December 28, 2023 — War of the Worlds
9 min readDec 29, 2023
- (Intro to this series)
- (Previous notes: The Terminal)
- (War of the Worlds on IMDb)
- Ooh, I like this one. It’s just a good sci-fi action movie, right? Very modern, gripping, visually exciting as I recall. I don’t think anyone doubted that there could be a perfect melding of Spielberg with a Tom Cruise summer action blockbuster, but if they did they then didn’t. I guess off the top of my head I can’t remember a lot of specifics about what happens in this adaptation of the novel, so I’m looking forward to being reminded. Here I go…
- Right away it seems like the John Williams score will play a big part in the sense of doom we’re about to feel.
- Tom Cruise plays a guy who operates the giant lift thing that puts shipping containers in stacks, that looks super super fun. He has the cockiness of his Top Gun character.
- He exchanges his children with his ex-wife and her new man, the tension is familiar and effective. So is the Tom-Cruise-iness of TC and the mopey teenager-ness of the son, Robbie. The look is similar to Minority Report with its harsh paleness.
- “That’s now how you’re going to get through to him,” says Rachel, the daughter who is solidly single-digits in age and yet said that.
- 0:13:30 — A Morgan Freeman narration had informed us in the very beginning, with a script that seems like it might have come from the original novel, that this was an aliens-are-watching-us story, so right now we’re ready to see something unearthly, and we do when a not-normal storm looms over the city at them. Neighbors are all outside just watching. The wind isn’t normal. It actually stops abruptly. TC puts on a confident attitude for Rachel…
- …until some lightning strikes are way too freaky. We see them in reflections of his windows. It is super cool. Robbie had stormed away angrily in the car so now it’s like where is he uh oh.
- Everything electrical stops working, even cars and watches. Even a bicycle which operates on electrical impulses from human muscles won’t work any more. Just kidding, I know, I am kind of a snob sometimes.
- So the thing with the lightning is that it was striking the same spot multiple times, so they go check out the spot and here we go. A bunch of cool shots show cracks expanding out from the spot and breaking buildings all around them. Eventually the ground buckles super unnaturally like. We see a three-hooved mechanism first, it seems to be attached to something else but our vantage point is incomplete, we see what TC and the crowd sees. Eventually the whole mechanism is discernable, a skyscraper-height robot with a bird-shaped metal head and three very flexible legs. Also three eyes I guess.
- A SUPER cool shot, very Spielberg-y, shows a camcorder dropped on the ground, and zooms in on the viewer showing the robot’s lasers mutilating things really easily. More shots show people running away in futility because it’s like this thing has squirt guns that squirt vaporized death at just whoever and whatever.
- TC returns home to where the kids are waiting, covered in the ashes of corpse-clouds he just walked through. Maybe some of it was just vaporized buildings but we’re supposed to be freaked out by the human remains aspect.
- They leave the house without him telling the kids why they have to leave with a box of groceries. He says “we’ve only got about a minute.” How does he know the timing? Dunno but they get in a car that was casually referenced earlier, and the guy that just fixed it is clueless about what’s going on and he fights with TC about how TC is about to steal the car. Which he does, and then a laser vapo-kills the guy and the next shot is a rad image of an overpass turning into basically a concrete cooked noodle.
- 0:33:25 — A shot that he practiced for in Sugarland Express… a long single take of them driving very fast through stopped highway traffic, the camera swooping to all sides of the car. This time there are definitely special effects that were not available then but whatever, it’s very cool looking. They have the only car that works. Rachel gets the idea to scream for mom. It is effective for the suspense, the choice of a child to scream MOM at the top of her lungs in this situation, I believe it and I feel TC’s frustration.
- They go out to the suburbs to where Mom lives in a nice house, but Mom is gone. The power works there. TC tries to make them sandwiches but he is a bad father. They hole up in the basement, the kids acting maybe not quite like they saw lasers destroying their neighborhood but more like they’re just mad at their flawed dad.
- In the middle of the night, some kind of lightning terror storm starts up outside so they find the basementy-est room in the basement and it protects them because in the morning the area where they were is trashed and the main floor of the house has been hit and destroyed by a commercial airliner.
- TC meets two people in a news truck and they have important intel and cool footage. He learn that the things are being called tripods, and their footage shows a huge army of them marching across a city, destroying it. The tripods have an invisible force field. Their footage shows that arrowhead-shaped crafts were going into the holes during those lightning strikes, which is how aliens got into the previously-buried tripods.
- I don’t understand how most things don’t work but this car does and also the news truck and Mom’s house.
- They’re someplace rural now, they have a vague plan of going somewhere, to Boston I think? Rachel takes a pee break by the river and sees a bunch of floating bodies that were timed to float by at just the right time cinematically.
- Their journey takes them to a town with way more people than we’ve seen in a while, and because of this whole situation, this entire town in upstate New York mobs the car violently like a bunch of rabid hyenas. TC has to fire his gun in the air, which makes us think “why is he the only one with a gun as well as the only one with a working car”, but some other dude has a gun and heists the car from TC. But then that guy gets mobbed and more guns go off.
