{"id":809162,"date":"2026-10-21T01:04:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-21T01:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/809162\/"},"modified":"2026-10-21T01:04:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T01:04:08","slug":"spielbergs-war-of-the-worlds-forced-americans-to-look-in-the-mirror-and-see-the-real-monster-war-of-the-worlds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/809162\/","title":{"rendered":"Spielberg\u2019s War of the Worlds forced Americans to look in the mirror \u2013 and see the real monster | War of the Worlds"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know, I know. There have been so many adaptations of HG Wells\u2019 classic 1898 science fiction novel of planetary invasion, both before and since Steven Spielberg took his swipe at the story in 2005, with a Tom Cruise still at the top of his box office game. Some versions of War of the Worlds<\/a> have been dire, while others \u2013 the 2019 TV adaptation starring Gabriel Byrne, or Jeff Wayne\u2019s 1978 concept album featuring Richard Burton \u2013 have been expertly realised, refracting the story through their own contemporary lenses. But Spielberg\u2019s is the best.<\/p>\n

While it was a financial hit, Spielberg\u2019s version was not universally loved. Peter Bradshaw, in his review for this masthead, called it \u201cfundamentally unambitious and often quite dull\u201d. So there! One of his strongest gripes was the design of the aliens themselves, which were \u201cjust Area 51 cliches\u201d. But, at risk of raising the ire of one of the great film critics of our time, I think Bradshaw missed the point. Spielberg\u2019s aliens were designed to be cliches, cobbled from the fears of previous generations. They were supposed to be familiar because we\u2019d invented them.<\/p>\n

Cruise plays Ray Ferrier, a Brooklyn longshoreman who is also something of a deadbeat dad; the hostility coming from his kids, Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and Rachel (Dakota Fanning), feels deserved and longstanding. The opening scenes \u2013 as heavily pregnant ex-wife Mary Ann (Miranda Otto) reluctantly drops them off with their father \u2013 speak of years of disappointment, resentment and the slow curdling of familial love. Spielberg of course is a master of the subtexts of divorce, from as far back as ET.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

When threatening storm clouds and uncanny lightning strikes hit the local area, Ray goes to investigate, only to come face to face with deadly tripod-like machines emerging from underground, who unceremoniously eviscerate those around him. This scene is monstrously effective, Cruise doing his famous Tom Cruise<\/a> sprint towards camera as clouds of human ashes rain down.<\/p>\n

From then on, Ray and his kids are on the run, first to Mary Ann\u2019s infinitely swankier house \u2013 soon destroyed by a falling passenger jet \u2013 then through an increasingly ghastly landscape of blight and ruin (the unnatural reds and greens in Rick Carter\u2019s eerie production design are brilliantly unnerving). It becomes clear that these attacks are indiscriminate, that money and status are no longer a protection against the forces of destruction. The US finally becomes egalitarian: everyone is reduced to insect-like prey. Even having a working car puts you in danger from the desperation of the mob.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s fascinating to watch Spielberg undermine and critique the military triumphalism of previous alien invasion narratives like Independence Day.<\/a> Here, uniformed soldiers are utterly useless against an unstoppable enemy not through any lack of fire power or command control, but sheer inadequacy. It\u2019s hard not to read this as political commentary about the conflict in Afghanistan and the futility of the conventional warfare in which the US was mired at the time.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s ending was highly criticised as anti-climactic, but I\u2019d argue it reinforces the point made above. This existential threat, \u201cvast and cool and unsympathetic\u201d, can\u2019t be fought in any traditional sense; it must be expurgated by nature itself in the form of microbial bacteria. As Rachel says of a splinter she gets at the beginning of the film: \u201cWhen it\u2019s ready, my body will just push it out.\u201d The invaders (no longer from Mars because that would be silly) are endured rather than vanquished, depriving humanity of any moral victory but also saving it from its own hubris.<\/p>\n

Dakota Fanning and Tom Cruise as Rachel and Ray Ferrier in War of the Worlds.
Photograph: Paramount\/Allstar<\/p>\n

Looking back at the film now, it seems astonishing that its critics seemed to view it solely through the lens of the commercial blockbuster. Few reviews made any mention of Spielberg\u2019s primary target, the \u201cinfinite complacency\u201d that leads Americans to feel immune from the displacement, forced migration and environmental catastrophe it happily inflicts on other parts of the globe.<\/p>\n

In his novel, which was inspired by the atrocities committed on Aboriginal Tasmania by British settlers, Wells calls the aliens attack \u201cthe great disillusionment\u201d. Spielberg\u2019s vision shows the scales falling from his own country\u2019s eyes, capturing the horrifying realisation that the monster has been on Earth with us all along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I know, I know. There have been so many adaptations of HG Wells\u2019 classic 1898 science fiction novel…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":809163,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-809162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=809162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809162\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/809163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=809162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=809162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=809162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}