In a commentary on War of the Worlds, the writer returns to the 2005 film with the same blunt complaint Roger Ebert made: the invasion does not quite hold together. The piece argues that the movie works best when it stops pretending to be a grand planetary war and becomes a frantic story of grabbing and running and ducking and hiding.
The film, by Cruise and Spielberg, follows an immature, divorced hotshot who has custody of the kids for the weekend, with Dakota Fanning playing his daughter. From there, the story turns into a chase in which all of humanity is on the run, and the human characters are described as disappointingly one-dimensional.
That narrow focus is part of why the film still gets watched. The writer says he pulls the DVD off the shelf every once in a while, and when the movie is moving, it is a tense action thriller throughout. One scene in particular stands out: an alien tentacle explores a ruined basement where the characters are hiding, a moment the piece says mirrors a better sequence in Jurassic Park where characters hide from a curious raptor. The effect is less about spectacle than survival, and that is what gives the film its bite.
The bigger problem, though, is the logic of the invasion itself. As Ebert put it, “The thing is, we never believe the tripods and their invasion are practical.” The commentary presses the point harder, asking how vast metal machines could have lain undetected beneath the streets of a city honeycombed with subway tunnels, sewers, water and power lines, and foundations. It also asks why a civilization with the physical science to build and deploy the tripods a million years ago would not have done a little more research about the planet before sending its invasion force.
That is the tension at the center of the film’s appeal. It is a war of the worlds at a molecular level, not a planetary level, and the movie depends on viewers accepting a premise that does not really survive scrutiny. H.G. Wells wrote the novel in 1898, and the 2005 adaptation keeps the old title while translating the conflict into a modern panic that is more intimate than cosmic.
Even so, the commentary’s answer is not that the film fails. It is that the failures are part of the bargain. Look past the implausibility, and War of the Worlds remains a tense action thriller, one that owes its staying power less to the science of invasion than to the simple terror of a family and the rest of humanity trying to stay ahead of it.