I didn’t just watch it — I felt it. It’s one of those films that makes you imagine, “What if this actually happened tomorrow, in my neighborhood, in front of my own house?” And suddenly the whole thing stops being just fiction and starts to feel terrifyingly close.
The movie throws you right into the ordinary. Ray Ferrier, played by Tom Cruise, isn’t your perfect hero. He’s a divorced dockworker, a bit rough around the edges, trying to piece together his fractured relationship with his kids. That raw imperfection pulled me in immediately because it wasn’t some superhero with all the answers — it was a man with brokenness, like most of us. You feel his awkwardness with his teenage son, Robbie, and the tender, almost fragile bond he has with his young daughter, Rachel. And it’s within that messy, relatable family tension that the end of the world begins to creep in.
It is like a silent storm when something goes wrong. There is no thunder but a weird lightning strikes again and again in the same place. The air feels charged. You are aware of the strange silence before disorder? It is what Spielberg constructs here so well. And the ground then clefts, and the tripods come out. Tall, gigantic machines resembling nightmares made of metal and flesh. The very noise you can hear when they are switched on--that guttering horn--I tell you it grabs your bones. My mouth simply fell open when they began to make people disappear by merely blowing them away. It has no warm-up, no explanation, no preface, just brutal annihilation and in a moment the streets Ray and the people living around him are not streets anymore, they are ashes and screams.
Among the things that struck me the most was the fact that normal life was disappearing so fast. People are curious and one second, they are trying to capture a selfie in their heads with the strange machines and the following second, panic breaks out. And it is not even heroic panic, it is desperate, selfish, ugly. At the moment Ray takes his kids and runs off, it dawns on you that survival is no longer about striking back at this stage, but about fleeing, sheltering, and making your family as tight as you can and hoping that you will not turn into dust like the rest.
This is a chilling scene where Ray and his children end up in the house of one of his friends to seek shelter, but he falls in the bathroom. His mirror-image is marked with gray ashes, - not of dirt, not of smoke, - but of human remains. You can feel his breath trembling, and there is a moment, when he is not the father who tries to hold himself together anymore, he is only a man who is ready to explode. That scene gutted me. Because in that instant, you know he’s realizing he’s got two kids clinging to him, and he can’t afford to collapse, even though inside, he’s falling apart.
Traveling with his children turns into a nightmare road trip through hell. Every stop is chaos. There’s that scene when they try to get into a car, thinking it’s their lifeline, but the mob takes it. People turn on each other like wild animals because survival strips away politeness, morality, everything. And then the ferry scene — oh God, that ferry scene. The hope of crossing the water feels like salvation, but once again, the tripods rise from the depths, dragging ships and humans alike. The way the water boils with destruction, the screaming, the chaos — it made me clutch my chair. Hope gets snatched away just as quickly as it’s offered.
Rachel, the little girl, became the heart of the film for me. Her innocence, her screams, her inability to fully understand what’s happening — it pierced through me. There’s this one moment when she’s watching bodies float down the river, and you see childhood end right there in her wide, horrified eyes. And Robbie, the teenage son, is caught in that restless, rebellious stage where he wants to fight, to do something, even though he’s just a boy. His clashes with Ray aren’t just father-son fights anymore; they’re about how each one faces survival. Robbie wants to join the military resistance, even if it means dying, while Ray is just desperately clinging to the idea of keeping his kids alive. That argument — that tear in their family — felt so painfully real because it’s not just about aliens, it’s about what trauma does to people.
And then there is the man they meet who has gone mad hiding in a basement, and he is Ogilvy. The entire scene in the house was choking. The walls are closing on you as Ray understands that this man is too unstable, too dangerous, and he can murder all of them. That is one of the moments that would remain lodged in your throat as it is the moral weight of what Ray does there, silencing Ogilvy to save Rachel. It is ugly and heartbreaking but it is survival stripped down to the bare bones. I always remembering on that scene and how silent it was after that. The silence which is heavier than the sound.
The aliens in the form of tripods were not machines per se but symbols. Unconquerable, gigantic, ruthless. Then the twist appears in the most embarrassing manner possible, humanity does not overcome them. Not the guns, not the missiles, not the cleverness. They perish due to earth itself - bacteria, germs, the smallest creatures we can daily coexist with. That was an irony, that poetic justice, which mopped me out. It made me remember that however strong something might look, even the most insignificant, neglected detail can be its downfall.
Towards the finale, as Ray joins up with his former wife and their son, I was exhausted. It was not a slick, heroic conclusion that you would have hoped a blockbuster would offer. It was raw survival. A man who was broken, managed to bring his daughter alive somehow. And that was enough. Due to the fact that at times, enough is not defeating the enemy but it is only ensuring that your loved ones live another day.
The thing that particularly lingered with me after viewing War of the Worlds was not the presence of the aliens or the devastation but the manner in which it stripped down human behavior when put to the test. It demonstrated how fast the civilized world disintegrates, how slim that coat of paint is. Yet it also was strong enough not to break down - how love can make you keep on when all around you is in terror, how the father who knows not everything can nevertheless lift himself up to the task when his children need him the most.
Frankly speaking, it made me wonder: in my case, what would I do? Would I fight as Robbie, stand like the mob, lose my head as Ogilvy, stick with my family like Ray? That is the part that strikes the hardest. The reason is that we still really do not know until the ground opens up and the monsters come up.
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