| | |  | Suspence & Thriller | Home » » War of the Worlds (Widescreen Edition) | | | | | | | Description: | | Steven Spielberg's masterful take on the H.G. Wells classic stars Tom Cruise as a divorced New Jersey Everyman whose weekend with kids Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin is shattered by an alien invasion. As the decidedly unfriendly E.T.s and their menacing tripods devastate the planet, Cruise bravely attempts to reach ex-wife Miranda Otto in Boston, encountering the best and worst of humanity along the way. Tim Robbins also stars. 117 min. Widescreen (Enhanced); Soundtracks: English Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS 5.1, Dolby Digital stereo, French Dolby Digital 5.1; Subtitles: English, French, Spanish. | | | Product Details: | | | Actors:
| Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Tim Robbins, Miranda Otto, Justin Chatwin | | Director:
| Steven Spielberg | | Format:
| AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC | | Language:
| English | | Subtitle:
| English, Spanish, French | | Number of Discs:
| 1 | | Studio:
| Dreamworks Video | | Run Time:
| 116 minutes | | DVD Release Date:
| November 22, 2005 | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 1049 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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246 of 315 found the following review helpful:
ACTION MANJul 25, 2005
By DAVID BRYSON
The War of the Worlds is a great novel and Spielberg is a director of exceptional talent and accomplishment, so I had been hoping for a lot from this film. In the event, I have got part of what I was hoping for. Very occasionally, a novel can be 'walked' straight on to the screen (The Big Sleep, with a script by Faulkner, is a striking case), and I found myself wondering whether this novel might not have benefited from the same treatment. Some of Spielberg's changes are perfectly reasonable, others less so in my own opinion. It makes perfectly good sense to bring the action forward by a century into the present day, for instance. I suppose there's no harm either in changing the main actors from Wells's scientist with a wife and a brother to a dysfunctional American family, as this may provide enhanced 'human interest' or some such benefit for all I would know. Again, I have no real problem with the way the film combines the roles of the curate and the artilleryman in the book into the single persona of the former ambulance-driver, and I can well understand that Spielberg would have thought it prudent to tone down the socialistic elements in this aspect of the story in order to avoid setting off the wrong types of reaction in American audiences. What I do have a major problem with is the appearance of the Martians themselves. I'm sorry to report that these have far too much in common with a certain wretched TV series. The author's own description is one that stays in the memory, to say the very least, and Wells's Martians look the way they do for very clear reasons that he provides. What was gained by going downmarket in the way Spielberg chooses to do? Nothing that I can think of except perhaps better audience figures from harking back to that ghastly broadcast series.
In fact the best things in the film come directly from Wells. Even one of the best lines, where the statement that the invaders come from somewhere else is met with the question 'Where - Europe?' is a very clever adaptation of a good joke in the book comparing the attitudes of Mrs Elphinstone to the Martians on the one hand and the French on the other. The Martian tripods are simply terrific, their appearance lifted more or less exactly from the book. However The War of the Worlds is a work of political and social philosophy and speculation, not just some science-fiction yarn. I really would have liked Spielberg to be a bit more ambitious and reflect this more than he seems to have felt like doing. For one thing, the Martians are invading the earth because their own smaller planet is cooling and dying around them. Wells explicitly says that there is no reason to suppose them 'pitiless'. They have come for pressing practical reasons connected with their own very survival. We know now, as Wells did not, that all they were going to find on Venus is a searing hell under the rolling white clouds, so it would be more than likely, as Wells says again, that they would learn from the failure of their first expedition and come back to the earth better prepared the next time rather than stake everything on one throw, which is what the film seems to be suggesting. The last gesture of the Martians in the film is an expression indicative of hatred, which doesn't even make sense considering they saw us as their food source. What consumer of beef makes hostile faces at beef-herds? The Martians' purpose can't have been 'extermination' as someone is made to say in the film, only subjugation, another matter perfectly clear from the novel.
More survives of the view Wells takes of the behaviour of humanity itself, and Spielberg handles the mob-scenes rather well. However what he tones down more than I would have wished is the reflections, in the novel expressed via the persona of the artilleryman, on the likely behaviour of human beings towards one another once the Martian dominion was hypothetically established. The artilleryman's predictions are class-based like the vision of the Eloi and Morlocks in the Time-Machine, but they are far from endorsing Marxism and there is no reason to see them as any firm viewpoint held by the author himself.
