June 14, 2026

War of the Worlds (2005) — The Fear

Show Notes
Transcript

Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds transformed H.G. Wells’ alien invasion story into a post-9/11 nightmare about fear, survival, and collapsing American security. Tom Cruise stars as an ordinary father trying to protect his children while civilization falls apart around them. In this episode of Spielberg Reloaded, we examine how Spielberg used alien invasion imagery to reflect the anxieties of the early 2000s, including terrorism, mass panic, and the fragility of modern life. We discuss Dakota Fanning’s performance, the terrifying tripod attacks, Janusz Kamiński’s cinematography, and why War of the Worlds may be Spielberg’s darkest science fiction film.

A.I. was used to help with narration and creative elements of our scripts.

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Calarogu Shark Media. You've seen what happens when the sky

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brings wonder. You've seen what happens when it brings a friend.

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Now watch what happens when it brings the end. New

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Jersey early morning. Ray Ferrier is a crane operator, a

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bad father, a man whose ex wife has dropped the

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kids off for the weekend because she has somewhere better

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to be. He hasn't bought groceries, He doesn't know his

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daughter's peanut allergy. His teenage son looks at him with

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the specific contempt teenagers reserve for fathers who have genuinely

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earned it. Then the ground starts to shake. Lightning hits

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the same intersection fifteen times in a row. The pavement

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splits open, and something comes up from underneath. This is

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Spielberg reloaded episode three, War of the Worlds two thousand

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and five. Steven Spielberg made War of the World's thirty

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two years after Close Encounters and twenty three years after

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e t He was fifty eight years old, and it

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was two years after the Iraq War had begun. None

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of that is incidental. The film was released in June

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two thousand and five. Adapted from H. G. Wells's eighteen

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ninety eight novel, with screenplay credit going to David kupp It,

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stars Tom Cruise as Ray Ferrier, a crane operator in

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New Jersey who spends the entire film trying to get

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his two children to their mother in Boston while an

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alien invasion systematically destroys civilization around them. The aliens do

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not communicate, They do not want to negotiate. They have

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no interest in us as a species, except as a resource.

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They have been planning this for a very long time.

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The machines they use were buried under the earth before

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humans built the first city. They were waiting. That detail,

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the machines already here, sleeping beneath our feet, is one

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of the most unsettling ideas in the film. Close Encounters

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gave us aliens who arrived War of the Worlds tells

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us they never left. Spielberg strips the alien invasion genre

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down to its bones. There is no president giving a

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speech in the Oval office. There is no scientist who

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figures out the weakness. There is no moment where humanity

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rallies and fights back. There is only Ray Ferrier running

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carrying his daughter, trying to keep his children alive in

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a world that has stopped making any sense at all.

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That choice to stay at ground level, to refuse the

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wide view, to show a global catastrophe entirely through the

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experience of one terrified man, is the film's defining decision,

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and it is a punishing one. War of the World's

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is not fun. It is not exciting in the way

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action films are exciting. It is relentless and claustrophobic and

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deliberately exhausting. Spielberg said he wanted the film to feel

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like what it would actually feel like, not the movie version,

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the real version. Tom Cruise was the right casting for

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reasons that go beyond star power. Ray Ferrier is not

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a hero. He makes selfish choices. He prioritizes his own

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survival in ways that are recognizably human and not particularly admirable.

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Cruise plays him without vanity, frightened, reactive, occasionally cowardly, slowly

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discovering that the only thing he has left to offer

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his children is the willingness to keep moving. It is

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one of the less celebrated performances of his career, and

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one of the better ones. Dakota Fanning plays his daughter Rachel,

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and she spends much of the film screaming. That sounds

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like a criticism, it isn't. The screaming is accurate. A

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ten year old girl watching the world end would scream.

