Spielberg Celebration: A Post-9/11 Nightmare Family Road Trip in ‘War of the Worlds’

The deadbeat dad at the end of the world

Image via Dreamworks/Paramount Pictures

I’ve always been fascinated with the way that September 11th forever broke something in the minds of American artists and storytellers. I remember watching the towers fall on the news, and I remember how not long after that happened, every film studio started producing very gritty, “serious” reboots of all their major properties. I was in 3rd grade in 2001, so it took a while before I started seeing the direct cause and effect at play.

I didn’t understand that Marvel’s Civil War comics were a blatant critique of the Patriot Act, or that Nolan’s Dark Knight films had something very profound to say about the relationship between law enforcement and those they deem to be terrorists. I thought those Bourne sequel movies were straight adaptations of the books and I didn’t blink twice at a plot point involving a CIA-sanctioned murder of a journalist.

Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds was the first time I saw a movie and could immediately tell that the filmmakers had been deeply affected by the events of 9/11. People standing in the streets covered in ash and looking up in terror, a confused and useless military, scared citizens turning on each other. I had seen other disaster films and alien invasion flicks in the past and always found myself wondering, “what would it be like if that happened??” But watching War of the Worlds as a 12 year old in California in the summer of 2005, I found myself thinking something much different: “This feels familiar.”

Image via Dreamworks/Paramount Pictures

Spielberg was in post-production on Minority Report when 9/11 took place. The Phillip K. Dick adaptation, starring Tom Cruise as a futuristic cop who hunts suspected murderers for crimes they haven’t committed yet, proved to be extremely timely in the wake of the passage of the privacy-shredding Patriot Act.

Cruise appeared to be deeply affected by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, doing fundraising for rescue workers, delivering a moving speech at the Oscars, and possibly exploiting the tragedy to grift for the Church of Scientology. Cruise also owned the rights to adapt H.G. Wells’ classic 1898 science fiction novel The War of the Worlds, and approached Spielberg to direct it after the two had enjoyed working together on Minority Report.

Initially they wanted to hire J.J. Abrams to write the script, but he was too busy working on Lost, so they went with Spielberg’s frequent collaborator David Koepp instead. The trio made the savvy decision to keep the focus of their new adaptation squarely on everyday people rather than any military figures or scientists. Cruise was also taking on riskier roles at the time like his villainous turn in Collateral, so he jumped at the chance to play a shitty divorced dad with no special abilities (except being able to run like Tom Cruise).

The movie was a rushed production, which absolutely shows in Koepp’s clunky script, but not at all in its Oscar-nominated sound design and visual effects. War of the Worlds has some of the most impressive CGI and cinematography of Spielberg’s entire career. If you think that is hyperbole, go rewatch the spectacular car scene and pay very close attention to the camera maneuvers when they are on the freeway.

The film was a massive hit, doing over $600 worldwide. But Cruise’s eccentric behavior (jumping on Oprah’s couch, scientology etc.) during the press tour caused significant damage to his public image, and the following year saw the J.J. Abrams-directed Mission: Impossible III underperform at the box office. Cruise and Spielberg have never worked together since.

Dakota Fanning and Tom Cruise in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. Image via Dreamworks/Paramount Pictures.

You may be aware of other adaptations of H.G. Wells’ paranoid classic, such as Orson Welles’ 1938 hysteria-inducing radio drama or the Oscar-winning 1953 version starring Gene Barry and Ann Robinson (who both cameo at the end of Spielberg’s rendition). You may have even made the questionable decision to watch last year’s straight-to-streaming version starring Ice Cube. But did you know that that 1953 version had a sequel television show in the late 80s? Or that there have been multiple musical adaptations? Or that 2019 featured two separate TV adaptations, including one that starred Gabriel Byrne and Daisy Edgar-Jones and ran for three seasons?

The story of unknown invaders toppling human society in a few days’ time is the kind of thing that can easily be retooled to reflect the fears of a new generation. Many of them have been trash. For all of its plot holes and story contrivances, the Spielberg version is one of the strongest due to the fact that everyone involved had a very singular vision of how the iconography of the narrative could be updated to fit the current moment.

In the 1953 film, a priest walks towards the aliens to try and communicate with them, before he is blasted away by their laser beams. In 2005, when people were freaking out about non-existent terrorist sleeper cells, the aliens in Spielberg’s version have planted their tripods deep beneath the oblivious Americans and they rise up from beneath the earth, causing a church to collapse. In the 50s version the cities look like they have been hit by a nuclear bomb, but in Spielberg’s the aliens terraform the environment using human blood. Unlike pre-9/11 disaster flicks like Independence Day (which was directly inspired by Wells’ novel), the 2005 War of the Worlds is more focused on the horror of people dying than the spectacle of infrastructure being destroyed.

There are definitely a few moments that are unintentionally funny, like when everyone is staring up at a freakish otherworldly maelstrom of lightning in the sky and someone asks Tom Cruise if he has ever seen anything like it before and he replies “Springtime, maybe.” No Tom Cruise, you have not seen a storm like that in the springtime.

There’s also the bizarre and half-cooked subplot where Cruise’s brat teenage son Robbie (played by Dragonball: Evolution’s own Justin Chatwin) wants to join the military for no reason. The way he is written out of the plot is pretty silly, but I tend to forgive it because I think that Cruise’s dynamic with Rachel (Dakota Fanning giving one of the all-time performances by a child actor) is far more compelling, and I actually quite enjoy the whole sequence of them trapped in a basement with crazy Tim Robbins.

Image via Dreamworks/Paramount Pictures

War of the Worlds is far from a perfect film, but I’ve never quite understood the hate it’s gotten over the years. For me it is so burned into my memory as a formative viewing experience that a lot of its major flaws simply don’t register. Even though it’s a pretty upsetting movie I rewatch it frequently as a sort of nostalgic comfort.

The bizarre lens netting and light bleed effects that Oscar-winning cinematographer Jausz Kaminski created are gorgeous and dreamlike and taught me so much about the way that cameras work. The score by John Williams is enthralling and anxiety-inducing in equal measure. The action is awe inspiring and deeply upsetting, even removed from its historical context. The acting is (arguably) a mixed bag, but for me it really does hold up as a perfect representation of a particular era of American existential dread.

There is a world where David Koepp had a second draft on the script and turned in a masterpiece. There is also a world where Tom Cruise learned how to act normal in public and never tainted this movie’s reputation. I personally do not care. If you want a perfect airtight thriller, Jaws and Jurassic Park are right there whenever you want to watch them. But if you want to see a genuine master flexing his muscles and showing you what it looks like when an undisputed king takes on b-movie schlock, War of the Worlds is an infinitely fascinating and bizarrely entertaining slice of both popcorn entertainment and geopolitical history.