Starring a smooth-sprinting Tom Cruise at the top of his game, Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi thriller shows the scales falling from his own country’s eyes I know, I know. There have been so many adaptations of HG Wells’ classic 1898 science fiction novel of planetary invasion, both before and since Steven Spielberg took his swipe at the story in 2005, with a Tom Cruise still at the top of his box office game. Some versions of War of the Worlds have been dire, while others – the 2019 TV adaptation starring Gabriel Byrne, or Jeff Wayne’s 1978 concept album featuring Richard Burton – have been expertly realised, refracting the story through their own contemporary lenses. But Spielberg’s is the best. While it was a financial hit, Spielberg’s version was not universally loved. Peter Bradshaw, in his review for this masthead, called it “fundamentally unambitious and often quite dull”. So there! One of his strongest gripes was the design of the aliens themselves, which were “just Area 51 cliches”. But, at risk of raising the ire of one of the great film critics of our time, I think Bradshaw missed the point. Spielberg’s aliens were designed to be cliches, cobbled from the fears of previous generations. They were supposed to be familiar because we’d invented them. Continue reading...
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