War of the Worlds

(War of the Worlds)

Sam Ferrier is a divorced docker and a father who is estranged from his son Robbie, 17 years old, and his daughter Rachel, 11 years old. A powerful storm erupts and Ray witnesses a spectacle that will change his life forever. The earth splits, revealing a war machine perched on three huge metallic feet. Before anybody has time to react, the monstrous engine reduces all the buildings of the vicinity to ashes. An ordinary day turns brutally into a nightmare, the first phase of a massive alien attack has begun...

Beating in retirement ahead this mysterious and implacable enemy, Ray starts with its children a perilous travels through desolated landscapes where are stretching columns of runaways in distress. But the danger is ubiquitous, and no shelter is solid enough to offer to the trio some respite. Whereever they are going nothing can more save Rachel and Robbie… except the inflexible will of Ray to protect those he loves.

DoctorSF's Words

The daddy of E.T. THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL (1982) and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977) returns with a new alien story, but this time - these ones are rather bad. Operating a bend to 180 degrees as compared to his two past alien movies, Steven Spielberg, gives honor to English writer H.G. Wells and his novel "The war of the Worlds". far from being the remake of the 1953's cult hollywood movie, the producer chooses here a contemporary framework to justify the Martian invasion. For him, "The war of worlds" has preserved all its force and it is still more relevant today. Far of the catastrophe cliche of monument destruction, courageous television team, skewers of generals in battle order and Martians such we could imagine them ("We know that is nobody there" says Spielberg), the story of THE WAR OF THE WORLDS is resolutely different. It is the story of a man, Ray Ferrier, voluntarily ordinary, fallible and imperfect constrained to assume his father role for the first time. Spielberg follows almost in subjective camera his struggle for his surviving and the one of his two children's : Robbie and Rachel.

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS is the second collaboration of Spielberg and Tom Cruise after MINORITY REPORTS (2002). Useless to remind their brilliant careers, it would be too long to enumerate their filmography. By their sides notice the excellent play of Dakota Fanning (11 years old) in the role of Rachel, the youngest interprets selected for a Screen Actors Guild Award, discovered besides Sean Penn in SAM, I AM SAM (2001). About special effects, ILM and the visual effect supervisor, Dennis Muren, that one knows especially for his devotion since 1976 to the George Lucas's Star Wars Saga, give life to the destroying H.G. Wells's "tripods" as you never saw them befors at cinema.