Spielberg's 'War of Worlds' brings horror home

By Jack Garner
Gannett News Service

WAR OF THE WORLDS (PG-13) Four Stars (Excellent) Steven Spielberg — the cinematic master of the amiable alien — turns brilliantly to the dark side in his apocalyptic story of alien invasion. It is enough to make E.T. grab his potted plant and turn tail for home. Tom Cruise stars. Paramount, 118 minutes.

Spielberg's $128 million adaptation of the H.G. Wells classic joins "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and "E.T.," to form Spielberg's superb trilogy of alien visitations. While the earlier films profiled benign and helpful intergalactic beings, this "War of the Worlds," presents slimy, malevolent aliens, as willing to destroy us as we are to stomp on ants.

Tom Cruise stars as Ray Ferrier, a divorced New Jersey dockworker and far-from-perfect father. When the film opens, he begrudgingly agrees to watch his two children for the weekend. The teenage son (Justin Chatwin) has no respect for Dad, while the 11-year-old Rachel (Dakota Fanning) tries to, but not without a struggle.

In short order, bizarre and intense lightning strikes morph into a full-scale alien invasion. Aliens ride the lightning bolts into the ground where giant tripod war machines await. In a shift from earlier versions, the machines have been here all along, planted on Earth like deadly flower bulbs millennia before humans arose from the muck. The machines simply awaited their crews.

With the giant machines at work, trampling and blasting humans and their structures with horrific abandon, the earthlings can do little but run, mostly out of the world's cities and into the countryside. However, the aliens are soon on their trails.

The 1897 Wells novel, the famous 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast, and the 1953 George Pal film all had a professor as the protagonist — the better to make scientific suppositions. In an intriguing shift, Spielberg and his writers put a typical, working-class father and his two children, at the center of the tale. Less concerned with the why of it all, the Ferriers' chief concern is simple survival, which generates the film's unrelenting core of tension.

The concept also puts "War of the Worlds," in a steady line of Spielberg films that have made imperfect families an important theme. We are nearly as curious about the Ferriers' stumbling attempts at reconciliation as in the survival of mankind.

Family ties also gives Cruise something worthwhile and more textured to work with as an actor and he delivers a moving performance, especially in the various moments when his young daughter is threatened.

Fanning, who shares most scenes with Cruise, is a remarkable young actress, well beyond the manipulative prop that most children seem to be on screen. Tim Robbins contributes a few key scenes as a spooky, disillusioned survivor who thinks he and his single-shell shotgun can take on the alien invaders.

Of the various incantations of the story, Spielberg seems most influenced by the 1953 film, aping especially an ominous sequence in which an alien periscope snakes its way into an underground hideaway where our heroes try to avoid its all-seeing eye. (Spielberg also gives the '53 star, Gene Barry, a tiny cameo as Ray's white-haired father-in-law.)

"War of the Worlds" isn't quite perfect — a blood-sucking motif in the final reels is a bit muddled and the ending succumbs to sentimentality. Still Spielberg shows he remains the master of the form he virtually invented.

Rated PG-13, with frightening sequences, a threatened child and violence.