Perhaps the very best things in the entire film are to be found in the voiceovers right at the start and right at the end. The words are lifted almost verbatim from the novel itself at these points, and they are simply awesome, the first page in particular of The War of the Worlds being surely one of the greatest in all English fiction with the last page not far behind it in that respect. The exquisite irony of the fact that the Martians, who might have viewed us as we view micro-organisms in a laboratory were in their turn thwarted and destroyed by just such organisms when nothing humanity could do availed in the least is obviously not lost on the director. I just wish he had raised his game more consistently to something like the level of the theme he was taking on.
246 of 326 found the following review helpful:
 Good homage to both Wells' novel and Pal's movie!Jul 07, 2005
By Reginald D. Garrard
"the G-man"
H. G. Wells wrote the novel over a century ago and Steven Spielberg has done a fantastic job of incorporating some of the literary tale's elements into his version: the tripods and their ear-shattering "ULLA!", the heat ray, the retaining baskets, the growth of the "red weed," the demented "Ogilvey" (Tim Robbins), the devastating onslaught from the invaders, man's futile efforts to defend himself, and the final "solution," among other parts familiar to fans of the book.
The director also paid tribute to producer George Pal's 1953 Technicolor classic by using a similar "probe" into the basement occupied by Cruise and daughter Fanning, the destruction of a church, an American setting, and a brief appearance by the earlier film's stars: Gene Barry and Ann Robinson.
There are many tense scenes, making this film not quite suitable for younger audiences. The sound is loud and abrasive, befitting the on-screen destruction. Surprisingly, John Williams's score is quite subtle and, on occasions, is barely audible.
Actingwise, Cruise, contrary to his behavior off-screen, asserts himself well as the estranged father of two kids who must now do all that he can to save his children, as well as himself. Fanning's strong performance shows why she is one of most popular child performers today. And Robbins is appropriately creepy as the man with the plan to bring down the invaders.
While megahit "Independence Day" toured similar ground, "War of the Worlds" is more the work of a master storyteller and his name is Steven Spielberg.
That alone makes it a film not to be missed!
18 of 23 found the following review helpful:
Cut the ending some slackOct 19, 2005
By Carlos
I won't offer a play-by-play of the movie's plot, but I do want to make one point. Let's cut the ending some slack.
Spielberg is often criticized for over-sentimentalizing his films' endings and going too far over the top. Like "A.I." and others, "War of the Worlds" has not escaped such complaints. I admit I was initially shocked by the level to which Spielberg asked that I suspend my disbelief, but after reflecting on the film as a whole, I've decided this isn't a problem for me. After all, during the film's run-time we've seen countless numbers of people not just killed, but utterly annihilated. We've seen buildings crushed and families torn apart. As far as his ending is concerned, Spielberg pulls no punches and goes for a solid emotional knock-out, which either works for you or does not. For me, seeing such an unabashedly happy ending was actually cathartic; after so much despair, I found it felt awfully good to see something I could feel happy about.
This is a great film and will certainly have a spot on my Wish List until its release date.
9 of 11 found the following review helpful:
It Has Its Problems, But It Gets Away With Them With Awesome VisualsNov 21, 2005
By Anthony Ian
"anthony_ian"
I have always been a fan of the alien-invasion genre, and have long awaited a decent movie to exploit the subject. Independence Day was a joke; Signs was great until the preposterous ending and explanation of what did in the aliens; X-Files had a good tone and smart plotting, until they lost everyone with the whole bees-and-corn storyline. Huh?
When I saw that Speilberg was going to tackle this with Cruise in the lead, I couldn't wait. And you know what, I wasn't disappointed.
First things first: the plot, as Ebert pointed out, about where they come from, is illogical, yes. But once you see the first machine literally explode onto that small town, it sure won't matter, because it's creepy as hell. Once one of these things stands up and starts making all the ominous noises while everybody just stands there, you can't help but be rattled.
