Part of Weekend Classics: Spielberg
Steven Spielberg’s purposeful modern-day retelling of H.G. Wells’ novel War of the Worlds is grand sci-fi spectacle and a key player in post 9/11 pop culture. Tom Cruise stars as Ray Ferrier, an ordinary man who summons extraordinary courage to protect his children when a global army of alien invaders set their sights and their devastating war machines upon Earth and the entire human population.
“Contains all of the hallmarks of classic genre Spielberg: It shows you things you've never seen before, instills an accompanying sense of awestruck wonder, and delivers long stretches of heightened, delirious excitement that remind you why people started going to the movies in the first place.” —Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald “Steven Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS is huge and scary, moving and funny — another capper to a career that seems like an unending succession of captivations.” —Ken Tucker, New York Magazine “Steven Spielberg has made the anti-CLOSE ENCOUNTERS in WAR OF THE WORLDS, a gritty, intense and supremely accomplished sci-fier about some distinctly unbenign alien invaders…. Spielberg’s vision of worldly wipeout has such visceral immediacy that it connects almost at once and rarely flags until the end.” —Todd McCarthy, Variety
