Newark blue-collar dockworker Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) is divorced from Mary Ann (Miranda Otto) and estranged from his teenage son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and ten year old daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning). Mary Ann drops off a reluctant Robbie and Rachel for a rare weekend visit, departing with the words "take care of our kids" - and shortly afterwards a freak lightning storm breaks, cutting off all power and releasing from the ground a gigantic metal tripod which begins to obliterate anyone and everyone in its path. Ray flees with his children, and as it dawns that this is just a tiny part of a massive worldwide alien invasion, the three join a desperate flood of refugees, hoping to get safely to Mary Ann in Boston. As their world is turned upside down, Ray will stop at nothing to keep his family alive.

With his new update of H.G. Wells 1898 novel 'The War of the Worlds', Steven Spielberg presents a peril so overwhelmingly vast and mercilessly indiscriminate that thoughts of negotiation or resistance are futile, and the only hope that remains, however precarious it may be, is survival itself. For as in Roland Emmerich's

It's Got: Tom Cruise finding the perfect balance between likeable and repellent Everyman; Dakota Fanning proving once again that she is the finest actor of her generation (and in the first decent vehicle in a while to match her talents); cameos from Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, the stars of the 1953 George Pal/Byron Haskin version of the film; drama, suspense, horror, comedy - and, of course, relentless aliens in giant tripods with a bad case of the sniffles.

It Needs: Some reflection - like all good science fiction, this has more to it than just spaceships and pyrotechnics.


Summary: Spielberg's second holocaust survival feature is an unexpectedly subversive Wells adaptation that puts extreme human behaviour under the microscope