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Spielberg doesn't soften it or cut away from it. He

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makes you sit with the sound of a child who

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is genuinely terrified, and it is one of the most

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effective choices in the film. The tripod sequence in the

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opening act is as well constructed a set piece as

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Spielberg ever filmed. The emergence from the street, the first

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sweep of the heat ray, the crowd turning from curiosity

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to panic to ash. It happens in minutes, and it

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establishes everything the film needs you to understand. These things

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cannot be reasoned with, They cannot be stopped. The only

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variable is whether you are fast enough to be somewhere else.

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Janosh Kaminski, who had shot every Spielberg film since Schindler's List,

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gave the film a washed out, overexposed look, blown highlights,

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gray skies, a world that has lost its color. It

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feels like the morning after something terrible. It feels in

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ways that were not entirely comfortable for audiences. In two

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thousand and five, like footage they had seen on the news,

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War of the Worlds came out in the shadow of

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September eleventh. Spielberg was explicit about this. The imagery is

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not subtle. A crowd covered in ash and paper, a

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bridge collapsed, missing persons, notices plastered to every surface, the

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specific American terror of ordinary mourning turned to catastrophe without warning.

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The film doesn't use nine to eleven as metaphor. It

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uses the texture of it, the sensory memory of it,

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to make the invasion feel like something that had already

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happened to its audience. That was a deliberate provocation. Some

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critics at the time found it exploitative, others found it honest.

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What it undeniably is is specific. Spielberg was not making

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a timeless adventure film. He was making a film about

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a particular kind of American fear in a particular moment,

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for an audience that was still living inside that fear.

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The decision to set the film in New Jersey and

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Boston rather than Washington or Los Angeles, the traditional targets

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of invasion narratives, is part of the same impulse. This

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is not a film about symbols. It is a film

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about ordinary places, where ordinary people live, and what happens

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when those places are gone. There is a sequence roughly

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midway through the film in a farmhouse basement where Ray

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and his children take shelter with a man named Ogilvy

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played by Tim Robbins. Ogilvy is losing his mind, he

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wants to fight back, he is making noise that will

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get them all killed. Ray makes a choice in that

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basement that the film does not flinch from and does

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not explain away. It happens off screen. What it implies

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is unforgivable, a man doing whatever it takes to protect

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his daughter, and the film looks in that direction and

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then keeps moving because that is what survival requires. Spielberg

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does not punish Ray for that choice, He does not

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redeem him through it. The film simply acknowledges that people

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in extremity do things that cannot be walked back, and

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then it keeps going because that is what survival requires.

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The ending was criticized when the film came out. Ray

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delivers his children safely to Boston. His son, who had

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run toward the fighting earlier in the film and was

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presumed dead, is alive and waiting at his mother's house.

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His grandparents are on the porch. Everything is intact. Critics

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called it a cheat, too neat, too sudden, too much

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of a departure from the bleak logic the film had established.

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The criticism is not entirely wrong, but it misses what

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Spielberg was doing. The ending is in triumphant. Cruz's face

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when he sees his son is not the face of

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a man who has won something. It is the face

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of a man who has been let off a hook.

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He knew he deserved to stay on. The relief is real,

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but it doesn't resolve anything. His daughter can barely look

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at him. The world is still destroyed. The aliens are dead,

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killed as in Well's original novel, by bacteria, by the

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biological reality of a planet they were not prepared for.

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But that is not a victory. It is an accident.

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Humanity did not save itself. Humanity survived, which is a

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different thing entirely. That distinction between survival and victory is

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what separates War of the Worlds from almost every other

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alien invasion film ever made. H. G. Wells wrote the

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novel in eighteen ninety eight as a critique of British

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imperialism of the assumption that a technologically superior civilization had

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the right to take what it wanted from those it

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considered lesser. Spielberg understood that the film inherits that critique

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and updates it without spelling it out, without making a

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speech about it. We Were the Martians Ones War of

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the Worlds isn't a film about aliens. It's a film

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about what people do when everything they built their lives

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on stops being enough, and how thin the line is

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between the man who protects his family and the man

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who would do anything to do it. No