- 0:57:30 — A burning train speeds by and it looks cool. The lights & barriers function normally and that is oddly chilling.
- The mob has calmed down enough to form an orderly line to a ferry, because the other side of the river must be better I guess. But they stop being orderly when some tripods show up and make their foghorn noise. Boarding the ferry remains a thing, although a more chaotic thing. Is it going to the same destination? I would ask the captain to sail further away from the tripods. Wait, never mind, the captain has to worry about a whirlpool in his way, and it is actually about another alien vehicle, maybe an even bigger one. It rises from the water and capsizes the ferry. Some sweet shots of underwater peril.
- And then, traditional tripods show up, I guess the ones we saw a few minutes ago, and they use metal tentacles to snatch people from the water. Our heroes scramble out of the water and onto the other bank and get a scary view of tripods chasing people down and lasering them. Another shot of the new Big Vehicle is right by them and they sneak by. The thing about this movie is that there are lots and lots of cool shots of scary alien robot terror.
- They stumble upon an area where army forces are attacking tripods. Robbie had said earlier that he thought he should join those forces, and he totally tries to join this army group. He actually insists. He thinks he’s just going to be in the army and help, but shortly after he goes over there, everything over there becomes on fire. Again, many very cool shots.
- 1:11:05 — TC and Rachel find a man with a shotgun inviting them into a cellar. They’re like “m’kay” and they go in there. The man is Tim Robbins and he has a badge. They have a peaceful moment but then the music is creepy and TR looks shellshocked and crazy, although he doesn’t seem like a bad guy. Just like a conspiracy theorist.
- A cool long single-take shot has them checking through a couple different windows and see tripod activity, it looks cool. TC spots weird red vein things growing into the basement.
- Then a neat alien periscope probe thing enters the basement and snakes around looking for them. It is slow and easy to avoid but this is still suspenseful. TR almost tries whacking it with a hatchet but instead doesn’t. They all hide behind a mirror and the periscope probe pauses and admires its reflection, good thinking. It leaves without finding them because it is a very bad alien periscope probe.
- Or is it. After it leaves, what appear to be actual organic aliens come into the cellar. They’re like big insect-y humanoids and are also bad at searching for them.
- While the aliens are poking around, TR decides to load his shotgun, and he and TC start tussling… quietly! TC doesn’t want him to have the shotgun but they both want to stay quiet! It is tense! But the foghorn sound happens and the aliens just leave.
- The vein things are growing and also the air is apparently misty with red stuff. They see through a window that a tripod is sucking the blood out of a person and spraying it around! What the actual!
- This is getting too much for TR, he is going nuts, he sounds very Trumpy. Things get even darker. TC puts a blindfold on Rachel and tells her to cover her ears. TC then goes behind a closed door and somehow probably just straight murders TR.
- They take a nap after that, but that periscope probe must have gotten in trouble for sucking before because it’s back, and this time it spots them napping. TC hatchets it! What a hypocrite. No, because it knew they were there this time. Rachel goes missing during that and now the outside is a veiny bloodscape.
- A tripod finds TC and chases him into a car, but then Rachel is by herself all conspicuous and well-lit, so it goes and grabs her! TC doesn’t like that so he gets its attention and makes it grab him too. It puts him in a cage thing with like thirty other people, including Rachel. The cage hangs under its chassis and sometimes a tentacle comes out of a nipple and abducts one person.
- Okay, when I said he distracted one, it was with grenades. It went by so fast that I had no idea how he had grenades, but in a highly non-credible sequence, he managed to smuggle more grenades into that cage, and get the tentacle to pull some up into the nipple with a guy, and then pull the guy out, and the pins of the grenades were pulled and it blows up. Only a character played by Tom Cruise could be so heroic and skilled and lucky.
- 1:43:00 — They have arrived in Boston with a parade of refugees, and it looks like the tripods are dying. Everyone is wondering why. TC notices that birds are now landing on the tripods so they must not have shields any more. He heroically tells an army person of this observation and they start bazooka-ing tripods very successfully. One of them barfs out orange liquid and a dying alien.
- TC brings Rachel back to her mom, who is in a brownstone in Boston so maybe it was other family members who lived in the suburbs and I didn’t catch that. Robbie had also made it to Mom somehow so he’s there, everyone is together and hugging and acknowledging TC’s heroism and not telling us Robbie’s story. Morgan Freeman returns to explain that all our viruses were super good at killing aliens.
- Okay, so it turns out that when you’re watching and enjoying this movie, you are also conscious of the weakness of some of the story elements. It’s easy to imagine a version of this movie where Tom Cruise decided not to do it, a less marquee actor did it instead, and that opened them up to make more interesting and credible choices about characters and subplots. But while that would have improved it, we still would be just breath-took by the intense action and imagery. I really like all that, it was hard to keep up with it! And all the death and blood and veins, it goes pretty hard with that! I like this movie. I acknowledge, as these notes make clear, its more dippy aspects and I ungrudgingly accept the whole thing for what it is.
- (Next: Munich)
