War of the Worlds - ***

Speilberg has proven he can deliver a movie. He invented the big summer movie with Jaws, and has further proven himself with the Indiana Jones films and more serious efforts like Schindler’s list. But I don’t know what’s going on lately, since he’s snuggled up to Tom Cruise. Hot on the heels of the underwhelming Minority Report (the previous Speilberg/Cruise friendship movie), we now have the underwhelming War of the Worlds.

I haven't read the book, and it's been years since I saw the original movie, but from what I can tell the bare minimum was taken from the earlier versions. Which is fine, really, you could probably make a hundred different stories revolving around a group of people trying to outrun giant walking tripods. This one focuses on Tom Cruise, who plays Ray Ferrier, a divorced, blue collar father of two. His wife Mary Ann (Miranda Otto) is leaving the kids with him for the weekend. The oldest is teenage Robbie (Justin Chatwin), who is of course sullen and withdrawn, because every teenager has to be in movies any more. The younger is Rachel (Dakota Fanning), who is surprisingly good at playing the person stuck between the warring father and son. The weekend starts out bad, and then gets worse when a lightning storm not only knocks out every piece of electrical equipment in the area (except, of course, for the guy who has to be there filming the aliens awakening with his camcorder), but also awakens a giant alien tripod mere blocks from the Ferrier household. The Ferriers make a death-defying escape, and plan a mission to head to Boston to find Mary Ann. Because, I guess, mom can fight tripods…

The bulk of the movie are the few days spent trying to stay alive as they travel from New York to Boston, having the regimented close encounters along the way. This is where Spielberg reminds what he still has the ability to do. The action scenes are suspenseful and horrifying. And while every laser blast manages to evaporate everyone BUT Tom Cruise, I found myself only thinking of that later after the movie was over. The tripods, while looking slightly ungainly, are frightening, and every time I heard the fog-horn blast they made as they appeared in the horizon, I found myself squirming in my seat.

But, for every time a tripod appears on the horizon, there has to be a quiet family scene, and here is where the movie stumbles. Tom Cruise is at best when he doesn't have to be too terribly emotional, and while he is a good choice for playing the angry, blue collar Ray, he seems a bit lost in the smaller scenes. Robbie is your typical impulsive teenager. He could honestly be written out of the movie and you'd lose basically nothing. The real stand out is Dakota Fanning, who I think I dislike only because she was in Uptown Girls. While she basically has to stand around and look scared, she is the only one who manages to inject a true sense of fear and horror into the movie. The only other character who seems to share any amount of screen time with the Ferrier family is a miscast Tim Robbins as an ambulance driver-turned-survivalist.

It is really at the point when Tim Robbins shows up that the movie begins to falter. Rather than continue with huge action sequences, the movie gives us TWO scenes of things in the basement that the characters must hide from. Both of these scenes are uninspired remakes of scenes from Minority Report and Jurassic Park (in fact, one shot is directly lifted from the Raptor/kitchen chase). And, is it just me, or do the aliens look almost exactly like the aliens from Independence Day? I will give Speilberg credit for a confrontation scene between Cruise and Robbins I didn’t see coming. But then, we're led into the extremely anti-climactic climax, and of course the schmaltzy end, which I won't give away, but you'll see coming fairly easily.

So this is what eventually lost me: the movie’s inability to be consistent. For every great scene, there has to be something that happens to slow everything down to a crawl. Which in the long run, isn’t SO bad. It’s just isn’t so great. So if you want to see giant action scenes, and are able to ignore the silly in-between stuff, and the totally lame conclusion, you could do worse. Much worse.