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War of the Worlds

Generally favorable reviews
Based on 40 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 1047 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Action | Adventure | Drama | Sci-fi | Suspense/Thriller
Written by:
Josh Friedman
David Koepp
H.G. Wells (novel)
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Release Date:
Theatrical: June 29, 2005
DVD: November 22, 2005
Running Time: 116 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for frightening sequences of sci-fi violence and disturbing images
Starring Tom Cruise, Justin Chatwin, Dakota Fanning, Tim Robbins, Miranda Otto, David Alan Basche, James DuMont, Yul Vazquez, and Daniel Franzese
A contemporary retelling of H.G. Wells's seminal classic, the sci-fi adventure thriller reveals the extraordinary battle for the future of humankind through the eyes of one American family fighting to survive it. (Paramount Pictures)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: A.I. Artificial Intelligence Amistad Catch Me If You Can E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Empire of the Sun Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Jaws Jurassic Park Minority Report Munich Raiders of the Lost Ark Saving Private Ryan Schindler's List The Color Purple The Lost World: Jurassic Park The Terminal
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Working in the spirit of his predecessors but with the kind of uncanny special effects they could barely dream of, Spielberg has come up with an impressive production that is disturbing in the way only provocative science fiction can be.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
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.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
It is, simply, the alienation-invasion movie to beat all alien-invasion movies: meticulously detailed and expertly paced and photographed, with sights so spectacular and terrible that viewers will have to consciously remind themselves to close their mouths when their jaws drop open.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine Ken Tucker
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.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
An attack-of-the-aliens disaster film crafted with sinister technological grandeur -- a true popcorn apocalypse.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
With this genuinely big entertainment, powered by a beating heart, Steven Spielberg has put the summer back in summer movies.
Slate David Edelstein
It's the human struggle that makes this a sci-fi masterpiece.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
Rivets and amazes, even if it falls just frustratingly short of the mind-expanding grandeur it could have had.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
It's impossible to praise too highly the verve, skill and authenticity with which Spielberg brings off his alien invasion.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
The audience is treated to one extraordinary vision after another; the sense of a world literally being destroyed around the principal actors, the sense of their flight through panic and destruction, the sense of concussion, collapse, rubble and ruin.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky
The filmmaker who once aimed to enchant his audiences with cheerful stories of beatific visitors from outer space now wants only to scare the hell out of us. E.T., as it turns out, is a mass murderer after all, and we are his Reese's Pieces.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Scott Foundas
The imagery is startling not just for its symbolic resonances, but for the breathless intensity with which it sears the screen.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Might be too realistic for its own good: The film takes perhaps a little too much glee in its abilities to manufacture mayhem. That being said, the ride is extraordinary.
Read Full Review >Empire Colin Kennedy
Dark and stormy, even gloomy, this is a distinctly autumnal blockbuster from the man who invented summer.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
Kaminski, who is as good as any cinematographer working today, matches the chromatic tones of shots to their content in ways that can only be called exciting.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
Certainly one of the most lovingly crafted, end-of-the-world, cinematic feasts ever made, a spectacle of destruction and survival not even C.B DeMille could have envisioned.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
War of the Worlds is not vintage Spielberg, and it's on the grim side for a summer action blockbuster, but it's worth the time and money invested.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Alas, Robbins is far more interesting than Cruise, and you wonder what the film would have been like if their roles were reversed -- if Robbins were the loser in search of redemption and Cruise the agitated freak in the basement.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
This is B-movie material all the way, yet it's not only watchable, it's engrossing. That's because the material is in the hands of an A-talent director, who knows, as few of his contemporaries do, how to manipulate the plastic qualities of a film: the lighting, editing, composition, camera movement and production values.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
The film isn't quite excellent, though, since it sags in the middle and starts to seem repetitive.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
But expect a logical plot, and you'll walk out of the theater with a host of questions, mostly concerning procedural points of the alien attack.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
For the first 100 minutes of his 117-minute film Spielberg holds the audience in a grip of fear. When Ray and Rachel take refuge in the storm cellar of a survivalist (a miscast Tim Robbins), the director's grip relaxes only a bit, but the film never recovers from this excursion into the Gothic.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
It's those dark visions of destruction that stick, even when Spielberg pushes the script to an unlikely happy ending. Great foreplay, failed orgasm.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Dana Stevens
Acting is not really the point of this movie, which seems to arise above all from Mr. Spielberg's desire to reaffirm that he is, along with everything else, a master of pure action filmmaking.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Michael Atkinson
Although it's thoroughly retooled, H.G. Wells's scenario doesn't allow for many soft landings, and the extreme respect for havoc on view quite properly keeps the Spielbergian cutesies to a minimum.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
In an unfortunate case of star casting, Cruise strains credibility as a hard-edged Jersey dockworker.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar
I thoroughly enjoyed the street level perspective of the world being destroyed, it just would've been nice if they hadn't crapped out at the end.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan
As is his wont, Spielberg can't resist stuffing the ending of the movie with a bit too much cheese and baloney. Despite those quibbles, War of the Worlds is taut, gripping and surprisingly dark filmmaking.
