Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds premiered at the Ziegfeld Theatre on June 23, 2005, and Paramount Pictures released it in theaters on June 29, 2005. The film had already opened in Tokyo on June 13, 2005. It cost $132 million to produce and grossed $604 million worldwide, and it stars Tom Cruise as Ray Ferrier, a divorced Brooklyn dockworker and crane operator whose estranged children arrive at his Bayonne, New Jersey house for a rare weekend visit just as something else does.
Trailer, via YouTube Movies.
The Lightning Storm Over Bayonne
The opening is the film’s cleanest piece of engineering. Ray’s pregnant ex-wife Mary Ann (Miranda Otto) drops off ten-year-old Rachel (Dakota Fanning) and teenage Robbie (Justin Chatwin), and within minutes a strange thunderstorm strikes the same intersection over and over.
The lightning is not weather. It is transport. An EMP disables almost every electronic device in range, and when Ray walks toward the impact site he watches a massive tripod war machine rise out of the ground and turn a crowd of onlookers into ash with energy weapons.
Spielberg shoots the first attack as a street-level panic rather than a military spectacle. That choice holds for most of the film’s 117 minutes.
Ray Ferrier Takes Manny’s Minivan
Ray’s mechanic friend Manny (Lenny Venito) has just replaced a solenoid in a customer’s minivan when the tripod attacks. Ray commandeers the van, tries to bring Manny along, and is forced to drive off when the machine closes in. Manny dies.
From there the film becomes a road movie with no road. Ray drives Rachel and Robbie to Mary Ann’s empty suburban New Jersey home, and a Boeing 747 crashes into the neighborhood. A wandering television news team is scavenging the wreckage for food.
A correspondent tells Ray what the audience needs to know: tripods have attacked major cities around the world, they carry force shields that shrug off humanity’s defenses, and their pilots rode down inside the lightning itself, into machines that were already buried underground.
A Basement and Tim Robbins
The film’s most contained stretch, as this paper reads it, puts Ray and Rachel in a basement with Harlan Ogilvy, played by Tim Robbins.
Robbins plays him as a man whose competence has curdled, and the sequence works as a horror film about proximity — three people in one room, and whatever is outside it. That is interpretation, not plot summary; the film never explains him, and the source material for this piece lists only the name and the actor.
It is also where the film’s politics get interesting without ever becoming explicit. The script hands Ogilvy a conviction and then refuses to say whether the film shares it.
The Cast, and What Cruise Is Doing
Cruise’s Ray is not a hero at the start. He is a self-absorbed man handed two children he barely knows, and Cruise plays the early scenes with a coldness most blockbusters would soften.
Fanning is the film’s anchor. Rachel spends most of the runtime terrified, and Fanning makes that terror specific rather than generic — she is a child doing math on how much danger she is in, and the math keeps getting worse.
Miranda Otto has little to do as Mary Ann, and Justin Chatwin’s Robbie is given a motivation the script then strands, or so it seems. The screenplay is by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, from H. G. Wells’ 1898 novel.
Morgan Freeman narrates. The film opens with his voice stating that extraterrestrials with immense intelligence have grown envious of humanity’s dominion of Earth and are plotting against them.
The Secrecy Campaign
Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, and Cruise/Wagner Productions produced War of the Worlds. It was shot in 73 days across five sound stages and locations in California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia.
The production was wrapped in a secrecy campaign so few details would leak before release. Tie-in promotions ran with several companies, including Hitachi.
The film’s tagline — “They’re already here.” — does the same job the first act does: telling you the invasion is not coming, it is already underground.
Release Schedule
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| June 13, 2005 | Tokyo release |
| June 23, 2005 | Premiere at the Ziegfeld Theatre |
| June 29, 2005 | Theatrical release by Paramount Pictures |
What the Film Gets Right
The first hour of War of the Worlds is close to the best work Spielberg has done in the genre. The tripods are not monsters with personalities; they are machines operated by something the film mostly keeps off-screen, and that restraint is more frightening for it. The ash — people, disintegrated, drifting down onto the survivors — is an image the film earns.
The basement sequence with Robbins is the film’s high point and also its most contained. It works because it is small. The moment the film goes back outside, it loses the intimacy that made the terror legible.
What holds up is the craft. The sound design, the camera work at street level, the decision to keep the aliens largely off-screen — these are choices that have aged better than most 2005 blockbusters. The film treats an invasion as a logistics problem before it is a battle, and it stages the logistics with real care.
War of the Worlds drew generally positive reviews, with critics praising how it captured the suspense of Wells’ novel while modernizing the action and effects for a contemporary audience. It was also a commercial success.
The film is worth watching for the Bayonne sequence alone, and for Fanning, who is doing more work than the script gives her credit for. It is not the definitive Wells adaptation, and it does not try to be. It is at its best when it forgets to be inspirational.
Score: 7.3/10 (Metacritic 73/100)
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