What the Flick

But first, we meet longshoreman Ray (Tom Cruise) as he starts a weekend of babysitting his teenage son (Justin Chatwin) and tweeny daughter (Dakota Fanning). Their mom and her insufferable yuppie new husband are going to Grandma's in Boston, and the kids get to chill in an asbestos-shingled house on the flight path to Newark Airport. I don't know why the kids aren't going to see Grandma, too, but, man, they are crabby at the prospect of spending 2 days with Dad and the V-8 engine on his kitchen table. Ha! Little do they know this is going to be the best damn part of their weekend!

Against a background of eerie TV news reports about lightning and blackouts in the Ukraine, Ray gets busy fighting with his son, telling the girl to order take out, and taking an ill-timed nap. He is, in short, a Bad Dad. He wakes to find a mother of a summer storm blowing up -- except that it's clearly fall. The storm is THE WORST EVER, until what comes next. Which is that shortly thereafter, in downtown Bayonne, the ground is cracking and everyone in town is running to see it. Yes, that's that North Jersey crowd for you -- freaking death machines are popping up like manhole covers, and everyone runs toward the mayhem to check it out.

What they find are giant tripod machines popping from underground intent on killing everything that moves. If you thought Ray's housekeeping was scary (and I admit, I did), you're really going to jump out of your seat when this gets going. From this point on, WAR OF THE WORLDS never, ever lets you rest. Things explode, death rays beam, people are vaporized and their clothes float to earth, whole neighborhoods are crushed, and still the giant tripod thingys keep coming. Worse, as Ray and his family flee to try to reach Boston, it becomes very clear that this is not just some Sopranos-inspired regentrification of North Jersey -- as the TV news foreshadowed earlier, these creepy newcomers are turning all of earth into a Beverly Hills tear down. There is nowhere to run.

Along with the obligatory monster-related scares, WAR OF THE WORLDS is full of terrifying images, many of them part of the zeitgeist since 9/11. There are people fleeing death from above, cities laid to waste, the white ash that covers the survivors, a plane crash, refugees pushing to get on a boat or in a car, a lone survivalist (Tim Robbins) reminding that the evil you know can be just as scary as the unknown. These are the images of war: WWII, Saigon, NYC, London. I'm not going to debate the politics or judge Spielberg's use of these images as Tim Noah and David Edelstein of SLATE recently have, but I will say that those images, as eerily familiar and sad as they are, certainly added to the film's feeling of fear and despair.

As usual, Tom Cruise plays well against type, as he did in COLLATERAL, MINORITY REPORT, and MAGNOLIA. Ray is so unsympathetic at the outset that he can't help but go up in your eyes. Cruise gives him a dark soul, embodied less in courageous acts than in selfish manipulations; his first act as the family escapes is to steal a neighbor's car. That disconnect makes him somehow more real and his primal urge to protect his kids more haunting. He never becomes a hero, just a guy, trying to get through one hell of a bad day. Don't let Tom's antics of the past few months scare you away from his performance here.

To me, WAR OF THE WORLDS was the most satisfying summer movie so far this year. It's not perfect -- in fact, in sticking to H.G. Wells' story, much of it makes no sense. Why would the Martians (though in the movie they are never identified as such) bury so much hardware on Earth? And, like, when? A million years ago? Did they meet the Ancients from STARGATE SG-1 while they were at it? Why did they want to kill everyone? Didn't they worry they'd need someone to explain how VCRs work? I didn't like that Spielberg bothered at one point to show us the creatures inside the machines; I thought it was scarier not knowing (plus they looked kind of like the aliens in INDEPENDENCE DAY). And how the earth is saved, though faithful to the original source, might be anticlimactic to some -- personally, I liked the implication that mindless evil contains the seeds of its own destruction, either through overreaching or oversight.

Still, WoTW delivers on all the summer promises: it's beautifully made, the story is easy to follow, and it scares you silly. In a jumpy summer when you can't seem to get away from the news, it was a relief to have one good summer scare, the kind that makes you happy to come back out into the sunshine and recognize the relatively benign world in which we do live.