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War of the Worlds (2005 film)

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War of the Worlds
File:War of the worlds Poster.jpg
Directed bySteven Spielberg
Written byDavid Koepp
Produced by Kathleen Kennedy
StarringTom Cruise,
Dakota Fanning,
Tim Robbins,
Miranda Otto
Distributed by Paramount
Budget$128 million

War of the Worlds is a 2005 modern retelling of H.G. Wells' original novel. It was directed by Steven Spielberg, with a script by David Koepp and starring Tom Cruise. The budget for the film was $128 million (US).

The film tells H.G. Wells' story "through the eyes of one American family fighting to survive it." Locations were in Bayonne, New Jersey, Athens, New York City (Staten Island), Rockbridge County, Virginia, Brooklyn and parts of Los Angeles.

Plot

Template:Spoiler Ray Ferrier is given permission from his ex-wife, Mary-Anne, to watch their kids, Robbie and Rachel, for the weekend. As the day progresses, news networks get reports of freakish lightning storms not accompanied by thunder throughout the world. In New York, one of the storms occurs; 26 bolts hit the exact same spot. Ray goes out to investigate. When he arrives, the ground breaks apart and one of the massive walking tripod tanks rises from the ground. It begins firing on civilians, vaporizing them on contact. Ray hurries home and gets his kids together, racing to get out of the city, away from the ever-growing, unstoppable alien invasion and get to Boston and safety. The aliens die in the end not by hand of man but are killed by microscopic organisms.

Spielberg on the adaptation

Spielberg told the web site Dark Horizons: "I'm more interested in concept shots and money shots than I am in tons of MTV coverage, which certainly takes a lot of time. But if I can put something on the screen that is sustained where you get to study it and you get to say, 'How did they do that?' That's happening before my eyes and the shot's not over yet, it's still going and it's still going and my God, it's an effects shot and it's lasting seemingly forever. I enjoy that more than creating illusion with sixteen different camera angles, where no shot lasts longer than six seconds on the screen. To pull a rabbit out of a hat, because you are really a smart audience and you're in the fastest media, the fastest growing new media today and you know the difference between slight of hand visually and the real thing. I think what makes War of the Worlds, at least the version that we're making, really exciting, is you get to really see what's happening. There's not a lot of visual tricks. We tell it like it is, we show it to you, and we put you inside the experience. "

And this about the story: Spielberg: "It's nothing you can really describe. The whole thing is very experiential. The point of view is very personal - everybody, I think, in the world will be able to relate to the point of view, because it's about a family trying to survive and stay together, and they're surrounded by the most epically horrendous events you could possibly imagine."

Tom Cruise and Scientology controversy

Press coverage in the lead up to the film's release, notably in May and June 2005, covered Tom Cruise's proselytization for Scientology. Around this time Cruise had changed publicists, from Pat Kingsley to his sister Lee Anne De Vette, and notably talked more about Scientology, overshadowing talk of the film itself.

Press coverage has noted [1] the similarity between the movie poster and the front cover of The Invaders Plan (volume one of Mission Earth) by L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology.

Budget

In August of 2004, the Internet Movie Database reported that the film was "poised to make history in Hollywood as the most expensive film ever made - surpassing Titanic's $198 million budget." The report quoted an unnamed source that said, "No expense will be spared. Spielberg wants to make it the film of the decade." The New York Times, the original source for this number, ran a correction a few days later that the budget is actually $128 million.

Press coverage and anti-piracy controversy

The press preview of the movie raised severe criticism, as every journalist who wanted to take a look at the movie before it premiered had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. This NDA stated that the undersigned could not publish a review of the movie before its world-wide release on 29 June 2005. Many people have argued that the movie might not be able to catch up with the great expectations that might have been postulated by such reviewers.

Furthermore, at the New York premiere of the film at the Ziegfeld Theatre, all members of the press were required to check all electronic equipment-- including cell phones-- at the door, as part of a larger sweeping anti-piracy campaign by the film's producers hoping to keep the film from leaking on the Internet.

Among other efforts to curb piracy, the producers also prevented theatres from screening the movie at midnight the night before 29 June, despite the recent success of midnight screenings of such films as Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. The producers also chose not to screen the film in any DLP-equipped theatres, despite the technical superiority of digital projectors. Some viewers saw these efforts as overreactions, especially the more hardcore movie fans who enjoy seeing blockbusters such as War of the Worlds early and at the highest quality possible.

Trivia

Template:Spoiler There are a few references to the original 1953 film. There is a scene with an alien camera searching the house and at the end, one of the aliens staggers out of his war machine and dies, just like at the end of the 1953 film. Also, several lines of dialogue-- especially those spoken by Tim Robbins' character-- are taken directly from Orson Welles' infamous radio adaptation of the novel.

Actors Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, stars of the original film version, make a cameo together near the end of this film.

There are also references to Spielberg's earlier films about alien contact with Earth, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The plane-crash set was built on the Universal Studios backlot, right next to the famous Bates house from Psycho. Despite great demand for the location, the studio has decided to keep the plane crash set intact as a permanent installation on the backlot tour.

At the hill scene in the middle of the movie, when Ray Ferrier and his two kids are walking on a deserted farm with other refugees, U.S Army and Navy fighter jets streak overhead firing at a nearby tripod. If you watch closely, the first jet that flys over is an F-22 Raptor Stealth jet, followed by U.S Navy F-18 Hornets. The appearance of the F-22 implies that the film takes place in 2005, when the plane was introduced into the U.S Army. The tanks that mount a ground offensive in that scene are M1A1 Abrams tanks utilising depleted uranium armor that were introduced in 1980, but uranium armor was not used until after 2001. The helicopters that bombard the Martian tripod are AH-64 Longbow Apache attack helicopters and AH-1 Cobra Light Attack helicopters. They are both missing landing equipment: landing wheels on the Apache and landing struts on the Cobras. The AH-64 was introduced in the 1970s but has remained a faithful part of the U.S Army and several other select armies around the world.

Differences from the book

One plot change is that the aliens this time do not land on Earth in giant meteorites before unleashing their war machines, since this kind of scenario has been already used recently. The tripods were on Earth the whole time, planted beneath our very feet, and the aliens arrive (from their ships) in the lightning storms.

Main cast

See also

Template:Steven Spielberg's films

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