There's a nifty and creepy sequence right before about a sort-of lightning storm--but with no thunder, as Ray points out, and the wind blowing TOWARDS the storm and not away from it. Next thing everybody knows, all electrical devices are dead: cars, power, even Ray's watch. Nice setup for obviously impending doom.
Of course this is CGI at work and I always appreciate digital that's done so realistically you forget it's digital. And that is the case here (unlike, say, the embarassingly digital snake in the movie Anaconda).
Once the machine starts going on a rampage in that New Jersey town, it is frightening and freaky and for whatever anybody says, Cruise does a good job of downplaying the role throughout--he's not the hero who does in the beast but rather a sad father who's just trying to keep his two kids alive.
The the other big plus for the movie is how it portrays what monsters WE become in the face of catastrophes on this scale--the panic, the me-first mentality, the trampling over others, etc. There's a great scene when Ray and his kids--in a working car, which nobody has--is set upon by a mob that attacks them viciously. A mob of fellow Americans.
What's best about the movie is the horrific imagery: people covered in ash from you-don't-want-to-know-what, a downed airliner, a burning train speeding through a town, the mist of blood blowing in a window, the source of which becomes horribly apparent. Yes, there are obvious reminders of 9/11 from not only the destruction and the ash but the aftermath.
The downside to the movie was too often the carnage and action was immediately followed by what seemed like overlong drama pieces intercut throughout. Of course you need a "human" story to it lest it become a cartoon like ID4, but these were the only sequences that dragged.
Cruise underplays it nicely, Dakota Fanning is great as always and the kid who plays Ray's conflicted teenage son is quite a find. You even get to see Tim Robbins as a crazy guy in a tornado shelter who meets a fate you won't believe.
Best Spielberg movie ever? No. But definitely worth seeing, especially when the machines are wreaking havoc. They are quite horrifying to behold, especially the first one.
DEFINITELY worth a rent.
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
Not nearly as bad as some reviews claimNov 03, 2008
By strangeitude
I sense and read a lot of mindless Spielberg bashing in some bad reviews here.
OK, lets face it from the start: this is no masterpiece; Cruise's character is not 100% likeable, the guy sometimes is immature, but this is a councious choice in the script, if it's a good or bad choice is arguable; the family characters are not 100% likeable either, thay are all antiheroes...nobody's perfect. Moreover, this is no faithful adaptation of the novel, which I have read; but why all movies that come from a novel MUST be ultra faithful screen versions of a novel? That would be always boring.
The viewer should'nt try to descypher all the extraterrestials intentions and means of operating, they are just a misterious and formidable force from another planet that want OURS for THEM. Not only about this movie, but other SciFi, I read a lot of people complaining about 'Why This?' 'Why That?'. This is a 2 hour movie, not V The Final Battle nor Galactica, that kind of criticism belongs more to the latter or Star Trek.
As a disaster movie, this work is almost a masterpiece, the FX are superb, there is great tension and desperation always, you just try to imagine yourself in the characters' various situations of this alien invasion, and lets see if you would always make the right decisions...you will figure out, that THERE ARE NO RIGHT CHOICES in such an extreme and unbelievable situation, your life depends of some luck and to stay away as possible from the powers that be.
As Science Fiction films are concerned, I avoid to compare remakes, specially if they are decades away (except if there is an obvious difference in quality, such as Planet of the Apes). 1953 The War of The Worlds is a work from another time, Spielberg's is a work of the 21st century that exploits 21st century's sensibilities, I do not see why that has to be negative.
The ending is very similar from the novel, and it is a whole and HUGE point of the main story. Spielberg surely knew this and wisely avoided a more climatic final, those who want humans blasting off and wasting aliens should look away. A footnote: this ending is far more wise than, for example, Independence Day...my God, I still cannot make some text files compatible between my Mac and my Windows PC! You know what I mean...
In a nutshell, of Spielberg's late SciFi works I prefer this one (the others being Minority Report and Artificial Intelligence) despite that in all of them you find masterful moments, this has the more thrills and surprises that are typical of his authoring. Forget Tom Cruise and give this film a chance. I wish that there would be more SciFi movies like this and less like Alien vs Predator or Supernova, Spielberg is still the 'master', even when he does not use his full power.
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