Read Full Review >Premiere Aaron Hillis
Has masterfully polished mechanics, some of the most seamless CGI effects in recent memory, and the Wells veneration is admirable. However, the film takes far too many creative shortcuts, like bookended narration and aliens that make strategically humanlike mistakes, completely incongruous to their technological superiority.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
War of the Worlds pushes some of the right buttons and enough of the wrong ones to make you wish that Spielberg would move on from aliens already and use his unparalleled talents to focus once more on earth.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
Now that this technically impressive - but seriously flawed and self-referential - remake is finally in theaters to swell the July 4 weekend box office, conversation will doubtless shift to the lamest ending yet to a Steven Spielberg movie.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Forget what Tom Cruise does outside his movies: What he does inside his movies is more than enough to wreck them.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
It unfolds in the angst-haunted shadow of the 9'11 terror attacks and teeters on a thin edge of sheer panic.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker David Denby
It’s the right role for Cruise, but the movie is so devoted to him, so star-driven, that it begins to seem a little demented.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Corliss
The new film is a toss-up with George Pal's very watchable 1953 version: the special effects are even better here, the drama even lamer.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jami Bernard
Go for the extraordinary special effects, by all means, but not if you want to feel good about yourself or humanity. And heed the PG-13 rating, because this movie takes no prisoners.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
A big, clunky movie containing some sensational sights but lacking the zest and joyous energy we expect from Steven Spielberg.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Newly updated but shamelessly hokey, Steven Spielberg's version of the 1898 H.G. Wells yarn about murderous invaders from outer space starts off as a nimble scare show like "Jaws."
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
Extravagant in movie terms but stingy in emotional ones, it embodies all of Spielberg's bad impulses and almost none of his good ones: It's a grand display of how well he knows how to work us over, and yet the desperation with which he tries to get to us is repulsive.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.3 (out of 10) based on 1047 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
J S gave it a1:
This is the worst movie I've seen in a very long time. It has no style, no personality. Its sole purpose is just to show a small town get blown to pieces in the first 20 minutes. Every other second of the movie is agonizing! Its not even a movie, its what the "nails on a chalk board" sound is to the visual sense. The actors all spend the whole time screaming at each other in a very melodramatic fashion. Or just screaming in general. I've never seen people scream so much before in my life. If a giant robot is trying to kill me, I'm not going to be like "DAD WHY ARE YOU UPSET ITS ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD!!!! DAD!!! DAD!!! DAD!!! AAAAAAH YOU'RE MAKING ME NERVOUS TRYING TO FLEE FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!!" The characters don't even have lines when they're not screaming or acting stupid. At one point, Tom Cruise's son begs him to let him go watch a battle between the US army and aliens, and Tom has to try and drag him away; to no success. That's the dumbest thing I've ever seen in a movie, and it was totally non-secateurs. No plot. No nothing. When the pretty visual effects stop momentarily, Tom Cruise resorts to throwing peanut butter and breaking the windows of his house to entertain us. I guess they ran out of budget after making all the terrible CGI.
Collin P gave it an8:
The ending was indeed lame, but taken exactly from the book. You got a problem with the ending, take it up with H.G. Wells. In terms of "disaster" movies, this is as good as they get - Spielberg is a master filmmaker. It has heart, adventure, and terror not seen in normal movies of the same ilk. All in all, a worthy picture.
[Anonymous] gave it a4:
Some of the other comments here seem to be really on the money. The film is visually brilliant but with a plot so barmy you'd *almost* want to love it. The most salient bit of the old film is removed [i.e. the aliens are from another planet] whilst the most ridiculous is kept in [the aliens all get pneumonia]. Someone should have told Spielburg that bacteria can't jump between species - but he probably wouldn't have cared. I was hoping for an actual war between aliens and humans. What I got was a horror film that lacked tension because the setting was too ridiculous.
Jay H gave it a4:
Between my dislike of tom cruise, the poor acting and average special effects this wasn't a very good film.
Trevor L gave it a10:
Visceral, vile, repulsive and totally awesome. Alien meets the Nazi death camps. And the creepy sound effects as the tripods processed and disgorged human blood towards the conclusion freaked me out-it was the sound of death.
Ken W gave it a5:
I must admit that I agree with alot of the other reviews in regaurds to the fact the movie could have been better. I personally do not like Tom Cruise an any way, shape or form, but at least the movie did keep me going. Yes the constant screaming of Dakota Fanning did get on the nerves, but given the point of view of a little girl in a crazy situation, it could be understood. Overall though the movie was definitely worth watching.
Conner S gave it a10:
Holy crap this was good! This is like the best movie ever. the acting was phenominal (especially tom and decota) and the effects were so realistic! For those of you who gave it low ratings, you obviously did not understand the sybolism entwind in the plot. To Adam e.- nobody found a tripod because the aliens were smart enough to put them in the ground deep enough so no one would find them, Robbie is a smart kid he figured out something, The aliens didn't notice the desieases because the were arrogent and only focused on wepons, THey store people because they need to spread the blood everywere, not just all at once, who cares if they're nude (YOUR MISSING THE POINT!), the airplane crashed a little bit away and slid into the house, You would scream to if you were being attacked by bloodthirsty aliens, and the clothes show that the aliens are so sofisticatied and interested in our planet, that all they want to do is get rid of us, not anything else!
