War Of The Worlds

Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning in War of the Worlds.

Herald rating: * * *

The World's Greatest Storyteller gets his mitts on the Greatest Story Ever Told ... oops, that was the other one. Well, one of the best yarns ever woven, H.G. Wells' tale of the day the Martians came to town. Steven Spielberg has updated the story from the 1898 novel, Orson Welles' nation-stopping 1938 radio broadcast, the 1953 B-movie and the 1978 Richard Burton record into a commentary on our post-September 11 world. "Daddy, are they the terrorists?" asks the frightened child as her family flees the alien attack.

Jersey docker and hopeless dad Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) is given custody of his children (Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin) when his ex-wife and her new husband go on holiday. As if things aren't bad enough this is just the moment when Martians decide to destroy his neighbourhood.

Seems millions of years ago invaders, apparently from Mars, buried huge machines all over the Earth. Now their planet is threatened they activate their exit strategy with lightning bolts, each machine containing an alien, though we will not see a living example until quite late in the two-hours-plus piece.

With the aliens at the controls, the machines drive out of the Earth, stand on three spindly legs and aim their death rays at every living thing. For afters they suck human blood with their tentacles and toss the leftover bodies into steel baskets.

Ferrier throws his kids into the only car that's still mobile, aiming to catch up with their mum, on holiday in Boston. They are threatened and escape. Son wants to stay and watch the action. Dad and daughter hole up in a cellar. The aliens attack the cellar.

Because this is Spielberg and Cruise, you know not to be too concerned because this will end in a Triumph of the Human Spirit. Perhaps that's not exactly how you'd describe the outcome but we won't give it away for those who don't know how those earlier versions came out.

Spielberg dipped into his petty cash for US$135 million ($194.22 million) to make this epic, though on the smaller screen it's sometimes hard to see just where the money went.

His machines are faithful to the illustrations for the original novel; accordingly they look like an exercise from a turn-of-the-last-century technical drawing class. That said, there are some spectacular disasters and, for once, the film-maker's darker side wins out, to the movie's benefit.

* Dvd, Video rental today