What could be a better match in Hollywood than superstar Tom Cruise starring in a movie by universally acclaimed director Steven Spielberg? For all intents and purposes, 2005’s War of the Worlds was the second and final collision of awesome. Three years prior, the pair made the sci-fi hit Minority Report. War of the Worlds was to be a twenty-first-century cinematic update to the 1898 H.G. Wells novel of the same name. Using all the technology and adapted storytelling of the time, Spielberg and Cruise nearly pulled off the awesome movie everyone expected, except for a single moment at the very end had to unravel the whole sweater. It is such a glaring bruise to the movie that Steven Spielberg himself admitted to not liking the ending of War of the Worlds in an interview he had in 2018.
War of the Worlds was a leading summer blockbuster in 2005. In addition to reaching the fourth highest-grossing film of 2005, it became the third highest-grossing movie of Independence Day, earning a hair under $604 million on a budget of $132 million. It lost out to such tentpoles as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith. Generally, the critics agree the first half is better than the last, while the audience dragged it through the coals over the ending’s blatant ridiculousness.
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Overall, the film sits at a 75% score on Rotten Tomatoes and should have hit higher had it solved its final act imbalance. The basic premise follows Tom Cruise as a blue-collar divorced dad trying to protect his two children from the Martian invasion. Instead of London, where the central story takes place in the novel, it is now in New Jersey and along the east coast of the United States. Spielberg intended War of the Worlds to be a counterpoint to his previous alien movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, wherein Richard Dreyfuss ultimately leaves his family to be with aliens, Tom Cruise is doing everything he can to bring his family together.
This is where the major contention lies. The film’s two major themes are the family bond and maintaining control in times of crisis. The themes come to a head in Tom Cruise’s scenes with Tim Robbins, where Robbins becomes unhinged and threatens the safety of Dakota Fanning, who plays Cruise’s ten-year-old daughter. Robbins’ erratic behavior might potentially alert the Martians, so to stop that from happening Cruise makes the fateful decision to murder Tim Robbins. To protect the family bond, Cruise’s character must go beyond the moral norm to maintain control. The point is well done, and well expressed in this scene.
The themes entirely deflate, however, with Tom Cruise’s teenage son Robbie, played by Justin Chatwin. Throughout the movie, Chatwin rebels and clashes with Cruise as a neglected and rebellious teenage son would. Their enmity is elevated because of the horrendous cataclysm ongoing around them. Cruise’s character is facing the consequences of his previous inaction at the worst possible time. They constantly butt heads, and the relationship degrades to the point of separation.
Due to Robbie’s naïve temper, he believes the right thing to do is to strike back at the aliens via the military. Robbie wants to join the soldiers and fight and do his part in the great “war of the worlds,” both out of vengeance and a misguided sense of duty. The father, Cruise, knows better as he witnessed the failures of the army attacking the Martian vehicles prior, and sincerely tries to explain to his son the futility of any military action. Robbie will not listen and so finally leaves his father to participate in the army’s direct assault.
In this conflict between father and son, Tom Cruise cannot both maintain control and defend his family at the same time. Even though his son has made an erroneous decision, Cruise has to let him go. He is forced to confront this truth and accept it - -except at the end, he really does not. Robbie left Cruise right as the army strikes one of the tripods. It is a very cool scene of tanks and infantry and explosions all around, which means it is also extremely dangerous. At the very end of the movie Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning reach their safe destination, his ex-wife’s house in Boston, and when they arrive Robbie is magically already there. What are the odds? In what way could he have survived that onslaught?
First, Robbie has no military training whatsoever and, arguably, has never used a firearm before. Should he have run away from his father and joined a squad, they likely would have given him any weapon from a fallen soldier and told him to run toward a tripod and hope for the best. There was no time for training or organization. Considering the high casualty rate of the professional soldiers in the battle, this kid would not stand a chance. The audience expects the certainty of his death. A tragedy made by his own character flaw, and a high price for Tom Cruise to pay for the survival of his daughter and himself.
Second, his survival at the end totally ruins Tom Cruise’s moment of acceptance earlier. The murder of Tim Robbins was incidental by that point. There are simply things he cannot control, and in order for his whole family to survive, he had to relinquish responsibility of his son. He had to let his teenage son take his life in his own hands. That is a tough lesson to learn. Fathers in all cinemas no doubt flinched when that moment came.
Seeing Robbie at the end totally robbed the audience of a satisfying cost to survival. It was as if there was no real consequence to their journey. The lack of explanation or visible trauma to Robbie is maddening. If he were to survive, he should have paid for it somehow. So far as the audience was concerned, Robbie looked like he casually strolled through a garden. The meaning of the film was lost as Tom Cruise’s inability to save his son ultimately meant nothing because Robbie saved himself somehow.
The War of the Worlds remake was an awesome science fiction movie that truly updated the old yarn to the twenty-first century. It featured one of Tom Cruise’s best performances, coupled with intense and startling action sequences. Unfortunately, all of it feels shucked to the curb because of the poorly thought-out conclusion. Had they killed off Robbie and accepted the consequences of his actions, the triumphant salvation at the end would have been all the better.