age.
The mounting sense of desperation Ray feels as the world continues to, quite literally, burn around him is carried masterfully by Cruise who, despite his fame, still doesn’t often get the credit he deserves for the range he can display. The character of Ray is a man with no extraordinary skillset. He’s not suave or cool or hyper-competent at anything. He’s just a guy hanging on by a thread trying to keep his kids alive as the world ends.
In a brilliant inversion of the earlier car theft mob scene – a scene meant to fill the audience with impotent rage and despair – we later see Ray driven to the point of murder himself after a man named Ogilvy (Tim Robbins) takes him and his daughter Rachel in after Ray assumes he just lost his son, Robbie. Ogilvy has already lost the plot. He’s erratic and half out of his mind – quickly proving to be a detriment to Ray and Rachel’s continued survival. In a brilliant, wordless scene we see Ray come to the conclusion he has to take Ogilvy out.
Spielberg doesn’t frame Ray as a hero making the noble decision here. He frames Ray in silhouette, a looming, wordless threat come to snuff out a being desperate to live. In this way Ray is almost like the unknowable tripods themselves – coolly going about their conquest.
Every encounter with the tripods is fraught with tension. The way Spielberg and his long-time cinematographer Janusz Kaminsky shoot the tripods ensures that the audience never feels at ease in their presence. Their scale is a constant source of awe and fear.
Making the decision to keep the narrative focused on regular civilians and not the military does all the work in selling the aliens as truly unstoppable as well as give the audience a way to relate to the situation in a more personal way. There are no action heroes to root for here. This could be us.
The brief glimpse we do get of military engagement offer no sense of comfort or encouragement. Tanks and artillery bombard the tripods to no avail. Everything ends in a wall of flame as they continue their razing of the planet.
As intense as Spielberg is able to keep the keep for its efficient runtime of just a hair over two hours, the ending of the film feels like a genuine cop-out with the miraculous survival of Robbie ending the film on a note too hokey to feel believable. It’s a hollow note that sadly does sour the relentless ride up to that point, but not enough to negate just how well executed the proceeding two hours were. Spielberg himself owns up to the misfire ending, claiming in James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction that he dislikes it as well could never quite hone in on a satisfying ending.
Even so, War of the Worlds is one of the better modern remakes and what I consider to be a true big budget, epic horror film.
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